Pricing Personal Training Sessions: A Quick How-To Guide

Share:
Pricing Personal Training Sessions: Featured Image. Personal Trainer Coaching Client on Dead lift.

If you aren’t working for a major commercial gym, then that means you have to figure out pricing personal training sessions. At first glance it doesn’t seem to be very difficult, but there’s a balance you want to maintain. You want to figure out a price that demonstrates your value but also one you feel is fair for your clients.

In this blog we will go over exactly how to price your sessions and what sort of mentality you should be approaching it with.

Common Considerations for Pricing Personal Training Sessions

There a couple considerations you should make before pricing your personal training sessions. Often times, new trainers will look at other trainer in their market and use their base price or say “well bob set his price at this so I’m just going to set my price there too”.

The problem with this is it’s not unique and often times, this approach doesn’t reflect the true value of your services. This is why it’s important to consider all factors and come up with your own pricing model.

Status of the Economy

Pricing your sessions can vary based on the status of the economy because personal training is considered a luxury service by many. Unfortunately, luxury services are the first to take a hit when the economy looks like its going downhill.

At the point of writing this article (3.23.2020), the COVID-19 pandemic has it’s full fledged grip on society. As of right now many stores are closed, including Gyms for the foreseeable future.


As we speak, thousands of people are out of work and applying for unemployment. Right would be a good example of when you might want to start looking at adjusting your prices. One this to consider is, many people are stuck at home, off of work.

If you adjust your prices accordingly, you may find people who still want to train as it might be the only thing that keeps people sane.

However, on the flip side, while to economy is booming, you can charge more for your services.

Your Location Matters

Your location can be a rather large variable in what you price your sessions at. Do you live in a large city or a small rural town? Even if you live in a large city, what part of the city do you live in?

The FitSW offices are located in Colorado Springs, Colorado. In Colorado, there are three main cities people go by. Pueblo, Colorado Springs, and Denver. Then there are the surrounding cities such as Fountain, Manitou Springs, and Falcon which are all outside of Colorado Springs, but close enough to be considered part of the Colorado Springs area.

If you were to look at the prices on average with the surrounding towns, trainers in Fountain would more likely charge slightly lower rates. Same with Falcon. However, Manitou is very heavily visited by tourists and has a lot more money. Therefore you might find training to be more expensive in Manitou.

Then you have Denver for example. Personal training in Denver is likely to more expensive then Colorado Springs. However, much like Colorado Springs, Denver also has smaller towns on the outside of Denver that are almost seen as a part of the city. As such, you might find cheaper prices in Aurora or Littleton then Denver even though they are essentially in the same place!

Does the Price of a Session Cover Your Expenditures?

This all depends on what kind of training you are doing. If you are a private trainer who travels to the home of the client, then what would your expenditures be?

If you are training in their home you probably pay for liability insurance. You have the time it takes you to drive there, the gas you use, the equipment you bring, the time it took you to write the program/workout, and probably a couple other factors. Are you an employee of the gym you train at or are you renting space there as an independent trainer? Are you renting space at just one gym or many?

When considering all of those expenditures, you absolutely need to sit down and tally up all of your unique costs and factor those into your pricing. Especially if you have special requests from clients.

This is essentially comparably to calculating “operating costs” for larger companies. Factor in how much it costs to run your PT business.

What is Your Target Market?

This one often times runs parallel with your experience level too. The trainers who are in the more niche areas of personal training often are the most experienced. This is because they have spent the most time in the personal training industry in general and know where their interest lies.

Trainers who work for corporations as the “company trainer” might make more then a trainer in a Golds Gym.

In this case, it’d be good to do research on that specific niche industry to see if there’s any rhyme or reason to other trainers pricing. Not because you want to copy their pricing, but this way you can get a better feel for pricing and the variables involved.

Self Worth & Confidence

Have you heard of Paula Scher? She is one of the most renowned graphic designers and artists in the world. There are a lot of different achievements she is famous for but among them is her 5 min sketch of the Citibank logo.

Citibank was paying her design agency $1.5 million to help them come up with a logo and more likely other branding assets. Paula Scher sat down and drew the Citibank logo in 5 minutes. Dubbed the $1.5 million napkin. Later on she was quoted in saying:

“It took me a few seconds to draw it, but it took me 34 years to learn how to draw it in a few seconds.”

Paul Scher

This quote couldn’t be more applicable to pricing personal training sessions. A lot of clients only see the couple minutes it takes you to create a workout for the day. But they don’t see the hundreds of clients you have trained and the thousands of workouts you have written.

Not to mention the hundreds of hours of reading and studying many trainers do on their on off time.

Many trainers spend quite literally thousands of hours honing their craft. Some trainers can look at the way you walk in the gym and tell you what part of your neck is sore and how personal training can help alleviate that. They might even already have an idea for how they would structure your program in their head. Not because they have done it before but because they know how the human body works.

Listing Your Prices and How to Discuss Them With Clients/Prospective Clients

This really depends on your employment situation as a trainer. For example some trainers work at commercial gyms as an employee of the gym. With a lot of commercial gyms, your rate is dependent upon how long you’ve been there and how many specializations you have.

In the example above, more times then not, your rate is set for you. However, you still need to have the confidence to discuss it openly with prospective clients.

In other examples, some trainers rent space in a gym and set their own prices.

In either example, you want to sell results first, not packages or sessions. Regardless of the issues clients are coming to you with, the bottom line is a better quality of life is essentially priceless.

Personal training is so much more then just “selling workouts”. Many trainers are part time therapists, part time life coaches, and full time personal trainers. Many people who start a rigorous personal training program undergo major changes in other areas of their life as a result of the training.

When you approach it from that direction, it suddenly seems pretty easy in discussing exactly what the price will be and the benefits of your services.

Feedback on Pricing Personal Training Sessions?

Have any feedback on this blog, other blogs, or just in general? Let us know by shooting us an email at support@fitsw.com or reach out to us on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter!

The Impact of COVID-19 on Personal Trainers

Share:
The Impact of COVID-19 on Personal Trainers: Featured Image

The impact of COVID-19 on personal trainers has already begun. Many gyms are being forced to shut down for the next 30 days at the minimum. That’s assuming nothing gets worse.With that being said, the affects of COVID-19 are being felt across all industries. But that’s old news.

Many trainers and their clients are scrambling to figure out how they can continue training for many reasons. Namely, clients who have been working hard for months with their trainers don’t want to lose all of their hard fought progress. On top of that, trainers – especially in-person trainers – are having their very livelihood taken right out from under their feet.

I mean, many people are prone to feeling a little cabin fever during this time of social distancing and working form home. But, trainers especially. Many trainers went from the normal hustle and bustle of their typical work day to essentially being laid off for 30 days; all within 24 hours in some cases.

How to Continue Training

First, a disclaimer. Training won’t be the same as you are used to. You think toilet paper and chicken were the only things people raided at the stores? I implore you to check out the fitness gear sections of your local stores.

Many of them have been raided already for resistance bands, weights, and other common fitness equipment. Not only do you have to find a way to train at home but also with limited gear. We are going to have to get creative.

With that being said, we can still find ways to sweat.

Body weight Workouts

Considering that people are raiding fitness gear, it might be a good idea to prescribe body weight workouts. This way your clients can rest assured that there is a way to maintain all of the progress they have fought for.

We at FitSW are already hard at work in putting together some body weight workouts trainers can use as templates.

However, in the meantime we will be posting body weight workouts you can use on our social media accounts.

Using a Client Management Software

If there’s one thing that’s true, it’s that COVID-19 has created a lot of uncertainty. Not only in our day-to-day lives but also in the way that we will train. You may have clients who are used to exercises within a certain training style. Now, we are being forced to adapt to new training styles with body weight exercise, the use of bands, and anything else we can get our hands on.

Client management software can help mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on personal trainers and some of the uncertainty. FitSW for example offers demo videos you can include in exercises for clients to reference. You might be saying “well duh”, but now that clients are training at home, a demo video can go a long way when they are unsure about certain exercises.

