Every year, tens of thousands of fitness professionals in Canada pay a renewal fee to maintain their certification. Not to learn anything new. Not to demonstrate that they've gotten better at their job. They pay because the alternative is losing the credential — and with it, the ability to work.
That fee is $98. It auto-renews on whatever credit card you have on file. Miss the window by more than a year and you don't just pay a late penalty — you retake both your Theory and Practical exams. That's not a continuing education requirement. That's a subscription service with a financial cliff attached.
I want to talk about where that money goes. And I want to talk about the system that money sustains — because it is not what it presents itself to be.
What You're Paying For
The largest fitness certification body in Canada is canfitpro — Canadian Fitness Professionals. To become a certified Personal Training Specialist through canfitpro, you'll pay somewhere between $489 and $1,232 depending on which package you choose.1CanFitPro. "Personal Training Specialist." canfitpro.com/personal-training-specialist/. Pricing confirmed via FitnessTrainer.com, CourseTreeLearning.com, and canfitpro landing pages. 2. CanFitPro. "Membership." canfitpro.com/membership/. CanFitPro. "Recertification." canfitpro.com/recertification/. 3. Cost estimates compiled from canfitpro published fees, FitnessTrainer.com certification comparison (2025), and NESTA certification price comparison. 4. Canadian Fitness Professionals. Foundations of Professional Personal Training. 3rd ed. Human Kinetics, 2023. 456 pages. 5. User reviews compiled from starting-a-personal-training-business.com/can-fit-pro-review.html. 6. Canadian Fitness Professionals. Foundations of Professional Personal Training. 3rd ed. Human Kinetics, 2023. Chapter 7: "Flexibility and Mobility Concepts" — includes subtopic "Mobility and Fascia." 7. CanFitPro. "Fascia Fundamentals." canfitpro.com/fascia_fundamentals/. CanFitPro. "Fascia, Movement & Assessments." canfitpro.com/fascia-movement-assessments/. 8. Chaudhry H, Schleip R, et al. "Three-dimensional mathematical model for deformation of human fasciae in manual therapy." Journal of the American Osteopathic Association. 2008;108(8):379-390. 9. Behm DG, Wilke J. "Do Self-Myofascial Release Devices Release Myofascia? Rolling Mechanisms: A Narrative Review." Sports Medicine. 2019;49(8):1173-1181. 10. Schleip R. "Fascial plasticity — a new neurobiological explanation: Part 1." Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies. 2003;7(1):11-19. 11. UK Advertising Standards Authority. "Health: Myofascial Release." Adjudication, March 16, 2011. asa.org.uk/advice-online/health-myofascial-release.html. 12. Aboodarda SJ, Spence AJ, Button DC. "Pain pressure threshold of a muscle tender spot increases following local and non-local rolling massage." BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders. 2015;16:265. 13. CanFitPro. "PRO TRAINER." canfitpro.com/pro-trainer/. 14. Indeed.ca. Employee review of CanFitPro. ca.indeed.com/cmp/Canfitpro/reviews. 15. Zenko Z, Ekkekakis P. "Knowledge of Exercise Prescription Guidelines Among Certified Exercise Professionals." Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. 2015;29(5):1422-1432. 16. Apollo Global Management / Newswire.ca. "The GoodLife Group Announces Strategic Minority Investment from Apollo Funds." February 2, 2026. 17. Ibid. "Its brands include GoodLife Fitness, Fit4Less, GYMVMT, Éconofitness, and canfitpro." 18. GoodLife Fitness. "Personal Training." goodlifefitness.com/training-programs/personal-training. 19. GoodLife Personal Training Institute. glpti.com. Program cost: $749 + tax. 20. Castaldo J. "Bulking up: How GoodLife became Canada's dominant gym." The Globe and Mail, ROB Magazine. 2014. 21. Chicken E. "Not so GoodLife for gym employees fighting to unionize." NOW Magazine. Toronto. 22. Competition Bureau Canada. Competition Bureau reaches settlement with GoodLife Fitness Clubs in advertising case. February 2005. $75,000 penalty. 23. Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. GoodLife Fitness penalized for 60 violations of unsolicited telecommunications rules. 2011. $300,000 total. 24. Ontario Ministry of Labour. GoodLife Fitness targeted as repeat violator in enforcement blitz. 2016. Violations of five workplace laws. 25. Eklund v. GoodLife Fitness. Class action settlement. 2018. Approximately 22,000 class members, $7.5 million settlement. 26. CanFitPro. "About Us." canfitpro.com/about-us/. "canfitpro's over 24,000 members." 27. "Personal Training, GoodLife Fitness." Club Solutions Magazine. October 2012. That gets you access to approximately 25 hours of live instruction plus around 20 hours of recommended self-study — roughly 45 hours total — and the privilege of sitting two exams.
