A recent article in the NYT notes that the personal training industry is booming: “From 2001 to 2011, the number of personal trainers grew by 44 percent, to 231,500, while the overall number of workers fell by 1 percent." One reason that personal training is growing also applies to Physical Therapy: the population is growing older and fatter, causing many people to seek treatment.
While PTs overwhelmingly treat people who are injured or trying to work through certain conditions, they can also design exercise plans for healthy and able-bodied individuals. Although PT can be more expensive than personal training, it is also more likely to be covered by insurance.
Some of the qualities that define the training industry also apply to PT. Both jobs can require entrepreneurship and the ability to work with a variety of people who have different abilities, needs and personalities. Jobs such as these tend to be more stable than occupations that can more easily be outsourced:
"It is a personal service that cannot be automated or sent offshore, that caters to a wealthier client base and that is increasingly subsidized (in this case, by employers and insurance companies) … Knowing how to keep someone motivated and how to keep a connection are skills humans have learned and evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. A robot can’t figure out whether you can do one more push-up, or how to motivate you to actually do it.”
Although PT doesn’t cater to wealthier people, there are definitely some clinics that do. And people without insurance or who can’t afford their co-pays are surely less likely to receive treatment.
Overall, PT seems to be a more stable industry with better pay and less erratic hours than personal training. And while becoming a PT requires three years of graduate school and licensing exams, become a personal trainer is much less restrictive and also less regulated. There is no national training standard, and courses can be as short as a few weeks.
As both industries continue to grow, they will also continue to feed off of each other: more people working out with trainers can unfortunately lead to more people injuring themselves, just as more people injuring themselves and needing PT may lead to more people seeking out better ways to exercise with trainers.