VASA Fitness announced on August 18 that it will sponsor up to 150 ISSA personal trainer certifications a year for existing employees, who complete the curriculum and then coach in VASA clubs. The company calls it Trainer in Training, and frames it as a career pathway that also feeds the staffing needs of an expanding club network.
Taken on its own terms, it is a good program. Paid credentials are worth real money to an entry-level employee, an internal pipeline is cheaper than external recruitment, and a benefit that vests through service is a retention tool with a hard edge to it. Any operator would take that trade.
The part worth sitting with is what it says about how this industry has decided to describe its own labour market.
Will sponsoring certifications solve staff retention?
Partly, and for a while. A benefit that vests through service is a genuine retention hook, because the value accrues to people who stay, and it expands the supply of certified trainers at the same time. What it does not do is change the wage that made the role hard to fill in the first place. A sponsored credential is compensation delivered in kind, which is cheaper than a raise and harder for a rival to match with cash. Over a long enough run, a larger certified pool also relieves the upward pressure on pay that a real shortage would otherwise create.
We have been here before. In July we looked at ISSA's 2026 hiring report, which named a 1,300-coach deficit at Anytime Fitness across 2,300 US locations, plus 4,000 needed at Snap Fitness globally and 500 or more at Equinox over five years. The report ran the numbers on the gap in detail. It published no wage data at all. Our conclusion then was that a skills gap is what a pay problem gets called when the people describing it sell training.
ISSA named the shortage. ISSA sells the certification. VASA now pays ISSA. None of that requires anyone to be acting in bad faith, and a CPT (Certified Personal Trainer) credential is a legitimate qualification that a trainer keeps for life. But it is worth being precise about the direction the money moves: from the operator to the vendor, with the employee receiving a credential rather than a higher hourly rate.
Two ways to answer the same staffing gap
| Sponsor certifications | Raise wages | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost shape | One-off, per head, capped | Recurring, compounding, applies to existing staff too |
| Who captures the value | Vendor gets fees, employee gets a portable credential | Employee, immediately |
| Effect on labour supply | Increases the certified pool | Draws people into the role at the existing skill level |
| Effect on retention | Strong while the benefit is vesting | Strong while the differential holds |
| Effect on market wage | Downward over time | Upward |
The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects 74,200 US openings a year for fitness trainers and instructors through 2034. That is a large number, and it is the number that gets quoted when the industry describes the problem as a pipeline. It is also consistent with a role that people leave quickly, which is a different problem with a different fix.
What this means for an independent operator
Most gyms and studios cannot fund 150 certifications a year. What they can do is read the move correctly and price against it.
If a large regional chain is about to put a steady stream of newly certified trainers into the market, the competitive question for a smaller operator is not how to match the program. It is what a trainer gets from you that a certification pipeline does not provide: a book of clients they keep, a schedule they control, a share of the revenue they generate. Those cost nothing to offer and they are the things a chain finds structurally hard to match.
There is a product angle here too. We wrote in August about how cheap AI is pushing gyms to redefine what personal training is worth, and separately about programming moving onto the gym floor automatically. Both point the same way. The plan is becoming a commodity. The person is not. An industry that responds to that by producing more certified plan-writers, rather than paying more for the people who hold a member accountable, is solving the half of the problem that was never the constraint.