With gyms reopening the question has come up as to how safe gyms are. When looking at the health and safety measures in place for gyms, it can easily be argued that they are a lot more safe than grocery and retail stores at this time.
What you need to teach your clients before, during and after assessments
The fitness assessment is a tough art. Most times, you have an hour to build rapport and history, measure, plan and sell to your potential client, who may or may not know what to expect from the process. Hopefully, if you have time, you also try to educate the assessee so they have a better understanding of the measurements, plan and ultimately, value of your services. Even if you don’t sell them the first time, if you leave them with some knowledge that proves true as they start out on their own you have built trust for them to come back when they realize they need your help.
Summer Struggles of a Personal Trainer
The summer is here, which is usually a means for excitement, however it’s also the toughest time of the year for the fitness industry. It was always difficult for me as a trainer and manager to hit even modest goals in these lean months. But difficult times were also a good time to experiment to try to mitigate these realities; from varying training packages, to group programs and different marketing initiatives, with varying degrees of success.
Part 3: The Most Effective Ways to Spend Your Downtime as a Personal Trainer
Workout? Write fitness programs? Work toward your latest CEC? Or is it more like: Nap? Shop? Facebook? There are many ways to spend the downtime in between clients, and depending on how you manage your business as a trainer overall, there may be more of it than you would like. Similarly to how you encourage your clients to take a long term perspective instead of a short sighted approach with their fitness goals; our aim at Trainer+ is to encourage you to adopt new solutions that allow you to take a more effective and long term approach on how you manage your business.
Part 2B: The Long Term Approach to Assessments
The key to the approach I use is changing the sales mentality that is often preached of aggressively closing, into one of aggressively caring. The service you are trying to sell is one of support after all, so how better to build your value continuously than setting that relationship up even before they purchase? The best way to demonstrate that care is to take your time to work through the key steps of the assessment and planning process, and make sure there is a follow up system in place that has been communicated to the potential client. I know this is unbilled time for the most part, but it just has to be looked at as your investment in securing a future sale, or at least retaining a gym member (who could lead to or refer a future sale).
Part 2A: Why the Current Way of Assessing Clients is All Wrong
Welcome back to our 4-part series about how fitness professionals can save time and make more money by taking a long term approach to managing and executing your business. In the first part of the series we talked about the language of your relationship with your clients: their fitness programs. In this part we will focus on the mechanism that sets out the expectations and measures progress of that relationship: the assessment.
Part 1: Why You Should Be Taking Time to Write Fitness Programs
Trainers are always too busy for their own good. In fact, even given a tool to help trainers save time, I have found that most of our first users are too busy to adopt a tool to get less busy. At least, that seems to be how they feel given the realities of being a personal trainer: selling time in one hour blocks and not getting paid for all of the unbilled time managing your business before, after and in between clients. But the reality is that it is this unpaid time that crowds the schedule with trainers balancing the common activities to manage your business, with maintaining your own fitness and ongoing education.
Surprising Moments of Joy
Making your own hours, doing tasks your way, making key decisions and ultimately being your own boss are all aspects of the entrepreneur lifestyle I think most people fantasize about. While these aspects are glorified, there is also the reality of risk and sacrifice that comes with removing the safety net of a job.
The Evolution of Fitness
In doing some research recently for another blog post, I was struck at how, in many ways, fitness has evolved on a cultural level over the ages in an eerily similar fashion to how the fitness life cycle happens for the average modern North American. As any fitness professional will tell you, especially those that do lots of assessments, there are some predictable factors that influence an individual’s ability to build and maintain their fitness level as they age. As man has evolved, there have been similar macro-factors affecting society’s ability to include and prioritize fitness as a part of the culture.
Confessions of a Terrible Blogger
So, apparently I suck with social media and blogging. I’d like to be able to tell you there is a great reason for being out of touch. That I was too swamped coding the app or chasing the people and funding we need for success to write blog posts or share memes via Twitter and Facebook. The reality is that I was embarrassed that we did not have any positive updates to share with you about our progress on the app, a weak excuse at best. Of course, I compounded my own problem by frequently talking about how close we were to getting it out in the past and not managing your (and my own) expectations correctly.
