Transcript of the above video: 

As the title of this video suggests, we are asking the question, "can foreigners operate as so-called personal trainers and/or yoga teachers here in Thailand?" The answer to this is somewhat amorphous especially when it comes to the issue of yoga teachers because that can get into kind of a gray area - "are you really teaching or are you guiding a group, is it sort of a guided meditation thing?" On top of that Thailand, Thai culture is very conducive to obviously Buddhism and even Hinduism and certain aspects of those religious orders. For this reason yoga is in a little bit more of an amorphous space. That said, one thing to bear in mind is if you are doing anything in Thailand that is work - and you know when you are doing it - and as we have discussed in other videos, the definition of work could in theory be construed as breathing if you really wanted to look at it that way. But again, yoga is a little bit more nebulous for me to sort of nod from an analytical standpoint. That said I have seen folks operating in the yoga space have problems but in virtually all of those situations, they had no Work Permit whatsoever.

Meanwhile, you go over to the notion of personal trainers, this is a very different animal. I have made videos some time ago specifically on this topic, where I believe it was 3 or 4 foreign nationals were arrested at a gym for engaging in personal trainer services, and this is an example of one of those things that "look there are plenty of Thai personal trainers here in Thailand" and I think yet again is an example of something that they view as necessarily restricted, they are not overly interested in foreign competition in that space. Again, you need to understand that work authorization policy in Thailand is often dictated by the notion that they, to quote the movie Harry Potter, I believe it was one of the last ones when talking about the sword of Gryffindor: "it only takes in that which makes it stronger". What do we mean here? Well Thailand just generally does not want to bring in foreign labour that they already have. They already have issues; they don't want unemployment; they don't want to put their own people out of work to the benefit of a foreign national. And Thailand has plenty of expertise in the area of personal training. So from that standpoint, that's one way to look at it. Also, while I do believe training and physical fitness and physical education can be a highly intellectual endeavour, as a practical matter it's not like a highly technological skill set, it is not something that is for example adding to the workforce, adding to the skill sets of the Thai people. For that reason, yeah it's going to be something that is not looked upon as something that they really want to bring a lot of foreigners in to engage in here in Thailand. And I have actually seen reports and I have done the videos on those reports of people actually being arrested and even in some cases deported for operating as personal trainers here in the Kingdom of Thailand.