As a personal trainer or fitness instructor you will be required to carry out a workplace risk assessment. This is a legal requirement to ensure you are insured, and must be done to minimise the risk of injury that can occur when working or training in an area with potential hazards, both inside the gym or outdoors if running a bootcamp. This simple guide is for those of you who are training to work within the fitness industry, and will help you to better understand how to carry out an effective risk assessment, and how to mitigate some of the risks for the safety of your clients and gym members. 

Fitness Classes

With any fitness class you must conduct your risk assessment before you start training. Ideally you should have a dedicated risk assessment form that indicates the date, time, location, number of participants, risks identified and how they were mitigated. Realistically you're probably not going to have the time to do this, and so with simple low-risk classes such as circuits and core training, you can do a visual check, accepting that you are responsible should anything go wrong.

In a gym environment the type of risks that are most common are drink spills and loose equipment lying around; this is simple enough to mitigate and requires just a quick tidy up before you train. However something that often gets overlooked is the quality of the equipment being used. If you plan on using resistance bands then you must check each band for tears or weaknesses, which could cause them to snap and potentially cause serious injury. With dumbbells and barbells ensure that the weights are securely attached and there is an even weight distribution on each side; this can be an issue when using rubber weights that have become chipped from being thrown on the floor.  Finally make sure that other members are aware that you are using the training area, as injuries can occur when non-class members stroll into the training area to retrieve equipment. 

Outdoors

If training outdoors always do a route check to ensure that there are no high-risk hazards, such as roads without crossings, that cannot be mitigated. If training in a grassy area you must do a thorough sweep of the training ground to make sure there is nothing that may cause injury, such as broken glass. Dog faeces may also pose a problem, and so it's often better to train on short grass, concrete or synthetic grass. With an outdoor session the risks tend to be higher, and so a signed and dated printout of your risk assessment should be used, along with your usual visual assessment, and kept with your records.