There are thousands of certified personal trainers in the Netherlands. A large portion of them do not really know what they are doing. Why is that? And what needs to change?
Wouter Middelbos
I am going to say something not everyone will like: a large portion of (/en/opleidingen/personal-trainer) in the Netherlands are insufficiently educated for the work they do. They have a certificate. They are on the floor. They write programmes. But if you ask them why they chose a specific exercise for a specific client, it goes quiet.
This is not an attack on individual trainers. This is an industry problem. And it affects everyone: the clients who do not get the guidance they deserve, the trainers who get stuck because they never truly learned the craft, and the entire sector struggling with its reputation.
In the Netherlands, you can get a PT certificate in a weekend. That is a fact. There are providers who hand out a piece of paper in two days that allows you to call yourself a personal trainer. No meaningful anatomy, no physiology, no coaching skills, no programme design. Two days and done.
The result? Trainers who do not know the difference between a squat and a hip hinge. Who have no idea how energy systems work. Who give their clients a programme they copied from the internet. Not because they are stupid, but because nobody ever taught them.
And those trainers then stand next to trainers who studied for four years. In the eyes of the client, there is no difference. Both "personal trainer". That is the problem.
A client who ends up with an insufficiently educated trainer faces multiple risks. Most obvious: injuries from incorrect technique or a programme that does not match their level. But the bigger risk is more subtle.
A client who does not get results does not think: my trainer is not good enough. They think: I am not suited for fitness. Or: it just does not work for me. That client drops out. Not from that trainer, but from the entire idea that exercise works.
That is the real damage. Not a wrong exercise, but a person concluding that it does not work for them. While the problem was not with the client, but with the guidance.
There is another side to the story. Trainers who are well educated, who take the craft seriously, run into a different problem: the market does not distinguish.
If you invested two years in your education, studied anatomy and developed real coaching skills, and you have to compete with someone who got a certificate in a weekend and charges the same price, that is frustrating.
And the consequence is that good trainers quit. Not because the profession does not suit them, but because the market does not reward their investment. They do something else. And the industry loses exactly the people it needs.
I do not pretend to have the solution for an entire system. But I do know what makes a difference at the individual level.
Depth over breadth. A good education does not teach you everything about everything. It teaches you to think deeply about what you do and why. If you understand how a hip moves, you can figure out which exercise fits. If you only learned a list of exercises, you are lost as soon as the situation deviates from the list.
Supervised practice. You do not learn to coach from a book. You learn to coach by doing it while someone watches and gives you honest feedback. That is uncomfortable. That is also exactly how you grow.
Time. There is no shortcut. Everything you learn in a weekend, you forget in a month. Everything you build over thirty weeks with repetition, application and feedback stays with you for the rest of your career.
Mentors who do it themselves. The difference between a teacher reading from a PowerPoint and a mentor who coached their own clients today is the difference between theory and reality. Learn from people who know how it feels when a client does not cooperate, when a programme does not work, when you simply do not know.
If you are reading this and considering becoming a personal trainer, you have a choice. You can get the quickest possible certificate and hope for the best. Or you can invest in an education that actually prepares you for the profession.
That is more expensive. That takes more time. That is harder. But it is the difference between a trainer who quits after a year and one who is still on the floor with joy after ten years.
The fitness industry has a quality problem. The solution starts with the people who decide they want to do it better.
Not just a certificate, but proof of real expertise!
