CHUMP-CHANGE: that’s what it feels like I’m making sometimes compared to the MILLIONS you hear people talking about all over the internet.

I got a cheesy automated email from a fitness marketer the other day talking about how he’s a MILLIONAIRE and one of his buddies is earning over 150K a month! It takes me a year to earn that much, so there’s kind of a natural feeling you get that you’re missing out on something big …

So what’s the big deal about Top-Level Training? Why should someone want to be a Personal Trainer and earn just 100K? Well the answer has nothing to do with money …

It sounds like a cliche, but there’s a lot more to wealth than can be captured in just a dollar figure. That’s the thing to consider with any job or career track you take. The pay’s important, but there are also other factors:

• How much do you take home?

• What are your hours like?
• Do you truly enjoy your work?

• Where are you going in your profession?

• Are you the kind of person you want to be?
• Are you bored all the time?

These are the defining factors when it comes to how much you earn. That’s what being a Top-Level Trainer is about. It has nothing to do with the income, because when you take all the factors into account, it’s way more than just what the 100K would typify.

Not that anything’s wrong with earning six-figures …

A $100,000 income has a certain cache and significance in American society –

That’s because when you’re earning six-figures in the US, you’re officially a player – it signifies membership into the consumer society. You can now take part in and enjoy what people call the American dream and way of life. Our entire consumer society and marketing is devoted to these six figure earners –

• You can afford payments on a Mercedes Benz
• You can save enough for a down-payment on a home, and make monthly mortgage payments
• You can afford top fashion items, like an Armani suit or a Louis Vuitton bag
• You can take vacations to places like Vegas and Miami several times a year, or travel to a major city abroad like Venice or Amsterdam once a year
• You can afford to put away about 10% of your income

Extremely superficial? True: but if you can’t have or do these things, you can’t help but feel left out in some way. There’s the feeling that you’re missing out on something; like you’re one of the un-cool kids that can’t get into the party.

A lot of us think that it’ll take millions of dollars to live a comfortable and appealing lifestyle. We get working for years on end and sacrifice the best years of over lives and countless other things in order to get the kind of lives we want. What we fail to realize is that just a simple plan to six figures in earnings would have got us there!

I remember when I first got to this level of earnings. There’s a a certain sense of entitlement that comes with it – like the curtain’s been pulled back and a new world has been made available to you.

The figures say less than 10% of people in our society earn 100K. I was talking to my buddy Tom Peters on the phone the other day, who’s a business coach in the fitness industry, and he told me it’s actually 3% of people – and if he said it I believe him.

When you consider the type of work Personal Training involves, and the fact that training rates are so high, I think it’s got to be the best and simplest career to earn a six-figure salary. And for all the guys that think six-figures is nothing, well, being in the top 3% of our country’s wage earners isn’t a bad start.

By simple, I mean you can earn it just from training clients. You don’t have to sell e-books, don’t have to sell vitamins, don’t have to record videos, don’t have to sell balance balls, don’t need to open a tiny training studio, don’t have to peddle books on the Internet – none of that crap.

If you’re not earning that much as a trainer yet, you’re probably not thnking about what you do correctly. I don’t know where or when being a Personal Trainer got a bad rap in the fitness industry, but I think the reason is because it’s typically been associated with the major health-club setting, not independent trainers looking to create a stable practice.

That’s why you hear a lot of people that get into fitness for some reason talk down on training. They want to skip the step of being a Personal Trainer.

They say they’d rather have a sports gym like Eric Cressey (who I talked to earlier this month and will be posting our conversation in a new post).

Or they want to be a strength coach for a major sports team like Brian Schiff, or the late Jason Hadeed.

There’s nothing wrong with that; getting to a top position in this field is a great goal – I’m not downplaying that. I understand if you want to move on in this industry – so do I!

Being a Top-Level trainer gives you that ability – it becomes real easy to focus on your future when you’re earning 75-100K in about 25 hours a week. Even if you’re a college student working towards your Sports Science degree, earning a good income in this field will shoot your career curve straight up.

What makes more sense to you:

Getting a part-time job doing some unrelated task while you’re in school, or already succeeding in the field you’re studying for? And furthermore, everything you’re learning in school can be applied directly to your clients – I wouldn’t be surprised if you became the top trainer in your immediate area, in addition to one of the coolest kids on campus (coolness is an important part of any career).

That’s just one example, but you get the idea.

For me, the TLT lifestyle has given me the time to do and learn things that I never would’ve been able to do otherwise. Professionally, I learned to become an effective writer, made tons of connections, written for the major training magazines, and am getting booked to speak at the major conferences. Personally, it’s given me the type of high-profile lifestyle that I thought was only reserved for drug dealers or trust-fund brats. That’s why you hear me say corny things like Personal Training is the world’s greatest job – because to me, it really is.

The other people that knock the whole six-figure thing are the trainers out there that THINK they’re earning it already. But be honest, when we’re talking about six-figures here’s what we’re not talking about:

– I don’t mean you made 150K in sales in your training department last year, of which you only kept a small commission

– I don’t mean you worked 60 hours training children and old ladies (there’s nothing wrong with that, just not my thing)

– I don’t mean you “own” a gym – I earn more than any of the private gym owners I’ve ever met. They all had business partners so were only minority owners in their gyms, and had tons of expenses and worked at least 60 hours per week. They didn’t own the gym, the gym owned them.

– I don’t care that you own a training facility, because after you paid all of your employees, expenses, and advertising expenses, you’re very lucky and smart if you took home over 100K – and just like the last case, you probably worked a ton of hours.

When I say six figures, I really mean six-figures; and I’m talking about a take-home income of nearly 100K. How’s that possible? It’s because in our economy, the government loves entrepreneurs. They’re the people that make the whole economy possible in the first place.

And when you’re a Personal Trainer you are technically a small business, even if you don’t have any employees or have just 10 regular customers. If you form an S-corp as a small business person, you can declare a lot of your expenses as tax-deductable. And the tax documents for S-Corps are not highly scrutinized – that’s the advantage of living in a capitalist country. This is a little bit of insider talk, not politically correct talk, so if any of this sounds shady to you get a life – and I hope the IRS isn’t reading this!

Speaking of getting a life, that’s also what we’re talking about with being a top trainer: the fitness lifestyle. Did you know that most fitness conferences are in Vegas and Miami? In that case, your hotel, airfare, and admission to the event will all be tax deductable.

So will your training certifications, gym memberships, and exercise classes – they’ re all tax-deductible too. I already take all my gym memberships and Muy Thai training off my taxes. And I’m planning on visiting Charles Glass and Milos Sarcev for some training later this year, and I’m going to be sending Uncle Sam the bill.

So how do you do it? That’s what we’ll be getting to in detail in the next couple of months on Super-Trainer. We’ll be getting to the real details of how me and many other trainers make this a reality. If you don’t have it already, this is going to be the tipping point.

It all boils down to just two things – having expensive training sessions, and finding and keeping about a dozen clients that can pay for them. Think about if for a few moments, and it should sound very simple.

I’ll be giving all of this info away for FREE on the blog – I had a lot of interviews lined up, but I’m going to hold off on them and give some really high-powered lessons from me and some other “even more successful” trainers instead.

Yes for FREE – like I said in The Whistleblower Report, you can’t charge for info – you can learn all if this stuff on marketing and creating a practice if you talk to enough people or research it all like I did – I’ll just save you some of the time.

It’s just a few of the naysayers that don’t think any of this is a big deal. That’s ok – to each their own; this Personal Training lifestyle does mean something to me. So I just wanted to air all of this out in one post once and for all – now I’m just going to go back to ignoring them!