I did retirement home training and used to think it was a sweet job. Then I got in the business and underestimated how demoralizing it was as they give you the easy elders in training while the others make you, or at least me, really think of the fact the job just amounts to an unkarmic freebie.
Personal trainers. Watching other people exercise is not a job.
You may as well be a corporate tax accountant, a ghost writer for the rich or an email scammer in terms of the value you create for society.
Weight training can be super dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can easily do significant damage to your back or knees doing fairly basic exercises like a deadlift or squat incorrectly.
Especially as weight training is increasingly encouraged for the elderly, personal training seems a fairly reasonable job. Admittedly, like any other job, there are folks who provide little to no value (think of the teachers just waiting to collect their pensions) but that’s not to say it can’t be a super useful industry.
I would say many of them are there for a free paycheck yes, but personal trainers are also there to teach people who have never learned how to exercise how to exercise and to encourage them when their friends and family will not, and those are valuable if time limited resources.
It’s also motivation. Sometimes I ask for a few sessions as a birthday present because it’s the only reason I’ll actually go to the gym. Accountability.