This simple course can help to transform your business while also providing you with many additional benefits. Some of these benefits will be mental, while some will be purely business related. If you got into personal training to help people, or to make money (or both) there will be enough reasons for you to sign up after reading this.
It’s not rocket science, if you suddenly have access to a large client base that is exclusive to a small amount of personal trainers with your qualification you will be able to benefit from more clients. Your weeks will be fuller, your bank will grow, and you’ll be able to invest more money on marketing, to continue to grow your business.
>>LEARN MORE: GP Referral to Gym, a complete guide
One of the biggest issues for personal trainers can come after you’ve been training people for a few years. One day you look at your training programs and realize that they are all almost identical. You’ve realized that while everyone is an individual with specific needs, a lot of your clients have the same goals (fat loss), the same capabilities, and the same motivation.
You’ll have your own idea about what training program is best for fat loss, or best for building muscle, and while you’ll make small changes to suit the unique characteristics of the client, you’ll still have a lot of the same exercises, similar reps and sets, and similar rest periods.
Then all of a sudden you have a client who has been referred to you by a doctor because they are clinically obese. You can’t teach them to barbell squat because they have no ankle flexibility, and they suffer from unspecified back pain. Suddenly you’re using all of your knowledge to create a program that will help them. You’ll feel reinvigorated, and you’ll realize that this is exactly why you started training in the first place.
After getting a few exercise referral clients, you’ll also appreciate your previous clients more. They are able to do more exercises and will progress quickly. You’ll probably also notice that you were probably being a bit easy on them, and will adjust your programs to match their actual abilities. Soon their results will skyrocket.
Due to this broader range of clients, you’ll become better at programming, you’ll also become better at progressing and regressing exercises. You’ll know how to get a client who can’t squat, to perform bodyweight box squats, then weighted box squats, then bodyweight squats, goblet squats, and finally barbell squats.
You’ll understand the benefits of unilateral exercises and machine weights for people with poor coordination and flexibility. You’ll lose some preconceived ideas about what makes a good exercise and what makes a bad one. You’ll become more patient, and will become better at deciding when someone is ready to progress.
Your ability to bond with clients (probably the most important aspect of building a business) will also be massively improved. Trainers tend to subconsciously stick to clients who are very similar. For example, a young female trainer may stick to mostly female clients, or a male trainer might concentrate on young men with bodybuilding aspirations.
But suddenly you’re training a 70-year-old man, followed by an obese 20-year-old woman. Your conversations will adapt to both, you’ll become more at ease with your clients, and you’ll also get to hear vastly different stories and experiences as you learn more about these new clients.
Hopefully, you should have your own website by now, and you should have a testimonials section. You should also have some social media channels. While it’s not a good idea to saturate your site and social media with testimonials (it can come off as a little conceited) you really shouldn’t underestimate how effective these can be.
Now your current clients should be able to give you some glowing testimonials about how you’ve helped them drop a dress size, or bench press their body weight, and you’ve probably got some good photos too. But imagine how much more effective a testimonial will be if you’ve helped clients to reverse their Type II Diabetes, or helped a 70-year-old man to perform a full-depth squat.
Imagine the emotional response you will get when you have testimonial after testimonial from people saying that you have changed their lives. Testimonials like this can be made into videos, you can do podcasts with them, and you can write blog posts about it (or get them to write them for you). It will build you up as an expert, and make you seem more approachable to the people who might be scared to come into a gym in the first place.
Hopefully after reading all of these benefits you can already see how effective an exercise referral qualification can be for your career. All that is left now is to sign up for our three-day GP Referral course.