Running your own personal training business is a hefty undertaking. It takes a lot of time and effort to grow your operation into something sustainable and profitable. Too often, however, the business side of things takes your focus away from where you really need it to be: on your clients. In a market saturated with competition and the resurgence of fitness technology, every ounce of energy that doesn’t go toward building and nurturing those client relationships is a waste of time and money.
To ensure they’re maximizing the time and attention they can allocate to their clients, many fitness coaches are taking advantage of modern technology and software. Let’s take a look at how the latest industry fitness tech can help you run your personal training business more efficiently and improve fitness for your clients.
Scheduling clients for sessions and taking and tracking their payments manually is painfully time-consuming. It also leaves a lot of room for human error. Fortunately, these days there are many apps that allow you to automate and organise bookings, billing, and payments in a single system. When your clients can book their own sessions and make payments online, your calendar and finances will be much easier to manage. It also makes the process more convenient and accessible to your clients so they can reach their fitness goals.
To provide the best training for your clients, you need to be on top of their fitness journeys. This is the only way you can be sure they’re on track to achieve their goals — and clients hitting goals is crucial to your retention rate. Tracking client progress enables you to tweak their workouts or change your approach as needed, provide support, and keep them accountable.
With modern online fitness programs, you can track and organise client data such as logged workouts, reports from fitness wearables, assessment results, and even progress photos, all in one place.
To further enhance client engagement, you might consider learning how to make a fitness app, which can offer customized workouts and real-time progress tracking directly on their smartphones.
Compared to paper records or even messy spreadsheets, these platforms can deliver this important information to you and your clients much more quickly and easily for optimized training.
Personal training clients are seeking fitness experiences tailored specifically to their needs and goals (hence the name “personal training”). When you have a full client load, creating custom workouts for everyone requires a lot of time and energy. A much more efficient solution is to use a workout builder that has templates and/or an exercise database off of which you can work. You can quickly create a program, edit for specific clients, and send it to them directly online. This type of software allows you to spend more time working with clients and building relationships, making for an even more personal and valuable customer experience. Top tip: My PT Hub provides hundreds of free, editable templates – designed by personal trainers – to make building your workouts even easier!
When COVID-19 forced gyms into lockdowns, much of the fitness community turned to the virtual world for workout solutions. Although clubs have now reopened, many of which now powered by innovative touchless tech like a gym key fob system, still 87% of people plan on continuing with at-home workouts in addition to returning to their gyms. Personal trainers can use this trend to their advantage by offering online services along with in-person training.
Clients aren’t the only ones who will benefit from virtual personal training either; you will be able to reach a wider audience, unrestricted by location, and take on more clients since virtual training isn’t as time-consuming as traditional sessions. Features like live streaming, video chat, and video recording for on-demand content will prove invaluable.
Consistent engagement with you keeps your clients accountable and motivated. This is how you foster connections that translate to retention, referrals, and, ultimately, revenue. Unfortunately, manually reaching out to everyone isn’t always feasible. But there is a lot of innovative software available now that enables you to communicate with clients more easily on a regular basis.
Email and SMS marketing technology allows you to automate emails and texts, and there are apps that can set up a direct instant chat between you and each client or a group of clients. You’ll be able to more easily check in with, support, and track your clients throughout their fitness journeys.
With My PT Hub’s easy-to-use mobile and web app, you’ll have a platform through which you can organize admin, create training programs, connect with clients, and grow your fitness business. Sign up for your 30-day free trial today to see how our technology can help you unlock your full potential!