Health and fitness coach Terry Bahat says one of her fondest career success stories was coaching an overweight bank manager who dreamed of travelling to Kenya but convinced herself she was too heavy to do it.
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Bahat says her challenge was to engender self-belief in the woman and spend a few months training her outdoors. For a few days each week, they focused on stretching, Pilates and weights, and the dividends began to show.
The client gradually dropped 40 kilograms and took the trip to Kenya. "Now she is running half-marathons," says Bahat, "whereas months ago she couldn't even run across the road to save her life."
Bahat owns CoreWorks, a small health and fitness business she established in 2005 to assist overweight professional women aged 30-plus to live healthy lives. Bahat coaches some clients over Skype, conducts face-to-face personal training for around 10 clients a week, teaches Pilates and holds group fitness classes.
But she doesn't consider any of it to be a job.
"If you do what you love, you never work a day in your life. I don't work, because this is my passion. I'm a woman on a mission," she says.
Bahat moved from Israel to Australia over a decade ago. Before the move, she spent time in the Israeli army, working as a sport and recreation developer for new recruits. It was her responsibility to train young recruits so they were fit to be soldiers.
She remembers that some of them would arrive wearing make-up.
"We had to do something else with them," says Bahat. "We had to make soldiers out of them so the country could rely on them."
Bahat says her army background has been formative in her establishment of CoreWorks. It's driven her to establish a health and fitness career with strict goals.
"I teach them one thing and one thing only: how to get their desired results. I want and I demand but I know when they have another five push-ups or that's it. It's my job ... It's my expertise."
The latest IBISWorld industry report forecasts the personal training industry will grow at an average of 5 per cent a year for the next three or four years. Bahat says her goal in the next 12 months is to train 10,000 women. She intends to do this by staging lots of bulk group sessions and events.
"Maybe it could become a fitness movement – not just a fitness training and coaching business," says Bahat. "I think it's important and I believe that I can do it."