Additionally, using a client management software can help give your clients security with constant access to workouts. Not only that, but they can also continue tracking their progress.

Many trainers are creating packages in FitSW and selling them to clients for in home workouts and in home training sessions. Through all of this, there might be some grey area when it comes to payments because a lot of clients are still paying for sessions at their gym that they aren’t able to use.

Luckily, most gyms are putting a pause on payments which makes it easier for trainers to accept payments from clients while everything is shut down.

Keeping Your Spirits High & Using Your Time Wisely

Although there are some negatives coming out of all of this, the impact of COVID-19 on personal trainers can also yield some good.

Through all of this, it’s easy to feel down about the whole thing. Not just because you are no longer working. But because your daily routine has been knocked off it’s tracks.

It’s good to maintain a normal routine throughout the day to keep yourself from feeling down. Maybe that means continuing daily rituals, such as, getting up at a normal time and drinking your coffee/tea. In addition, get up and get active. Schedule walks and home workouts for you to do.

You can even schedule a group training session with clients who feel up to meeting at a park. Just make sure your group doesn’t exceed the maximum gathering size many states and countries have established.

You might be thinking “okayyy, that only gets me so far through my day” and you’re right. However, you can supplement that time that you’re usually training with writing home workouts for clients or learning new things.

Get a Specialization

Maybe you have purchased one already and haven’t finished it or you have a rainy day fund you can use to purchase a course. Whatever it maybe, what better time to gain another specialization? You have more free time then usual and when all is restored to normal you can get right to training with your new specialization.

Explore Business Idea’s You Haven’t Had the Chance to Explore

Have you been thinking about online training? Setting up a website? Why not try it now? At the very least, some site builders like Webflow offer a free subscription model that allows for you to build websites for free. This lets you explore their courses and tutorials and familiarize yourself with the tool. Plus it’s free so why not?

Get ahead on Social Media Posting

Do you automate your social media posts? Many trainers and businesses do with sites like Hootsuite. With some of your spare time, you can sit down and make a bunch of posts to schedule in your social media scheduler.

This way when things go back to normal, you are caught up and ahead of the curve. And trust me, my guess is things are going to be crazy. Clients are going to be clawing their way into training sessions with you and a new crowd of people will be looking for training sessions too.

Make a Guide

Are you a personal trainer trying to grow your business? A guide is a great way to show your expertise and get leads.

The only downside of creating a guide is that it takes time. You have to choose a topic, do research, create an outline, and design the whole thing. But now that you have more free time this might be a good option to consider.

Brush up on Your Marketing and Sales Skills

Although there aren’t specializations with this, there are plenty of free courses and certifications online you can get. You can even start by reading some of the blogs we have written about marketing:

  1. Marketing Funnels for Personal Trainers: Click Here
  2. Social Media Marketing for Personal Trainers: Click Here

Aside from this, Google offers a boatload of certification courses with Google ads. These can be a great resource that you can use to start learning digital marketing.

Turn part of your home into a safe haven

Have you ever jammed you finger and injured it? And then over the course of your finger healing, you realize how often you bump it into random objects because it hurts every time you do.

By the time it’s done healing, you’re glad, not because you were in aching pain, but because you missed the luxury of not having to care when you bumped your finger into things.

Well, COVID-19 has done something similar to a lot of people.

However, instead of it being a stubbed finger, it’s taken away our daily rituals many of us take pride in. Right about now, some of us are starting to realize how much we miss our day-to-day habits because we have never had to go without them like this before.

If there’s one thing we know to be true, it’s that most of us have mini rituals we follow everyday, sometimes unwittingly. Some are intentional, some are a product of the habitual nature of human beings.

Whatever the reason is, we run on mini rituals. They help us ground ourselves during times of stress and right now is no time to sacrifice your personal time.

At the time of this blog being written, many of us are at home due to mass closures and mandatory social distancing. As a result, our worlds have shrunk drastically from what is a normal day and so have our daily habits. At this point you may be asking, “how am I going to re-create a daily pattern from my living room couch?”.

The answer is this, you don’t have to. Start by freeing up any points of stress in your life. Are the dishes a disaster when you go to cook food? Find out why and fix it. Then, turn your kitchen into a point of joy. Cook meals you’ve wanted to learn and try decorating it how you’d like to.

Haven’t had the time to decorate your desk in your room? Go buy a couple fake plants for a couple bucks and liven it up a little bit.

Your closet full of laundry? Do your laundry!

The point here isn’t to overload yourself with chores and eventually stress out, but quite the contrary. Eliminate the clutter and put things in place that make you happy.

Feedback On The Impact of COVID-19 on Personal Trainers?

Have any feedback on this blog post? Have feedback in general? Let us know by shooting us an email at support@fitsw.com or reach out to us on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter!

FitSW Web Update: Group Scheduling & Autocomplete

Share:

Hello Group Scheduling and goodbye to tediously adding clients to the same time slot. The long awaited feature many have asked for has finally come. Accompanying it is another feature just released today we are calling “autocomplete”. We know, so original. Without too much rambling, lets dive right into Group Scheduling & Autocomplete.

Group Scheduling

Before the group scheduling update in FitSW, you could schedule more then one client at a time. It was just a tedious process of adding each client one-by-one. Now it’s a simple click and drag and then selecting the client name for the group session.

Group Scheduling & Autocomplete: Sample image of the new Group Scheduling Feature.

Notice the beautifully drawn red box in the image above? That’s where all of your clients names will appear when you create an appointment or session in the scheduler. Once you have selected all of the clients you need, you can make it a recurring event and set an automated email reminder for either 6, 12, or 24 hours before the scheduled event.

Now that group scheduling exists you can create workouts, assign them to multiple clients, and schedule a group training session in the scheduler. This is especially handy since you can set reminders mentioned above.

Autocomplete

Autocomplete is a little self explanatory. On client workouts, you as the trainer or the client can now select a button the left side of their workout that auto fills their workout data.

Notice the fancy drawing again? Now you can just select the “Fill” button and have all of the data auto fill for you. A simple yet handy feature when it comes to workflow efficiency.

Feedback on FitSW Web Update: Group Scheduling & Autocomplete?

Have any feature requests or feedback on the new update? Feel free to reach out to us at support@fitsw.com or reach out to us on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.

How to Run an Online Fitness Challenge

Share:

Ever thought about starting up an online fitness challenge? Or have you tried already? Then you may already know it’s not as simple as just creating a “challenge” and selling it. You must consider why you are creating the challenge from different perspectives. More notably, two perspectives, your businesses and your target market.

Just simply creating a challenge doesn’t mean people will buy into it. Nor does it mean it will benefit your business either. Think of it like you do when writing a workout or creating a fitness program. You don’t just slap some stuff in FitSW and expect it to work do you? You more then likely put careful thought and consideration into it. As such, you should do the same when creating fitness challenges.

1. Breaking Down Your Online Fitness Challenge

When it comes to creating online fitness challenges, there are a couple essential variables you want to assess:

  1. What is the goal for your business?
  2. What is your target audience and what is your goal for your target audience?
  3. How will you market the challenge?
  4. What is your plan for after the challenge?

These questions help gain a better understanding of what it takes to run an online fitness challenge from a birds eye view.

Fitness challenges can be a very effective way of taking someone who is a complete stranger to your business and turning them into a long term client. The thing is, a lot of trainers don’t take the necessary steps to ensure the challenge launches successfully and they lose out on a lot of value that could have been generated from the challenge.

In the next section we will outline each step from the list above and look at what it takes to create and launch an online fitness challenge.

2. What is the Business Goal?

When it comes to the business goal you have to ask yourself what you want to come out of this challenge for your business.

  • Are you trying to increase sales?
  • Build your email list?
  • Create awareness of your business and services?

Your business goal is one of the most important aspects. It essentially defines the nature of the challenge and how you approach marketing it. Lets look at example challenges from the list above. Remember, there are loads of different business objectives. These are only examples.