Then the meter starts running.
Your Professional Membership costs $120 the first year, $98 every year after. Without it, your certification is explicitly invalid — canfitpro's own website states that without current membership, "your certification is not valid."2 You need 4.0 Continuing Education Credits per year, per certification held. If you hold both PTS and FIS, that doubles to 8.0. You need annual CPR recertification. You need liability insurance, which canfitpro conveniently offers through an exclusive partnership with Arthur J. Gallagher.
Exam retakes cost $99 plus tax. Extensions cost $20 plus tax. Deferral fees run 15% of your course or exam fee. CEC quiz retakes cost $10 plus tax. All non-refundable.
Over five years, a canfitpro PTS holder will spend approximately $2,100 to $2,700 before tax.3 Over ten years, $3,500 to $4,500. And these are conservative estimates — they assume you pass everything the first time, never need an extension, and find the cheapest possible CECs.
Now scale that up. CanFitPro claims over 24,000 members.26 Their own policy states that without current membership, "your certification is not valid."2 A member is a member — they pay or the credential dies. At $98 per year, that's a minimum of $2.35 million in membership renewal fees alone, before a single CEC course, exam retake, extension, deferral, or insurance referral commission touches the books.
None of these fees verify that you've become a better trainer. None of them test whether you can actually coach a squat, manage a client's load progression, or recognize when someone needs to be referred out. They verify one thing: that you paid.
What They're Teaching
The canfitpro PTS course uses a single textbook — Foundations of Professional Personal Training, published by Human Kinetics, 456 pages, $129.4 The curriculum spans 16 chapters covering career orientation, basic anatomy and physiology, flexibility, foundational movement patterns, program design, and the business of personal training.
There are no prerequisites. No prior fitness experience. No academic background of any kind.5 CanFitPro's position is that this credential establishes competence and serves the public interest. Take that at face value: a program that genuinely believed it would screen applicants for basic readiness — not to gatekeep, but because delivering material to someone who can't absorb it wastes their time and money. A basic aptitude assessment costs almost nothing relative to what they charge, and any provider that took its own product seriously would treat it as a baseline investment in program integrity. But every applicant who doesn't pass a screening is revenue that walks out the door. So there is no screening. Only enrollment checks cashed.
But the curriculum content deserves scrutiny on its own terms, because it reveals something about what canfitpro values — and it isn't durable science.
Chapter 7 of the PTS textbook includes "Mobility and Fascia" as a core subtopic.6 Beyond the base curriculum, canfitpro sells two additional fascia-specific courses for continuing education credits: "Fascia Fundamentals" and "Fascia, Movement & Assessments" — marketed as teaching "the essentials of fascia — how it drives mobility, fuels performance, and shapes overall health" and "cutting-edge methods for integrating myofascial concepts into program design."7
The science does not support what the fitness industry teaches about fascia.
Chaudhry et al. (2008) calculated that approximately 9,075 Newtons of force would be required to produce just 1% compression of fascia lata — roughly the force of a small car resting on your leg.8 The forces a foam roller or human hands can generate don't come close. The authors concluded that the sensations of tissue release that practitioners report "cannot be due to deformations produced in the firm tissues." Behm and Wilke (2019), in a narrative review published in Sports Medicine, were more direct: there is insufficient evidence that rolling devices release myofascial restrictions, and the term "self-myofascial release" itself is misleading.9 Even Robert Schleip, a fascia researcher sympathetic to manual therapy, acknowledged that the forces required for permanent structural change far exceed what manual techniques deliver and proposed neurobiological rather than mechanical explanations.10 The UK Advertising Standards Authority reached the same conclusion in 2011, ruling that evidence for myofascial release claims was "not sufficiently robust."11
The effects that do exist — temporary increases in range of motion, reduced perception of soreness — work through the central nervous system. Aboodarda et al. (2015) demonstrated that pain thresholds increased on both the treated limb and the untreated opposite limb after rolling massage.12 You don't get a bilateral effect from breaking adhesions on one side. You get it from triggering descending pain inhibition — a neurological event, not a structural one.
CanFitPro is building curriculum and selling continuing education courses on the version of the science that the evidence doesn't support. They're not teaching durable principles. They're chasing trends — and monetizing them.
The CEC Economy
The continuing education system is where the business model becomes most transparent.
CanFitPro requires 4.0 CECs per year to maintain certification. CanFitPro also sells CEC courses. And if you earn your continuing education somewhere else — through a third-party provider, a workshop, a conference — canfitpro charges you $15 per CEC to review and approve it.2
Read that again. They require continuing education. They sell continuing education. And they tax continuing education they didn't provide.
Whether you buy from canfitpro or from someone else, canfitpro profits. The only variable is how much. This is not a quality assurance mechanism. It's a toll system. The requirement creates the demand, and the organization that created the requirement captures revenue from every possible route to meeting it.
