Regulate personal trainers, and their little dogs too
For an interesting diversion, read this argument over whether we ought to regulate the licensing of personal trainers — in the affirmative, Freddie of the League of Ordinary Gentlemen, and Conor Friedersdorf with an entertaining (if a little puerile) response.
(If you want my opinion, of course personal trainer licensing should be regulated, but not for the health and safety reasons that Freddie cites and that Conor so thoroughly ridicules. It’s basically a consumer protection issue: if you’re paying for a service, from an ostensibly “licensed” professional, you want to know that you’re not being ripped off. We license & regulate accountants, financial advisers, mechanics, and plumbers; personal trainers are really no different. But then I’m a big, mean socialist, so you know.)
UPDATE: Freddie responds in comments, pointing out quite legitimately that Conor misinterpreted his argument. Don’t you love blogs?
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Conor has misinterpreted me. I don’t think you should have to have a license to show someone how to work out; that’s unenforceable, even if we wanted to do that. Consumers want there to be such a thing as a licensed personal trainer so that they have a little peace of mind that the person they hired knows what he or she is doing. Trainers want to be able to be licensed so that they can use that as a selling point. What exists now is a chaos of different certifications and licenses which don’t mean anything to most people, and which aren’t even enforced with the same standards within the same certifications. Many personal trainers claim to be certified when what they have amounts to a piece of paper they made in Microsoft Paint.
What I’d like is that, if you want to have your cousin train you on the side, and you’re comfortable with that, go for it; we couldn’t possible enforce it if we wanted to stop that sort of thing. But if people want to use a licensed trainer, knowing it’s more expensive, and if trainers want to get licensed in order to give people more assurance about their capabilities, and thus charge more, we should have some sort of consistent standards. And as the industry is most certainly not providing such standards now, I think it’s sensible to ask government to create such licensing standards.
July 11, 2009 at 1:33 pmExactly — it's a consumer protection matter.
Thanks for stopping by, Freddie! This brand-new blog appears to already be in good company.
July 11, 2009 at 7:55 pmThank you for the post, I really appreciate it.
November 8, 2009 at 2:05 amHave something to add?