Increase Sales

Lets say, for example, your goal is to convert people who do your challenge into longer term clients. Then that means your challenge might come with an exclusive discount towards some of your larger packages that you sell. But only if they signed up and competed in the challenge.

You could make this a free challenge or a paid one. It’s up to you and what you want to accomplish.

A challenge you can offer is 2 weeks of training geared towards solving a problem of your target market. Let’s say the goal is to lose weight. For those that complete the challenge get the price of the 2 week challenge taken off of a larger package that you offer.

This is a great way to increase sales. People are either purchasing the smaller 2 week challenge from you and that’s it or they are purchasing the 2 week challenge and then going on to purchase something larger.

Build Your Email List

Another business objective example could be trying to build your email list. You could run Facebook or Instagram ads that direct people to a landing page you have set up where they input their email as a way to sign up.

Then you deliver workouts straight to their inbox for the duration of the fitness challenge. Plus you could deliver other content besides the content you are delivering for the challenge. This gives you a great way to showcase your knowledge and provide real value to challenge participants.

This also opens the door to sending them marketing emails in the future when the challenge is over.

Creating Awareness

This is one of the more simple challenges, however, can still be effective. An example could be running a challenge on social media. You can ask participants to sign up on a landing page that way you can track who’s competing.

Then post updates on social media as far as the daily tasks for the challenge goes.

You could do a free 2 week push-up challenge where you post the daily workouts on social media. Then ask people to post their results on social media and tag you or use a specific hashtag you created for the challenge.

3. What is Your Target Audience and What is Your Goal For Them?

Keep in mind, many of the people who are or are considering signing up have something specific in mind they want solved. Maybe they are just looking to squeeze in a quick workout throughout the day, lose weight, or they want to try gaining muscle.

So, the question is, how will your challenge benefit them?

The goal should be to pick a pain point and guide challenge participants to a solution over the course of the online fitness challenge.

Lets look at weight loss as an example. Through the duration of the challenge provide exercises participants can do that will help them lose weight, educate them on diet, educate them on the myths of diet and exercise revolving around weight loss, and talk about how to healthily operate on a caloric deficiency.

It’s important to make sure the challenge target market fits the market you traditionally train in. Someone who’s a strength and conditioning coach isn’t going to launch a challenge about Brazilian jiu jitsu.

This is important because it helps you better ensure results for your clients and for your business.

In setting up a challenge that’s related to other personal training packages that you sell, it gives you the opportunity to up sell challenge participants later on.

4. How Will You Market Your Online Fitness Challenge?

There are different ways you can market your challenge. Without diving to deep into marketing your challenges, we will go into a high level overview of what a marketing plan can look like.

Referrals

The first obvious one is using referrals! Once you have the challenge outlined, then you can send out an email blast to your current and past clients informing them of your challenge details and asking them to refer people to the challenge.

You can even create a rewards system. If a current client refers someone to the challenge they get a gift card, a free supplement, or they get a discounted rate on their next session.

If a past client refers someone, they get a discount on future sessions they purchase or you can even try giving the person they recommended to the challenge a discount on any of your programs they purchase.

Creating a rewards system might even bring some old clients back!

Blogging

This method works if you already have a blog going. Posting a blog updating your blog readers on the challenge you are running can help create awareness of the challenge.

Having an active blog also helps as it this gives people the opportunity to subscribe to your newsletter which opens the door to leveraging email marketing.

Email Marketing

This is one of the more powerful marketing methods. Especially if you have an active newsletter you already send out weekly or monthly. Simply just send out a couple newsletters announcing the challenge details, starts dates, how to sign up, and any other details you find are needed.

Another option for email marketing involves leveraging the power of social media marketing. Essentially, use social media ads to drive traffic to a landing page where site visitors are given the opportunity to sign up for the challenges. A part of signing up is they provide you with an email you can send information to.

Social Media Marketing

As mentioned in the previous section, you can use social media marketing to drive traffic to a landing page where people are given the opportunity to sign up for the challenge.

However, this is where social media marketing can get really powerful. Not everyone is going to sign up when they click on your ad and are sent to your landing page. Fear not, you can get them to come back through re-targeting ads.

With social media ads, you can create an audience based on what pages of your site they viewed. For example, if they viewed the “Sign Up” page for the challenge but didn’t view the “Thanks for Signing Up” page for the challenge, this means they didn’t sign up. With this same exact logic, you can tell Facebook to deliver ads to people who viewed and didn’t view certain pages.

Another option for social media marketing is just simply posting about it on your personal Instagram or Facebook page. In your posts, announce the challenge details and don’t forget to include a link in your bio.

Google Ads

Leveraging Google Ads for marketing your online fitness challenge can be intimidating but it’s not too bad when you get the hang of it. The reason why Google Ads is so powerful is because of human nature. Think about it, when you have a need or problem, where do you go? You search for solutions on Google. And so do most people.

Google ads give’s you the ability to bid on words people are searching for.

Google Ads Example Image
Google Ad Example: Notice the highlighted area? That’s what the typical ad looks like on Google.

In the image above, notice how an ad pops up based on my search? That’s because Adobe is bidding on the search term “Photoshop”.

When I say bidding that’s because Google Ads is structured like digital auction. Every time you search something, an auction happens in the split of a second.

Anytime you search something, it’s likely the first 2-4 search results are actually ads. Each of the top 2-4 search results are different companies bidding on the term you searched or one similar enough to the word you searched such that their ad appeared.

This whole process operates on what you’d call a “pay-per-click” model or PPC. This means you don’t pay until someone clicks on your ad. This is where the auction comes from.

In your Google Ads account, you tell Google the max amount you are willing to pay per click and they “enter” you into the auction. You also tell Google what words, or more commonly referred to as keywords, you are bidding on.

Then when a search happens involving your keyword, your business is entered in the auction and Google determines who the top 2-4 bidders are. You might think this is immediately based on what you are willing to pay per click, but that’s not everything. Google also looks at how relevant your bid is.

For example, if a software company was bidding on the search term “Cocoa Puffs” that wouldn’t be super relevant and Google wouldn’t show their ad.

Given this, what’s another reason why Google ads is so powerful? It’s because of what us marketers call…

commercial intention.

Commercial intention is referencing the intention of the user who is doing the searching.

For example, if someone searches for “Personal Training” it might be hard to determine exactly what they are looking for. They could be someone looking for a personal trainer, wondering what personal training is, or they could be someone who wants to become a personal trainer.

That wouldn’t be a good word you’d want to bid on because you can’t tell what the user wants. However, bidding on the word “Software for Personal Trainers” is a good one to bid on. It’s more specific and tells you more about what the user is searching for.

In the example of online fitness challenges, you can do keyword research and find the best words to bid on for your challenge.

Online Fitness Challenge Key Word Research
Ubersuggest: Keyword Research Tool

In this example, I’ve typed in Weight Loss Challenge in Ubsersuggest to give an example. Notice immediately it gives you the Search Volume which is how many searches for this terms occur each month, SEO/Paid difficulty, and the estimated cost per click (CPC).

This is a great place to get started in doing research for keywords for an online fitness challenge.

5. How Will the Fitness Challenge be Delivered?

There are many way’s you can go about delivering a fitness challenge.

Social Media/Blog

You could post the daily challenge details on a blog or social media profile. You’d just have to make sure you let people know where and when you will be posting challenge details. On top of that, if the challenge is based on a social media or internet platform, you might want to give people a place to post their results.

Since it’s on social media, it might be a natural response for people to want to share their progress.

Email

An additional method for delivering challenge details and daily tasks could be over email. You could send out daily workout emails or deliver all of the details at once in an excel or word file. This is probably the most common method and can work pretty well.

The only thing is, if you are collecting feedback or results from this challenge, you will have to ask challenge participants to submit their results all over email. The problem with this is it’s a pretty manual process for your clients and can turnout to be a substantial amount of work for you.

