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Personal Trainer Liability Insurance

Filed Under Insurance, Legal

This is a Chapter Excerpt from my book “How to Become a Personal Trainer” written to help aspiring trainers understand the certification business

Think you don’t need personal trainer liability insurance? Well… Unfortunately, lawyers are born every day in local hospitals, then people raise them, and then the adult lawyer finds he or she doesn’t have a single skill, talent or rich Uncle that will feed their family, so they decide to start legally stealing money from other people and go to Law School.

If you’re going to be a successful trainer, you’re going to need to have this insurance to protect yourself from these people. Therefore, we all need personal trainer liability insurance to protect ourselves, our assets, and our sanity.

Let’s make one thing perfectly clear right now…

All Personal Trainers Need Liability Insurance.

Clear? Good!

Personal trainer liability insurance is a bit of a tricky business. Many insurance programs require you to “join” their organization (for a fee) and then pay for the insurance (for another fee). So not only do you pay more than you need to, you get a ton of junk mail, unsolicited phone calls, and more headaches…Many gyms have ‘preferred’ insurance providers they will push you to purchase…Businesses need property insurance as well as personal liability insurance. Yea, it’s a mess…

Luckily, personal trainer liability insurance isn’t too expensive and your chances of getting sued are pretty low. If you’re just a personal trainer, you should be able to get liability insurance for around $300. If you have a studio, you will need to make sure you have insurance like fire insurance, property insurance, etc. All those are just the cost of doing business, but even that insurance isn’t too prohibitively expensive.

Types of Personal Trainer Liability Insurance

There are a few types of personal trainer liability insurance that you should be aware of before deciding what coverage is appropriate. Let’s take a look at them briefly;

Insurance for Personal Trainers

Liability Insurance

This is the type of insurance that most new and independent personal trainers need. “Liability” insurance covers you if your client is injured either while working with you or as a result of some of your recommendations. In fact, even after you stop training a client, they can come back a number of months later and claim that the exercise you showed them was incorrect and they were injured as a result. Because of this extended liability, you need a policy designed to cover these cases.

Personal trainer liability insurance can be purchased either through the organization you are certified with (ACE, ASCM, etc.), through associations that you can join, or through companies that specialize in insuring the fitness industry. Most gyms won’t even allow you to apply if you don’t have liability insurance, so make this one of your first steps upon getting certified. Heck, do it before you get certified!

This is absolutely mandatory to have and I beg you to have it before you even start training your best friend or your mother.

As a general rule of thumb, you should have a minimum of $1,000,000 of personal trainer liability insurance.

Professional Liability Insurance

Professional liability insurance covers you for more specific absurdities that may happen between you and your client. It’s more of a complete insurance that covers more than just straight liability insurance. It’s necessary for someone who runs a fitness studio or gym themselves.

Personal Liability Insurance

Personal liability insurance covers you for things like slander, humiliation, or if you make a client feel his or her reputation has been harmed by confiding in you and you spill the beans to his employer.

Both of these last two are optional, however I wanted to make you aware of them.

Insurance for Businesses

Property Insurance

Property insurance is to cover you and your business in the event of fire, natural disaster, flood, etc. If someone injures themselves while on your property, this insurance should cover that contingency. That does not mean you can be negligent and not sweep the snow off your sidewalks, but it will cover anyone who accidentally falls when they trip on a dumbbell.

If you train clients at your house, many times your home policy will cover home-business property insurance. So before you pick up more insurance, make sure your renters/housing insurance doesn’t already cover this type of liability. Many times, you just need a “rider” added onto your current home insurance to cover your home business, which is much cheaper than a separate policy all together.

These various types of insurance (liability, property) can be packaged together and can be bought together for less, however I wanted to show the different types as separate entities so you know what you’re getting. If there’s one thing about insurance I’ve learned, there are many different ‘blankets’ of insurance that you can have…but not all cover every part of your body and some cover too much.

Purchasing Insurance

If there’s lot of different insurance policies out there, then there must be lots of different ways to purchase insurance, right? Yes, there is! Let’s look at them from easiest and least consuming to the more complex, business oriented methods.

1. Internet Search and Compare

The internet makes it very easy to find insurance all over the country that can cover your personal training insurance needs. More and more insurance brokers/organizations are migrating to cyberspace. Of course, this also means you have to be most careful with internet insurance because it is the easiest to fake and be conned.

If you’re curious, I get my personal trainer liability insurance from Sports Fitness. It has insurance for personal trainers, yoga instructors, even martial arts professionals.

2. Local / Phone Book Search and Compare

Open up any phone book and you can find tons of insurance agencies in your area. The risk is they may not specialize in fitness and be unable to adequately understand the scope of your needs. However, you may come across local representatives that understand insuring individuals/businesses that work in the health field.

3. Independent Insurance Agents

Independent Insurance Agents are professionals (that usually work on their own) to compare and present you with the best packages for insurance. These are excellent if you’re opening your own fitness studio or club because you really want to make sure a professional assists you in maximizing your coverage.

4. Certifying Organizations

Many certifying organizations, like NESTA, have their own list of ‘preferred’ personal training liability insurance providers. They are good places to start when you want to compare insurance policies, but always compare from many sources to make sure you are getting the best coverage.

5. Your Gym

Many times the larger clubs will have an umbrella policy that will cover their trainers while they are training at the club. (That means not while they are training anywhere else, even if it’s a client you met at the club.) But, if your club has personal trainer liability insurance and all your training clients will be working out with you at the club, you would be covered and not need any extra insurance.

Common Sense and What You Need To Know

Want to know what the most common legal/lawsuit issue today is? Giving bad advice outside of a trainers areas of expertise. Remember, no matter how much you know about foods and dieting, you are not a Nutritionist and can not recommend a meal plan for clients. Or, more typical of the last few years, recommend a host of ‘supplements’ for a client that may/may aggravate a medical condition.

You are a Personal Trainer, not a therapist, masseuse, nurse or doctor. Stay within your area of expertise. That is what professionals in every industry do and should be what you do in your personal training career.

In fact, you should be acquainted with a separate dietitian, psychologist, masseuse at a spa, and a variety of professionals to begin working on referrals in your own personal network. They will, of course, refer their clients back to you and it will pay off handsomely.

Another word about supplements, as they are the recent trend in legal troubles. Many trainers augment their income selling recommended supplements to their clients. However, recommendations that do not come from a client’s doctor leaves you open to serious liability issues.

If you knowingly recommend a supplement to a client, you are at serious risk of not being covered by your personal training liability insurance if the client sues you. You have acted negligently and your insurance will not cover for that type of contingency.

Supplement your income with better clients and more professional referrals, instead of risking it all for an extra dollar. It’s not worth the loss of insurance coverage.

Summary

Personal trainer liability insurance is an absolute must-have, but so is common sense. Please, do not go outside of your expertise to try and impress your client. Stay within your field, work on becoming more knowledgeable in your specialty, and network with other providers for referrals for your clients.

For individuals, picking up cheap personal trainer liability insurance shouldn’t be too hard. For businesses, the choices are more complex, but again, it’s affordable and you can usually find what you need in a package deal for less money.

Finally, these are all my opinions; none of this should be taken as professional advice or legal council. It is your responsibility to educate yourself about insurance and liability. Do not just listen to one source (even if it’s me!) for advice. I am not liable for any decisions you make based on my advice.

This is a Chapter Excerpt from my book “How to Become a Personal Trainer” written to help aspiring trainers understand the certification business