Whether you are a Personal Exercise Fitness Trainer or Group Exercise Instructor in Yoga, Pilates and other various group workouts program.

Sexual Ethics in your work is extremely important! I cannot stress that enough.

Bad Exercise Fitness Trainer are not bad people, per se. All too often they act the way they do because they don’t understand the issues at stake.

We must continuously ask ourselves, what is Ethical? What makes one Instructor ethical and the other not?

For example:

If a student is grieving , it might be okay to comfort the student who, perhaps, is asking to be held by the Exercise Fitness Trainer.

However, if a student is expressing romance to the Trainer and wants to be held, that is quite a different matter.

IMPORTANT!!!

Close physical contact must never be initiated by any Fitness Professionals. And, even when that physical contact is requested by the student, a trainer must be very careful to not cross the line of propriety.

It might be okay for a trainer and student to go to lunch together to discuss the difficulties of a training segment, but, it would be totally inappropriate for that Exercise Fitness Trainer and that student to go to dinner because it might be misinterpreted, and could result in sexual overtones.

Any Fitness Professionals must avoid this type of encounter at all costs. It simply is not worth the effort, the cost could be extremely high.

How should an Exercise Fitness Trainer behave?

A trainer’s behavior must be totally above-board. A trusting relationship between trainer and student must evolve over time.

Don’t rush it, don’t push a student to become more familiar with you by showing him/her special favors.

On the contrary, a trainer must understand the ramifications that such behavior might create.

Ethical behavior is paramount to an Exercise Fitness Trainer or any Group Exercise Instructor. Remember that what might be ethical in a personal context, might not be so in a professional format.

Sensitize yourself, educate yourself about ethics and ramifications of unethical behavior.

This way, you cannot blame anyone for what happens in the future. You are the sole factor, the only person who can catch unethical behavior before it swallows you whole.

Act with integrity, develop a broad perspective on what it means to create a loving, but firm, approach to your teachings.

The student will be eternally grateful, and you can rest assured that you acted in the best way possible.

What must we look out for?

As a Exercise Fitness Trainer or Group Exercise Instructor teaching Yoga or other fitness workouts program, we must be careful to not let our personal feelings about a potential student rear our head.

Remember that you may be the first person to ever show concern or special regard for that particular student. You may be the first person to ever listen carefully to everything the student has to say. 

Yes, there may be an attraction on the part of student or trainer, but one must be extra careful to not allow these feelings to mature and become problematic.

Although there is nothing wrong with sexual fantasies, or even to admire each other, it must not go further than a fantasy.

A student may be extremely vulnerable to suggestions of a sexual nature coming from his trainer. The trainer must follow strict guidelines regarding this type of activity.

Why?

Because women are predominant in striving to learn more about Fitness whether be it in weight training, Yoga, Kickboxing and etc, it stands to reason that many women develop a sort of love-respect relationship with the trainer.

It must not be allowed to go further than that. Many women, especially younger ones, often seek a measure of self-confidence in their relationships with their Personal Trainers or Yoga teachers. 

These women might have a sense of poor self-esteem, which leads them to seek intimate relationships with their male Exercise Fitness Trainer or Group Exercise Instructors.

All too often, these types of encounters take on a life of their own. The Fitness Professional must guard at all times against becoming involved in a sexual nature with the student.

Women who seek out these types of encounters, often come out of that relationship much the worse for wear.

As one woman stated: “Each encounter gives me an initial high, followed  later by a sense or deep worthlessness.”

The Exercise Fitness Trainer must guard against this happening at all times.

More to be reveal on Sexual Ethics of an Exercise Fitness Trainer Part 2