Along these same lines, you could create a Google document you share with everyone. This could be a good central place to update challenge details on a daily basis and collect information from participants.

Client Management Software

The last route you can go is using a client management software for personal trainers. This is a pretty good way of making sure the challenge details are delivered effectively. Not only that, but, using a personal training software can help you track the results challenge participants see over the course of the challenge.

6. What is Your Plan for After the Challenge?

Your plan for after the challenge is completely dependent on your business objective and what you’d like to accomplish. One aspect to consider are re-targeting marketing campaigns to get people to sign up for larger packages.

With re-targeting, you can simply run social media ads and email marketing campaigns to inform challenge participants of the services you offer in larger packages.

Another aspect for consideration is setting up a system for feedback. Whether you simply accept feedback through email or you use a software like Survey Monkey to collect feedback, creating a plan for feedback is a must.

This way you get insight into what parts of the challenge worked and what parts didn’t for future challenges.

Feedback on How to Run an Online Fitness Challenge?

We take our feedback seriously, if you have any, please feel free to reach out to support@fitsw.com or get in touch on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.

Updates to Our Web and Android Apps for Personal Trainers

Share:

Shamelessly, we are very excited to announce updates to our web and android apps for personal trainers. The updates come right after a couple big feature releases, subscriptions and packages.

This update includes:

Web
  • Table sorting on sessions and subscriptions.
  • Infinite scrolling.
  • Your services are now more accessible from your trainer page.
  • Macros are now totaled as you you add food items to meals.
  • Custom brand colors are now displayed on the trainer pages of those that purchased a custom web app.
Android
  • Updated super set and workout functionality.
  • Exercise list sorting.
  • General functionality improvements

Okay enough rambling, you’re probably curious about what “infinite scrolling” is! Well, me too so lets dive in. In this blog post, we will be exploring mainly the web updates.

The Android updates were mainly primarily improvements to general functionality and eliminating some small bugs that were reported. While we are at it, we’d like to say thank you to those who have reported bugs or submitted feedback.

We take any bug report or feedback submission pretty seriously as it really helps us provide a better service and platform.

Web Updates

1. Table Sorting on Subscriptions

Web and Android Apps for Personal Trainers: Table sorting on subscriptions

You can now filter by client name in your subscriptions list. That’s right no more scrolling down a large list of subscriptions when trying to find a clients subscription.

2. Table Sorting on Sessions

Web and Android Apps for Personal Trainers: Table sorting on sessions.

Alright, now we’re talking! Although infinite scrolling is a part of this update, fear not, there will be no infinite scrolling here. Filtering on client name, session date, and session status helps you keep clients accountable.

3. Trainer Page Improvements

Web and Android Apps for Personal Trainers: Trainer Page Improvements

Now all of the subscriptions and packages you put together are available on your trainer page. Making it easier then ever for prospective clients to access your services.

4. Infinite Scrolling

Do you have a lot of workouts or meals created? Previously, the page would load the entire list at once which could take awhile. Now it loads the top of the page first and loads the rest of the page as you scroll down.

So now, you’ll just be infinitely scrolling rather then infinitely waiting! Woo!

5. Totaled Macros

Web and Android Apps for Personal Trainers: Macros totaled

When creating meals and meal plans, the macros are now displayed as totaled values for individual meal items and entire meals. Making it easier for clients to hit not only their fitness goals but also nutrition goals as well.

Tip: If you would rather just simply prescribe macros instead of entire meals, you can create a custom food called “Macros” where you input macro values. Then assign that to your client as their nutrtion prescription. Example below.

This is a good way to give clients a guide for macros they should be hitting while giving them the flexibility to pick the meals they eat.

6. Trainer Pages with Custom Branded Colors

Trainer page with Custom Colors

Now, if you have purchased a custom web app, your brand colors will display on your trainer page as well as your logo in place of FitSWs logo. Creating a consistently branded experience for you and your clients.

Have Feedback on Updates to our Web and Android Apps for Personal Trainers?

Feel free to comment on this blog post, fire off an email to support@fitsw.com, or reach out to use on Instagram or Facebook. We look forward to hearing from you!

Marketing Funnels for Personal Trainers: A Complete Guide

Share:

What the heck are marketing funnels for personal trainers?? Well, I can tell ya’ one thing, it’s not something you just throw your money at and hope for the best. That’s a good way to waste all of your money.

Instead, lets do the opposite. Let’s take a calculated approach and make some money, shall we?

Admittedly, there can be a learning curve. Not in learning what a marketing funnel is, but more so learning common methods and tools.

But, lucky for you, here I am writing this blog and simultaneously googling “marketing funnels”.

Just kidding, I’m not doing that. Everyone knows Bing is better.

Okay, enough with the jokes, lets take a deep dive down a funnel of our own. One made of knowledge. What say you?

First, What is a Marketing Funnel?

A marketing funnel is a method of defining a would-be customers journey in discovering your brand and eventually becoming a customer. This includes from the point they first discover your business to purchasing your product or service.

Marketing funnels are commonly broken down into 4 main phases:

  • Awareness: The prospective customer is aware they have a problem/need they want to solve. During this phase you goal is simply to get discovered as a brand.
  • Interest: Our prospective customer has stumbled upon some content which has tipped his/her attention towards your business and has converted into a lead. Now it’s time for you to develop a relationship with the customer.
  • Desire: Said imaginary customers mouth is now watering. However, they still have not purchased anything and are evaluating all options.
  • Action: They bite and purchase something from you! or not. Yes, sometimes work goes into leading a customer down a marketing funnel just so they can decide not to purchase your product. Fear not, there are other fish in the sea. However, this stage is critical and is where you want to make sure your site is designed perfectly. Your messaging is fine tuned. And everything is optimized towards guiding those strangers who have made the pilgrimage across the internet to your site to make a purchase.

Different Marketing Methods Used in Marketing Funnels

Often times marketing funnels are made up of different types of marketing strategies. The main ones you’ll see are:

  • Content Marketing: This consists of putting out content such as blogs, social media posts, videos, eBooks, guides, white papers, etc… in an attempt to solve problems for people and create awareness for your business. Content marketing is typically in the awareness phase of the marketing funnel.
  • Paid Ads: Paid ads can occupy many different phases of the marketing funnel. You can run ads to people who may not have ever heard of your business or you can run adds to people who have been to your website. Popular tools for running paid ads are Facebook ads and Google Ads.
  • Email Marketing: Email marketing is a great way to keep people up to speed with the products/services you offer, discounts you’re running, announcements, top blog articles, and much more.

Marketing Funnels for Personal Trainers

In this section, we will outline what actions are typically taken in each phase of a marketing funnel.

Phase 1: Creating Awareness

When it comes to marketing funnels for personal trainers, creating awareness is often times the most underrated aspect. Creating awareness is considered a Top of the Funnel (ToFu) phase.

Without this phase, you don’t really have much of a funnel. This phase is where people identify they have a need they want a solution for and are actively searching for this solution.

The goal is for them to discover your brand while they are searching for a solution.

Social Media

A good place to start is social media. This is an obvious one but there are some nuances that often get ignored.

When it comes to leveraging social media as a branch of your content marketing strategy, it’s important to follow a couple practices:

  1. Do your best to post content that’s valuable. Content that’s valuable is usually informative, visually appealing, triggers emotions, is relevant, and is interactive. Interactive usually means running polls on your stories, creating regular opportunity for shout outs, and even just asking general questions to the community.
  2. Use hashtags. Hashtags can help your posts get discovered. You can create different combinations of hashtags for different types of content that you post. This helps you test which hashtags yield the best results just makes sure that it’s relevant to those who are discovering it.

Creating engaging content on social media is the most important part. It increases the likely hood of people liking, commenting, and eventually sharing your content.

Which makes it more likely that people who are searching for solutions to their needs will discover your social media profile and brand. This in turn makes it more likely that people visit your blog or site.