The industry term for this is "continuing education." The accurate term is a recurring revenue model with a captive customer base.
The Instructors Are Customers Too
CanFitPro courses are delivered by PRO TRAINERs. The canfitpro website describes them as "ambassadors for canfitpro and experts in their specialty" and — this is a direct quote — "You are an entrepreneur and a champion for fitness education."13
The language is revealing. PRO TRAINERs are described as "contracted partners" who organize and promote certification courses, secure their own host facilities, contact students directly, and conduct both theoretical and practical exams. They bear the commercial risk of insufficient enrollment. One PRO TRAINER wrote: "Greater promotion is needed for this certification to work in Windsor, Ont. The course runs two weekends every 3 months, but I have not had one run in a year."14
These are not employees. They're customers who have been promoted to unpaid sales and delivery agents. They pay canfitpro for the credential that allows them to teach canfitpro's curriculum, then they go out and do the marketing, logistics, and instruction — absorbing the risk while canfitpro collects registration fees centrally.
The value flows one direction. The PRO TRAINER recruits, teaches, and evaluates the next wave of certified professionals. CanFitPro owns the curriculum, owns the credential, and collects from both ends — from the people getting certified and from the people doing the certifying. If you proposed this as a business model in any other industry, people would immediately identify what it is. In fitness, it's called professional development.
The Safety Argument
The reflexive defense of certification is safety. The public needs protection. Trainers need baseline knowledge. Without a credential, anyone could walk in off the street and hurt someone.
This argument occupies dead space.
A personal trainer's scope of practice is to select appropriate loads, coach movement, design progressive programs, and refer out when something exceeds their competence. The safety floor for that work — the principle that prevents injury — is straightforward: load must match position. No movement is inherently dangerous. Only a mismatch between the load someone is handling and the position their body is in creates injury risk. That principle doesn't require a $1,200 weekend course. It requires attentiveness and common sense.
The work that is genuinely high-risk — diagnosis, rehabilitation protocols, medical management, pharmacological considerations — is explicitly outside a trainer's scope of practice regardless of certification. A canfitpro PTS certification doesn't authorize you to do any of it. Certification doesn't make the dangerous work safe. And the safe work doesn't require certification.
The credential sits in a dead zone: it neither qualifies you for the work that could actually hurt someone, nor is it necessary for the work that's within your lane. What it does is create a proxy — a logo on a wall that tells a client "this person is qualified" without the client having any way to evaluate whether that's true.
And that proxy may be worse than nothing. Zenko and Ekkekakis (2015) surveyed 1,808 certified exercise professionals and found an average knowledge score of 42.87% — below half.15 Personal trainers specifically scored 40.59%. Holding one, two, or three or more certifications made no difference in knowledge scores. But here's the finding that should concern every client who's ever trusted a credential: those same professionals rated their own knowledge 7.01 out of 10. They didn't know what they didn't know — and the certification gave them confidence that the evidence says they hadn't earned.
A client who sees a certification on the wall stops evaluating their trainer's actual demonstrated ability. The logo substitutes for judgment. The credential doesn't just fail to ensure competence — it manufactures the illusion of it.
I carry liability insurance. I obtained it without holding a canfitpro certification. The idea that you can't get insured without their specific credential is a myth that serves their business model.
Who Owns This
Everything I've described so far — the fee structure, the curriculum, the CEC economy, the PRO TRAINER pipeline — operates under the umbrella of a single organization. And that organization has an owner.
David "Patch" Patchell-Evans founded GoodLife Fitness in 1979 and Canadian Fitness Professionals — canfitpro — in 1993. He owns both.
GoodLife Fitness is the largest fitness company in Canada. Over 400 locations. 1.5 million members. 13,000 employees. The fourth-largest fitness chain in the world.16 In February 2026, Apollo Global Management announced a minority equity investment in the GoodLife Group, valuing the company at approximately C$2 billion. The press release listed the group's brands: "GoodLife Fitness, Fit4Less, GYMVMT, Éconofitness, and canfitpro."17 There it is — the certification body listed alongside the gym brands as a corporate asset. Not an independent professional standards organization. A brand in a portfolio.
GoodLife's own website states: "All GoodLife Fitness Personal Trainers are certified through the GoodLife Personal Training Institute™ and/or Canfitpro™."18 GoodLife also operates the GoodLife Personal Training Institute — GLPTI — a $749 program that results in a PTS certification issued through canfitpro.19 The employer, the training institute, and the certifying body are the same entity.
GoodLife has stated this directly. In an industry profile, a GoodLife representative confirmed: "GoodLife personal trainers are required to achieve and maintain their Canfitpro Personal Training Specialist certification."27 Current job postings have softened the language — "must be willing to accrue a nationally recognized Personal Training certification within first 75 days of employment" — but the only training institute GoodLife operates issues certifications through canfitpro. The requirement didn't disappear. It just went underground.
