This approach wins clients' long-term trust
As a personal trainer, your skill is achieving impressive results with your clients and maintaining long-lasting relationships with them. Client retention is a key aspect of a successful career in this field. To achieve this, you must offer more than just physical training. Here are a few key steps to ensure the status of "no one like my trainer": Listen and understand the needs of clients.
The first step
First step towards retaining clients is deeply understanding their goals, needs, and limitations. Each individual is unique, so it’s important to tailor your program and approach to each client. Active listening and empathy are key in this process. Ask questions, provide support, and show interest in their individual goals. For example, “I want to lose weight” is a goal, but the true GOAL is:
1. I want to get ready for summer
2. I want to be more attractive to that person
3. I want to have more self-confidence
4. I want to reduce the risk of heart attack
Even though all these reasons are related to “I want to lose weight,” in reality, people often have one key and only motive among these reasons. Knowing exactly what that deeper meaning is, you come closer to the right path and ways to motivate the client to stick to both the training and diet, to expand the range of goals, and make the whole process more enjoyable.
Create personalized training plans
One of the main reasons people hire personal trainers is to get a fully customized exercise approach. Your ability to create a training plan tailored to the needs and goals of each client will set you apart. This includes properly dosing exercises, carefully selected training methods, and considering individual needs for recovery and nutrition, as well as the client’s character. Some are ready to “attack” their goal with full dedication. In contrast, others need a much more gradual approach: personalization in planning and programming of training necessarily reflects in the psychological approach to clients.
Set realistic expectations
Unrealistic expectations can lead to disappointment and frustration in clients. Help them set realistic expectations regarding their goals and the time needed to achieve them. A clear and realistic plan will increase the likelihood of success, and satisfied clients are more likely to stay. Often, the best approach is to set smaller, more achievable goals so that with steps of success in the medium and long term, clients can actually exceed their expectations with training results.
Continuous communication and monitoring
Maintaining regular communication with clients is essential. Besides tracking their progress, this will show your care and commitment to their goals. Regular meetings to assess and monitor progress can help you revise the training plan together and set new goals. Also, you will know when and how to adjust the training to a new situation in the client’s professional and/or personal life, allowing them to continue making training a part of their life regardless of how other circumstances have changed.
Educate about health and exercise
Clients appreciate trainers who regularly invest in their knowledge and skills and educate them about a healthy lifestyle and exercise. Educating clients about proper nutrition, fitness, the importance of recovery, and maintaining long-term motivation can empower them to make better decisions regarding their health and exercise. More educated, aware clients more easily and quickly accept fitness and exercise as part of their lifestyle.
Motivate and encourage
Many clients struggle with motivation; your role is to encourage and motivate them. Praise their successes, whether small or large, and support them when they face challenges. Offer them additional motivation and inspiration to stay focused on their goals. If they face a crisis, choose to make the training fun rather than effective; let them feel comfortable during the training and do their favorite exercises in combination with those necessary for further results development. Change the schedule of easier and harder training sessions, include some sports-recreational activity as training, exercise outdoors, and add a drink before and/or after training. This way, the client will overcome the crisis and always feel more possibilities to implement exercise in their life. Continuity will allow the time for results not to be delayed or not much delayed – and you have a client long-term.
Simply put, clients need to see your CARE FOR THEM and their overall health and healthy living. It’s not easy to combine the roles of a trainer, animator, psychologist, recreator, life coach, kinesiotherapist, general and nutritionist: the trainer’s job is the main one, and all other roles a bit and as needed, depending on what best suits your client. Therefore, it is necessary to focus on each client individually and ensure adequate organization of work and the right tools for business realization.
We’ve been through this, of course, as have many before and after us, and by listening to many trainers around us, we realized that supreme organization saves both the trainer’s head and body.
The MyFitWorld platform is one of the tools that will help you with this. When clients see their detailed plans and know exactly what they are doing, how much they have progressed, what to expect, and have comments with exercises and training, which are important for their motivation and attention, can leave their opinions and actively participate in the process, be assured that such cooperation will last a long time. This means that you are with them even when you are not physically in the same place as they are – and that’s called real support and service for them and security and scalability in business for you.
MyFitWorld represents the digitalization of the trainer’s business for better and easier work with clients live, online, and combined. During the use of our platform, you will see how much it means when the trainer’s job can flow without trouble, and you can go on vacation and weekends, be sick, charge without additional efforts to organize delayed, canceled, missed training, business trip, client’s annual leave. This means you can scale your business 2-3-5 times and have a long-term career without stress.
We assure all our users of our quality by ALWAYS REGISTERING THE FIRST 2 CLIENTS FOR FREE. This shows our confidence that after you try MyFitWorld, you will soon add all your clients and take your training business to a higher level.
MyFitWorld – Get started today for a better tomorrow.
MyFitWorld Team
3 Strategies to Effectively Manage a Large Client Base in Personal Training Without Compromising Quality Service