Blogging

Another fantastic content marketing strategy is starting a blog. Blogging is easily one of the most powerful marketing strategies out there.

However, much like social media, there are best practices to follow to ensure you get the best results:

  1. Post blogs with value. Do you see a trend here? When it comes to content marketing, providing relevant value to your audience is the most important aspect.
  2. Make sure you go into enough depth in the topic you’re posting about.
  3. A good blog solves problems for readers and search engines. Meaning, you should spend time on making sure your blog is search engine optimized (SEO). A good way to do this is using the Yoast SEO plugin for your blog. Yoast helps you optimize your blog while you are writing it.
  4. Posting a blog once a week is always a good place to start. Although, there are loads of studies that show posting more often is better.
  5. Never post the same blog twice. In-fact, this can have a negative impact on your SEO. Instead, regularly update old blogs. This has shown to have positive impacts on your SEO.
  6. In each blog, link to an external website and link to at least 2 other blogs of your own (internal links).

SEO is really important for blogging as many people turn to google when searching for solutions to their needs.

If your blogs aren’t optimized for search engines then that greatly reduces the chance of people finding your blog when doing research.

Inevitably, it’s important to make it easy for people to sign up for a newsletter which gives them access to your content. This also gives you a channel to nurture this lead into a customer in later phases of the funnel.

Sponsored Brand Awareness Ads

Here’s another reason to make sure you are posting content that’s valuable on your social media accounts.

You can run paid ads on Facebook and Instagram that drive traffic to your site, blog, and your social media profiles. When running these ads, you run them towards “audiences” you have created in your ad account.

These audiences are made up of people whom you think have a higher likelihood of taking interest in the services you offer. Through your ad platform you can simply create audiences who have an affinity towards athletic clothes, technology, or pretty much any common interest you can think of.

When running brand awareness ads, the goal in mind isn’t necessarily to drive sales immediately. The goal is to create engagement with people who see your ads.

Engagement can mean they click through to your site or they visit your social media profile from the ad. This is why it’s important to consistently post valuable content to your social media profiles as it increases the likely hood of them following you.

Often times, giving them a little bit of information about your business in the ad is enough to peak their interest and prompt the esteemed click/tap on that “learn more” button of your ad. Effectively driving them to your site and giving you “ammo” for the later stages of your marketing funnel(s).

Summing up phase 1

Phase 1 is all about creating awareness of your brand and showing site visitors that you are serious about helping them out.

When it comes to marketing funnels for personal trainers, phase 1 can really help build a good reputation as a knowledgeable resource.

If visitors to your blog are able to pull actionable information away from the content you publish, they will be more likely to subscribe to a newsletter or even schedule a consultation with you.

Phase 2: Interest

This phase is where customers provide contact information so they can continue to get an endless stream of your lovely content.

Prospective customers haven’t decided on a product yet, but your brand is on their radar of products/services they are comparing.

Call-to-Actions (CTA’s)

Marketing Funnels for Personal Trainers: CTA example image.
Call to Action Examples: Can you identify all of the CTA’s on the FitSW homepage?

Calls to action are just as they sound. They are simple features on your site or app that drive customers to provide contact information in exchange for something that will benefit them.

Examples include signing up for a newsletter, signing up for a free consultation, or providing an email address in exchange for downloading a guide.

When incorporating CTA’s in your site, it’s important to keep the CTA somewhere where it’s relevant.

For example, it doesn’t make sense to call site visitors to sign up for your newsletter on your contact or services page. However, a good call to action for your services page could be a “Get Your Free Consultation Today” CTA. For the contact page you can incorporate a “Have Questions? We are happy help” field people can fill out.

In this phase, the calls to action shouldn’t be too much of a commitment for prospective customers. You don’t want to come off as pushy with “BUY NOW!!!” calls to action everywhere, especially this early on in the funnel.

Re-targeting Social Media Ads

Re-targeting ads are where social media ads really flex their muscles. When you set up your ads account you will more then likely install a tracking code on your site.

A tracking code allows for you to do a variety of things, such as measure page views, how many page viewers click on a CTA, and a lot more.

However, one of the most powerful things it lets you do is create audiences based on what pages site visitors viewed and what pages they didn’t view.

For example, you can tell Facebook to create audiences for people who viewed the “Sign up for our Newsletter” page but didn’t view the “Thanks for signing up for our newsletter!” page.

This means they thought about signing up but didn’t.

Running a re-targeting ad based on the example audience above is a powerful way to draw those users back. Examples include:

  • Running an ad with a blog image and summing up what the blog is about with a “Read More” CTA on the ad. When users click through to the blog, they are eventually prompted to sign up for the newsletter.
  • Or you can run an ad with a creative image suggesting they should sign up for your newsletter and a caption with a message such as “Don’t miss out!” and a details about what’s included in the newsletter. Users who click through are sent directly to the newsletter sign up page.

Effectively running re-targeting ads means you can increase the leads you have, which gives you more leads to nurture later on down the road and provides you with more nurtured leads to convert into paying customers.

Phase 3: Desire

Alright, you have done a lot of work at this point. But, you can’t stop now, no one else is going to nurture those leads for you!

In phase 3, prospective customers have provided contact information. They are interested. It’s time to inform them about your service even more and prepare them for a purchase. This phase is all about developing a relationship with your customer.

Email Marketing

Since you have their email now, you can send marketing emails to them providing helpful information that both benefits them and helps them determine why your services are the option they need.

However, don’t come out to bat swinging with discounts and reasons why they should purchase your service outright.

It’s important to start off slow. Provide information to common problems they might be facing and how they can overcome them. Then include what your services and products do to help over come these issues as well.

Once you have sent a couple of these emails, then you can send an email targeted at getting them to purchase in phase 4 of the funnel.

Here are some email templates that can help you get started. In addition, you can use tools like Mailchimp to help you manage your email marketing campaigns.

Phase 4: Action

Phew! Hang with me here, we are almost there. This is the phase where you go for the purchase. At this point, you customer knows your brand, the services you have to offer, and has been nurtured with some extra content you have sent them.

But “how do you I actually get them to make a purchase?” you ask?

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a fantastic method of converting leads into paying customers.

After you have sent them a couple emails about your business with helpful information, you can send that coveted sales email.

Here, a common practice is to offer a discount code only good for a limited amount of time in the email. Talk about what the discount is good for and how long it is available.

Provide a handy CTA for them to click such as “Claim My Offer Now” or something along those lines where they are guided to your site with discount and a wallet in hand ready to purchase.

However, leads may not always bite the first offer you give them.

If they don’t go for the discount, it’s important to remember it isn’t necessarily so much about getting the purchase but rather developing a relationship with the customer.

That’s why it’s important to repeat the process of sending a couple helpful and informative emails before you go for another discount or product offer. Jumping the gun to early with a product offer immediately after you just sent one is often a red flag for most people.

Re-targeting Ads

Much like the re-targeting section earlier in the blog, this one is all about audiences. Here you can create audiences based on people who have not seen your “Thanks for Your Purchase” page.

What does this mean? It means they have not purchased anything from you yet.

For these types of ads, you can use an image of yourself training or a creative image with a fancy caption and a CTA that says something like “Sign Up” or “Choose My Package”.

Upon clicking the ad customers are brought to your checkout page where they can use a discount code you gave them or simply just check out.

Summing Up Marketing Funnels for Personal Trainers

This was a long one, but it needed to be. This whole process sounds very involved. However, once you dive in you’ll realize most of the work goes into setting the whole process up.

Thanks to technology, once it’s set up, your job is to then optimize your ad campaigns for their best performance.

Once you have a marketing funnel built out, then it’s all about optimizing your ads to perform better. Using tools like Google Analytics can help you monitor your data and see how your marketing efforts are performing.

Have Feedback on Marketing Funnels for Personal Trainers?

We take our feedback seriously. Feel free to send us an email as support@fitsw.com with any feedback you might have. Or you can reach to us on Instagram and Facebook.