So the person who owns the gym where you want to work also owns the credential you need to work there — and the training institute that issues it. You pay him to get certified. You pay him annually to stay certified. You pay him for continuing education credits. And then you go to work in his gym.
The Globe and Mail reported on this directly in 2014. To his critics, the article noted, Patchell-Evans's ownership of both the dominant gym chain and the certification it requires is "yet another sign that Patchell-Evans is becoming a monopolist."20 The same article documented what happens when GoodLife acquires competing gym chains: trainers from acquired clubs are slotted into lower-level positions at lower pay, then told to pay Patchell-Evans for canfitpro courses to advance. NOW Magazine, covering unionization efforts at 44 Toronto GoodLife locations, reported that GoodLife requires all instructors to be certified under CanFitPro — which GoodLife owns — even if they've obtained credentials through other institutions.21
And the industry follows GoodLife's lead. Independent gyms, municipal recreation centers, and small studios across Canada routinely list canfitpro as a required or preferred certification — not because they've evaluated the curriculum, but because it's the most recognized name. Most have never questioned why. The credential's value doesn't come from the knowledge it represents. It comes from the network of employers who accept it — anchored by the 400+ clubs owned by the same person who owns the credential.
This is the entity that controls the credentialing pipeline. And this is its character.
In 2005, the Competition Bureau fined GoodLife $75,000 for misleading advertising — systematically failing to disclose mandatory fees in their promotions.22 In 2011, the CRTC fined them $300,000 for 60 violations of unsolicited telecommunications rules — robocalling members without consent.23 The Ontario Ministry of Labour targeted them as a repeat violator in a 2016 enforcement blitz, finding violations of five workplace laws including improper wage deductions and overtime failures.24 And in 2018, a class action settlement revealed what GoodLife's relationship with its trainers actually looked like from the inside: Carrie Eklund alleged the company systematically failed to record working hours and refused to pay trainers for scheduling, program development, client prospecting, and mandatory paperwork. The class covered approximately 22,000 current and past employees across nine provinces. GoodLife settled for $7.5 million.25
Misleading advertising. Illegal robocalls. Repeat workplace violations. Wage theft on a national scale. This is the company that owns the body that certifies your profession. These are not the actions of an organization that took a wrong turn. This is a pattern — and it's the same pattern that runs through the certification model itself. Extract maximum value. Absorb minimum accountability. Wrap it in the language of something you can't argue against. Fitness. Professionalism. Safety.
What This Actually Is
CanFitPro is not an education company that happens to charge fees. It's a fee company that happens to provide education. The credential is the product. The education is the cover story. And the value of the credential doesn't come from the knowledge it represents — it comes from the employer requirements it satisfies. Requirements set, in the largest case, by the same person who owns the credential.
The trainers who go through this pipeline aren't stupid. They're trusting a system that presents itself as legitimate because that's what systems like this are designed to do. The credential looks official. The employer requires it. The insurance company asks about it. So you pay. And you keep paying. And you never stop to ask whether the thing you're paying for actually made you better at your job — because the system is structured so that question never needs to be answered. The payment is the point. Competence is a side effect at best.
This isn't unique to canfitpro — but canfitpro illustrates the mechanism in its purest form. This credential didn't earn its market position through quality. It manufactured its own necessity — through ownership of the largest employer in the industry, through mandatory requirements imposed on trainers who hold superior credentials from other institutions, through a $15-per-credit tax on any continuing education that doesn't flow through its own pipeline. When a company can build a gate where no gate needs to exist and then collect a toll from every worker who passes through it, every trainer in that market becomes a recurring revenue source. That's not education earning value. That's rent extraction dressed in a lanyard.
Competence doesn't come from a credential. It comes from attention — to the person in front of you, to the load on the bar, to the mechanics of the movement, to the response your programming generates over time. It comes from years of deliberate learning, not from a weekend course with no prerequisites. And it certainly doesn't come from a $98 annual renewal on a credit card you forgot was on file.
If you're a trainer reading this, educate yourself on your own terms. Read the research. Study the biomechanics. Seek out coaches who are better than you and learn how they think. The gatekeepers only have power because you keep paying the toll — and the toll has never once made you better at your job.
If you're a gym owner or operator, stop requiring credentials you've never evaluated. You know what a good trainer looks like on your floor. Assess the person in front of you — their coaching, their eye, their ability to manage load and read a client. A logo on a certificate tells you nothing you can't determine in fifteen minutes of watching someone work.
And if you're anyone with influence over how this industry regulates itself — this model should be recognized for what it is. Not reformed. Not replaced with a government-stamped version of the same extraction. Seen clearly, and dismantled.