Packages and Subscriptions for Personal Trainers

Share:

Without further adieu, FitSW presents to you two new features: Packages and Subscriptions for personal trainers. With these two features, you can make your services more accessible for prospective and current clients. Don’t just make working out easier, make the checkout experience easy too. So, what’s with the hype you say? Feast your eyes.

Packages and Subscriptions for Personal Trainers (Screenshot)

First, Packages.

Personal Training Packages Screenshot.
Figure 1. Packages from the trainer’s view

With packages you can sell various offerings to your clients and would be clients. Discount sessions when bought in bulk, provide smaller packages to clients just getting started, or sell more involved packages for clients who are a little more serious.

Either way, this is guaranteed to create a more cohesive client experience from selling your packages to managing your client in the FitSW app.

Notice, you have the ability to activate and deactivate your packages. This is great for running temporary discounts, offering seasonal packages, or testing how different packages perform.

In addition, Packages will give you the ability to leverage sales strategies as trainer. Create custom packages based on the needs of individuals or create general pipelines for clients to follow.

From the client perspective (Figure 2), it’s a rather simple checkout experience. Enter number of packages. Pay. Workout. It’s that easy.

Packages and Subscriptions for Personal Trainers: Packages from the Clients View (Screenshot)
Figure 2. Packages from the clients view

Second, Subscriptions.

Have clients who are long term? Simplify your billing through setting them up with a subscription.

Much like packages, you can create different subscriptions for different needs from clients who are just getting started to more advanced clients.

The possibilities are endless. Want to host a group training class once a week? No Problem. Create a group training subscription, offer time slots on your schedule for people to book, and there you have it. A group training subscription. Viola!

Have feedback on Packages and Subscriptions for Personal Trainer?

We take our feedback seriously. Feel free to reach out to us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or email us at support@fitsw.com!

8 Challenges of Personal Training: A Micro-Guide

Share:

With the rise of “Fit Culture” on social media, becoming a certified Personal Trainer has never been so popular. Now, more then ever, social media influencers brandish #PersonalTrainer in their social bios as an accolade. #PersonalTrainer is now one of the most used fitness hashtags and houses more than 28 million posts. As a result, this has influenced the masses to go get their certification. But, most post people only see the “social influencer” side of the job. Many don’t see the Challenges of Personal Training. So, we have put together the top 8 challenges and solutions to those challenges.

1. Getting your Personal Training Business Started

Getting started as a fitness professional can be one of the most taxing parts about the career. The main reason is you are literally starting up your own business. Typically, this means new Personal Trainers will be going a couple weeks, if not a month with low pay. Here, are tips on how to make getting started a little easier on your self:

  • Make sure you save up some extra cash for when start your personal training business.
  • Keep your social media channels updated. Let your close friends and family know you’ve just started a position as a Personal Trainer as this might get you your first client!
  • Do as much learning as you can before you start. Specifically on topics, such as, sales for personal trainers, and business management for personal trainers.
  • Set realistic goals and expectations. Starting off, you aren’t going to be training immediately. You’ll likely be shadowing another trainer or going through training yourself.
  • Practice cold calling. This is something you might have to do as a new trainer.

2. Keeping Your Fitness Business Steady

One of the major challenges of personal training, especially after getting started, is keeping business steady. Particularly during the holiday season. But even during the regular season, it is a constant battle for personal trainers to keep business at a steady flow. Here’s a quick list to make sure you are prepared for when business is slower or how to prevent:

  • Save up some cushion for the holiday season. Christmas will be a slower time of the year for Personal Trainers. Not for every trainer but for most.
  • Run a special deal during the holidays! Whether it’s a promoting a special deal your gym is running or creating one of your own, this is a great way to get clients during the holidays.
  • Enhance your service. Every now and then reward your clients with a personal gift for their hard work. It doesn’t have to be much, a free protein shake or a small gift card will do. Don’t do it for everyone, but for those who come in with a chip on their shoulder. This creates incentive for your other clients to really put in effort and will more likely increase client referrals.

“What do you think someone is more likely to remember? A free session or a well thought out gift for all their hard work? Don’t break your bank but a $15 gift card will go a long ways.”

Chelsea Carter – @trainwithcece
  • Social media marketing. This can be huge if done right. As a personal trainer, it can be hard to create awareness of your services. Running social media ads gives you a targetted method of reaching extra people. Running a simple ad that gives a brief overview of your service and client testimonials is guaranteed to get you some extra attention.
  • Content marketing. Content marketing involves pushing out blogs and valuable, entertaining content to you followers to create awareness of your brand and services on social media channels. This is a great way to solve problems for people searching the internet for solutions. While at the same time creating awareness of you brand and the services you offer.
  • Ask clients for referrals and reward them for any referrals that turn into clients. This is another great way to enhance your service and increase awareness for the services you offer.

Leveraging these strategies can help ensure a steady flow of business and being better prepared for when business isn’t steady.

3. Avoiding Burnout

It’s not uncommon for a personal trainer to work from 5am-8pm on the weekday and training on the weekends. All while doing their programming on the fly. Combine this with the constant need to continue education and less and less personal time, it’s easy to feel the burnout come on.

This is why it’s important to arm yourself with the tools necessary for success so you don’t get burned out. Here are some good practices and tools personal trainers can use to get the most out of their time, grow their business, and make time some personal time:

  • FitSW – Fitness software for personal trainers you say? Huh. Never heard of it… but I heard it allows for you to get rid of Excel, Word, and even paper forms for completely digital workflows. Create entire fitness programs, nutrition programs, track client progress, and much more all in an app.
  • A social media scheduler tool. There are many social media schedulers that help you plan posts ahead of time. This is great because all you need to do sit down for an hour or two, schedule your social media posts out a week or two and forget about. There are many social media schedulers out there that have a free version you can use forever that will more then accommodate your needs.
  • Do things outside of the gym! Go for a hike, get some coffee, and just enjoy some time away from your place of work.

4. Keeping Clients Motivated

Keeping clients motivated is one of the most underrated challenges of personal training. You can have all sorts of knowledge about training, but if clients aren’t motivated, good luck getting those results to show for it. Here are a couple good practices you can use to keep those clients eager to hit the gym:

  • Make your workouts fun. This is why it’s so important to get to know your clients and ask for feedback after workouts. It’s also important here to create an atmosphere where your client feels comfortable enough to provide their opinion. Are they going to love every workout? No. But getting to know what they do enjoy will help you create workouts they will love.
  • Track their progress. Tracking their progress helps you create programs and lets you provide encouragement. Maybe they hit a PR and you get them their favorite protein shake. I want a free shake don’t you? It almost like keeping track of their birthday. But, different. You wouldn’t forget their birthday would you?
  • Brag about them on your social feed. Oh, yeah. This is a great one. It’s a double whammy. They get a warm feeling in their stomach when they see your post about all their progress AND people see how great of a trainer you are.
  • Show empathy. Okay, everyone knows that training really isn’t just training. You’re a business owner, a counselor, a friend, and a trainer. A lot of people open up to their trainers about their issues in life. It’s important here that you show empathy. This communicates to them that you understand them and helps make them feel less alone.

At the end of the day, your clients shouldn’t be showing up simply because they have to. Although, that is a part of it, they should be showing up excited to hit it with their favorite trainer everyday.

5. Overcoming Stereotypes

Let’s face it, there are a lot of people that don’t know the first thing about fitness but pretend they do. As a result, loads of misinformation is spread about fitness due to people pretending to know things that they don’t.

Along similar lines, most people who are not personal trainers themselves, don’t know the first thing about personal trainers either, but, nonetheless pretend they do.

And poof, that’s how stereotypes of personal trainers are born. A couple misguided people and maybe even some trainers that cheated their way through their certification and now perpetuate those stereotypes. Sigh, this is why we can’t have nice things.

Bet you coulda guessed what was coming next? Here are some common stereotypes of personal trainers and how to avoid or get past them:

“All Personal Trainers Should be Fit”

This one is probably the most common. It comes from people having these misconceptions in their head about what fit people look like or should look like. Let me just say this; physical appearance doesn’t equate knowledge or fitness level.

This one is hard to avoid all together as there will always be those people spouting this type of stuff. But it’s important to either ignore them or be as professional as possible in correcting them. If you react negatively it gives them the chance to say more negative stuff.

Honestly, if you catch someone perpetuating this stereotype, tell them to go check out the highlights from the fight where Andy Ruiz Jr. put a beat down on Anthony Joshua. If you’re not familiar, here’s the jist. Anthony Joshua was the raining champ. He looks like he came down from Mt. Olympus.

Anthony was only knocked down once in his career and that knock down came from Wladimir Klitschko, who is a force of nature in the boxing world. Despite the knock down, Anthony Joshua emerged victorious.

When news broke of a hungry Andy Ruiz wanting to fight Anthony Joshua, people scoffed at Andy. Largely because he looked out of shape. But, boy, did they have it comin for ’em. In short, Andy put a beat down on Anthony. In fact, his performance told a very different story. Overall, he had more gas in the tank and outlasted Anthony Joshua until he was able to knock him down the final time.

“Anyone can be a Personal Trainer”

This one is easy. Just tell them 90% of first year trainers quit in their first/second year and switch careers. The main reason? Most of them couldn’t figure out how to build their business. They underestimated the amount of work and knowledge required to get a personal training business off the ground and profitable.

Sure you can go to the gym and get strong or really fit. But there is a massive difference in running a personal training business and working out. One is a hobby and the other is a full time job and then some.

“All Trainers Should be Young”

Some of the most inspirational fitness trainers of all time are over the age of 50. In fact, statistically speaking, the longer you are in the industry as a personal trainer, the more knowledgeable you become.

The National Federation of Personal Trainers reports 40% of their certified trainers are between 40 and 62 years old. Now there’s no doubt, especially with modern trends in youth, that the average trainer is becoming younger. However, that doesn’t discredit older generations from not only becoming a trainer but becoming a leader.

You ever heard of Chet Yorton? How about Robbie Robinson? Please, feast your eyes.

6. Difficult Clients

You will always have clients that complain. Whether it’s they are new to the gym or just not about the workout you’ve given them, you are bound to hear some interesting excuses from clients.

However, there are methods you can use to keep the complaining at a minimum or to address complaining on the spot as it’s happening. Here are a couple of our favorites:

  1. Set clear expectations with the clients. Sometimes complaining can be a result of not having expectations set. Before you dive into training them make sure they know what to expect and that they know your expectations of them. If they are new to fitness, you can even outright say some workouts are gonna hurt more then others and during those times, you aren’t setting out to hurt them. You are setting out to show them where they can push themselves. You wouldn’t give them a difficult workout if you didn’t believe in them.
  2. Use positive re-reinforcement. If you have already set expectation and you have a client that seems to complain more them others, try to really provide positive support. Sometimes all they need are some kind words.
  3. Make sure they aren’t actually hurt. Sometimes it’s hard to tell. But when someone complains of an ache or pain, make sure you help them recover from it.
  4. Tough love. Some people complain just for the sake of complaining. If you’ve identified a serial-complainer, sometimes it helps to tell them to suck it up or even to ignore it all together.
  5. Learn how to say “No”. Sometimes, certain personality types just don’t mesh. In this case it’s important to know the difference between actually figuring out how to make something work and forcing it. If you’ve tried everything to improve things and they just. aren’t. improving. Then it’s time to recommend that client elsewhere. It has nothing to do with your training and everything to do with the complexities of human nature.

In short, complaining can sometimes mean that you don’t have a sufficient line of communication set up with the client. Making sure your client is comfortable with communicating with you can also mean they trust you. Naturally, people don’t open up to things they don’t trust.

7. Legal Protection

One of the challenges of personal training that also often goes unsaid is protecting yourself legally. This really applies to the independent trainer that isn’t operating under the wing of a gym. Most gyms have insurance for accidents and liability waivers that help protect trainers from “general negligence”.

However, as an independent trainer, it might be a good idea to consider the following:

  1. Professional Liability Insurance. This typically protects you from “professional negligence”. This includes injuries sustained during exercise you assigned or an illness from a meal plan you prescribed.
  2. General Liability Insurance. If you train clients in your own personal studio or in an atmosphere you have personal control over, then it’d be a good idea to get General Liability Insurance. This type of insurance protects you from injuries or illness sustained from the condition of the premises, i.e. slipping on a wet floor, a machine malfunction, or any other situation similar to these.
  3. Liability Waivers. This form basically states that the client understands the risks of training and if signed, the client waves any liability from you for injuries sustained during the process of training. There are exceptions, such as, cases of extreme negligence and lack of consideration for the well being of another human.
  4. Document everything. Documentation complete with dates, times, and client progress. Aside from helping you more accurately create programs for clients, this also helps establish your professional demeanor. In the case anything was ever called into question, you’d have consistent documentation to back up anything you say.

8. Behavioral Change

Behavioral change is one of the more complex challenges of personal training. The reasoning is because it is a dynamic effort on the side of the trainer. A lot of your clients might have hard habits to break that are overall, negative. These habits often span a variety of areas such as psychology, diet, fitness, and many others.

Frequently, many of the challenges of personal training extend to the client as well. It’s two sided. However, most of the pressure lies on the shoulders of the trainer to communicate. Trainers are often facilitators of change. Just with an emphasis in fitness.

Here are some tips on establishing a good base for sustainable behavioral change:

Acknowledge Relapses

Whether it be smoking cigarettes, eating poorly, or relapsing into a negative mindset, relapses are going to happen.

As a trainer, you can help your clients avoid these things through:

  • Helping them find where their triggers are that lead to a relapse.
  • Developing a coping strategy.
  • Helping them find their way back on track when they stray off course.

Through this process, it’s imperative you acknowledge relapses and hold them accountable, but also, use positive language. Whether it be words of support or relating to them in some way that helps them feel a sense of belonging.

Use the Stages of Change Model

This model employs the idea that using a gradual approach to a larger goal is more effective then setting one massive goal without a plan to get there.

Stage 1: Precontemplation

In this stage, people don’t have an active intention of taking action driven towards change. They might not even know their actions aren’t sustainable. Most frequently, people in this stage don’t understand two things: the benefits of change and the consequence of not changing.

Stage 2: Contemplation

Here people will recognize their actions aren’t sustainable. They might even start to develop intention to change, but at this point no actual action has taken place. They will have more likely weighted the positives and negatives, but are still hesitant to actually take action.

Stage 3: Preparation

In this stage, they have bought into change and are actively looking at how they can change. They will more likely take a solid action towards making the necessary changes in the next 30 days.

Stage 4: Action

An individual in the stage has taken action to change their unhealthy behavior. They also intend to push forward with the change they have made.

Stage 5: Maintenance

In this stage, people have sustained the change they have made for a good bit of time (defined as 6 months or more). People in this stage make a proactive effort to prevent relapses and recognize a relapse in its early stages.

Stage 6: Termination

This stage is rare. People in this stage have completely eliminated their unhealthy habits and have no plans of going back. Since this stage it rare, most people will reach the maintenance stage and relapse into an unhealthy habit temporarily.

Having a good understanding of how to use the stages of change can help you identify where your client is at in their progression towards a healthier life. Subsequently, you can make adjustments to your training program and communication to the client.

Use Smart Goals

Smart goals are defined as:

  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Attainable
  • Relevant
  • Time-bound

Every goal set by you or your client should meet the definition of a SMART goal. As clients progress and get more advanced, then you can start setting more ambitious goals to reach for.

Summing up the Challenges of Personal Training

This article outlines several challenges of personal training, but that doesn’t discount others that might go unspoken. When assessing the various challenges of personal training there’s one thing that becomes clear. That’s that personal trainers are just simply “gym coaches”. Personal trainers often times occupy many many roles in the day to day lives of their clients.

Understanding the challenges of personal training helps you understand the multi-faceted nature of the occupation and that mastery of personal training comes in the form of mastering many different fields of knowledge. The most successful trainers will take a dynamic, agile approach to each client as each client will be vastly different case by case.

FitSW Wants Your Feedback on 8 Challenges of Personal Training: A Micro-Guide

We highly value our community and take your feedback seriously. So, if you have any feedback or comments on this article or anything else, reach out to us! You can do this by connecting with us on our Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or support page! Additionally, you can leave a comment on this blog article or on any other article on our blog! After that, we typically reply within a day or so!

10 Tips for Online Personal Trainers on Fitness Website Design

Share:

If you’ve got an online personal training business, your website will likely play a major role in your fitness marketing strategy. Unlike marketing a face-to-face training business, you’ll rely more heavily on how visitors think and feel on your site when it comes to getting leads. In this article, we’ll go over the top 10 fitness website design tips for online personal trainers to help you get more traffic and leads.

1. Tell Website Visitors They’re in the Right Place

The first question a website visitor will have when they land on your home page is whether or not they’re in the right place.

The easiest way to ensure them that they are in the right place is with a keyword specific headline positioned high up on the home page. Can you guess the keyword in the example below?

Mellisa Nicole Fitness - Online Personal Trainers Website Example

Use this space to describe exactly what you do and who you do it for. This will help the website visitor take their next steps on your site and it improves search engine rankings.

2. Don’t Make Offers Too Early

It’s tempting to have your free trial or eBook positioned front and center on the home page. After all, that’s the spot that gets the most website visits, right?

True, but gone are the days when people haphazardly gave up their email in exchange for an eBook, especially on the home page.

Instead, consider inviting the website visitor to take their next logical step. Why are they on the site? What are they looking for? Probably to learn about your services and pricing. So that’s what you offer them.

FitPound Personal Training - Online Personal Trainers Landing Page Example

Save your eBooks for the blog pages where your website visitors are there to learn.

3. Answer Your Visitors’ Questions

As a follow on from the previous tip, each page of your fitness website should answer the questions a website visitor has.

For example, the Home page is designed to introduce the sub pages of the site, so sections that introduce each sub page will enable the visitor to easily navigate your site and find what they’re looking for.

PersonalBest - Online Personal Trainers About Page Example

The About page should outline what you can do for your clients and introduce you and the members of your team.

Service pages are for prices and how the service works.

4. Online Personal Trainers Need to Stop Trying to be Special

One of the first things a personal trainer ask their fitness website designer for is something “unique” and “special”.

While your branding and message absolutely should be unique to your business, your design should not.

There’s something called Design Convention which is extremely important to the way someone uses your website.

Design convention is what a website visitor expects to see. For example, they expect a navigation to appear at the top of the site and they expect the footer to be at the bottom.

This is why most sites, no matter the industry, tend to look pretty similar on the face of it. Going against design convention would be like reading a book with the pages i the wrong order.

However, if you’d like to experiment with design without breaking conventional design protocol feel free, just make sure it doesn’t disrupt your messaging.

5. Use Images of People

Faces make a huge difference when it comes to connecting a website visitor with your company. That doesn’t mean the face has to be you. It just needs to be a face.

Using images of real people expressing authentic emotions appeal to our primal nature. Smiles make us feel at ease. Seeing a sad person make us feel empathy. Try your best not to use stock photos. If you have to, its worth paying for them.

Fit With Sally - Online Personal Trainers Home Page Example

A good website design makes use of this basic primal conditioning, not to manipulate a visitor, but to help them feel the way you want them to feel about your business.

6. Fix Your Navigation

Navigation is among the first things a website visitor sees. Good navigation describes exactly what they’ll find on the page without overwhelming them with too many options.

One of the biggest mistakes online personal trainers make when designing sites is to overload the website visitor with pages and pages of information.

Instead, take a step back and think about what a website visitor really need to become a lead. Is the About page absolutely essential to them making that decision? If not, link to it from the footer and save space in the main navigation menu.

7. Hold Back With Social Media

For online personal trainers, more fans and followers is perfectly respectable goal and you should try to obtain those things for your social media platform, but you don’t need to make a big deal of it on site and here’s why:

The goal of your website is to turn website visitors into leads, not send them away to another platform where they get distracted and don’t take any action with you.

Have a social media presence on site to show trust and authenticity for those who want to explore, but keep it discreet and in places where the visitor might expect to see it like the footer.

8. Use Descriptive Headlines

Website readers won’t typically read your web pages word for word. When was the last time you did that? Humans think they’re busy and they’re always in a rush, so they skip through the main headlines until they find what they’re looking for.

With that in mind, your page headers should describe exactly what the content underneath it is going to say.

Raising The Bar Fitness - descriptive headline example

For example, instead of “What We Do” use “Online Personal Training Services”.

9. Avoid Long Paragraphs

Nothing is more frustrating than landing on a website looking for information only to be met with a wall of text. It’s hard to find what you’re looking for and the task of finding the information seems never ending.

Notice how in this article each paragraph is broken down into smaller sections with spacing between each main point?

That break in the paragraph reduces cognitive load and gives the visitor small feelings of accomplishment after each paragraph. This encourages easy reading.

Where possible, use bullet points to explain points in a simpler and more concise way.

10. Online Personal Trainers Need to Display Competence

On the list of what’s important to a website visitor when choosing towers with you, competence is at the top of that list. As far as online personal training is concerned, display competence is imperative. This is where visitors will form the initial opinions.

Showing that you can do what you say you can do is absolutely paramount and you can show this with testimonials and before/after images.

The Body Transformation Academy - Testimonial example.

Competence is so important that if you can show it on every page, do. Use snippets of testimonials with head-shots, before/after galleries and client statistics to show potential clients that when they work with you, they’re in with a good chance of achieving the same thing.

FitSW Wants Your Feedback On 10 Tips for Personal Trainers on Fitness Website Design!

We highly value our community and take your feedback seriously. So, if you have any feedback or comments on this article, update, or anything else, reach out to us! You can do this by connecting with us on our Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or support page! Additionally, you can leave a comment on this blog article or on any other article on our blog! After that, we typically reply within a day or so!

FitSW Android App For Fitness Trainers – New Features

Share:

We are excited to announce that we have a big update for our Android app for fitness trainers! This update contains the ability to view exercise progress graphs and tables directly in the app! Better yet, this is available on both iOS and web as well. Thus, you can view your personal training client’s progress on any device! Additionally, you can still view your client’s assessment progress as well.

Secondly, this new update has another big feature! We have added the ability to delete supersets, instead of having to recreate the workout!

This new Android release also has multiple other usability improvements. If you are unfamiliar with what usability improvements are, let me clarify. Usability improvements mean that we have made the app have better flow functionality and a more polished feel! We’ve added usability improvements to our PAR-Q feature, as well as multiple other places throughout the app.

Exercise Progress Graphs & Tables

FitSW Android App For Fitness Trainers - Exercise Progress Tracking Graphs

For each exercise, you can see how your clients performed during their assigned workouts. You can view this information in both graph and table format, whichever you prefer.

If you’re in graph format, you can see the Actual Reps that were assigned in orange, and the Actual reps that were completed in blue. This way you can see if your clients are underperforming or overperforming, you can adjust their workouts accordingly!

Ungrouping Supersets

You can now ungroup supersets directly in our Android app! This means if you accidentally add a wrong exercise to a superset, or want to add another, it’s much simpler and faster than before!

FitSW Wants Your Feedback On Updates To Our Android App For Fitness Trainers!

We highly value our community and take your feedback seriously. So, if you have any feedback or comments on this article, update, or anything else, reach out to us! You can do this by connecting with us on our Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or support page! Additionally, you can leave a comment on this blog article or on any other article on our blog! After that, we typically reply within a day or so!

Sign Up For Our Newsletter!

Get updates on the latest features, exclusive offers & discounts, countless tips for trainers, and more!