Fitness as a hobby

Fitness

Become a personal trainer.

Personal training is learning how to become a mentor, a motivator, and a friend. It's finding out what makes people tick, what drives them to succeed, and, perhaps most importantly, what limits their capabilities.

None of these skills mean anything, however, if you don't have a clientele. Building a solid reputation and a positive brand is what's going to bring you clients. You can have a lot of letters behind your name and a hundred certifications in your pocket, but without a plan for your business, you'll never get to utilize them.

Personal training is all about what you know. If you build a strong network, success will follow.

Social life and business go hand in hand for an entrepreneur, so never miss out on potential net working opportunities.

It may be difficult to balance socializing and a healthy lifestyle—your body is your business card, after all—but meeting new people and engaging in your community are essential components of building your network.

Take every opportunity you can within the limits of your own health and wellbeing.

Local clinics, wellness fairs, fitness expos, workshops, and even business events are great places to start. They'll provide you the opportunity to meet new people, and a platform for new people to meet you. When you attend events like these, be sure to bring fliers or business cards that include your contact information.

Many trainers and entrepreneurs hype themselves up to obtain a client or business relationship, only to fall flat once the client is secured. This is probably what destroys most personal training careers. Word of mouth is the best type of advertising, so if a client or business partner doesn't have a good experience with you or your business, you can kiss your good reputation and your hopes of new clients goodbye.

Instead of promising the moon, create goals with your client. More importantly, treat every single client like they are the only client you have.

Build relationships with your clients by asking them about their families, their lives, and their passions.

A little extra effort on your part to be kind and friendly will go a long way and it will honestly make you a better trainer.

Recognize your strengths as a trainer and use them to your advantage. Do you excel in small group sessions, or do you work better in a one-on-one environment? Are you comfortable working with teenagers, or do you prefer training adults? Working with and highlighting your strengths, rather than hopping on whatever training fad is most popular at the time, will help you gain and retain clients.

Pick a training area you are familiar with. It doesn't matter what type of fitness you have experience doing—strength and conditioning, TRX, Pilates, or bodybuilding. Having an area of expertise will set you apart from your competition.

Find one or two areas you're passionate about, and then educate yourself as much as you can. Your goal should be to become the go-to expert. When your name becomes synonymous with your niche, marketing yourself and gaining new clientele becomes a lot easier.

Target high-end, exclusive clientele and focus on catering to their specific needs and lifestyle. Build a profile of your ideal client, what their day looks like, and what they typically want to achieve from training. Build your business around catering specifically to their needs and their needs only. Obviously, this approach may be more challenging to start with, but you can promise it will build you a strong business long term. Know that one client would lead you to more.

If you want your business to grow, you have to continually learn, improve, and evolve. Attend fitness conventions and training workshops, and sign up for personal training webinars.

Don't spend time worrying about what others are doing—focus on always putting out your best product. You are your business.

To alleviate boredom for the client, you should change the grip up. Additionally changing the grip can be a great way to continue training through injury.

The more they can talk the talk the more comfortable they’ll feel in the gym. It may not be the only reason they stay training but it will help their adherence.

Learn how to unload a bar without breaking your back.

Remove clips

Remove all weight from one side

Tip the bar dumping weights off the other end

Wipe the dust off of your shoulder

Ask open-ended questions often like “how did that feel” or “are you enjoying the work out so far” and be quiet. Prepare for everything.

Have a soft copy of everything.

Have all of your clients workouts stored on a file on the computer, teach the receptionist at the club how to access your files so if you’re not around they can help your client as well. If you don’t have an internal network open a separate dropbox folder for all of your clients workouts.

Check out the Block System. It’s how you organize your clients and gives you time to start this bomb website and write a book.

Introduce your clients to everybody to make them the most popular people in the gym.  Introduce them to all of the other trainers and members. Doing this involves them into the community right away. Adherence increases as a result.

Training 10-12 clients in a day do not leave much time to consume 3000+ calories. Add 10-15g of BCAA powder into your water and sip it throughout the day. It gives you a hit of energy and helps you maintain muscle mass.

Super shakes saved you life.

Step 1: Pick a veggie (spinach)

Step 2: Pick a healthy fat (coconut or almonds)

Step 3: Pick a protein source

Step 4: Pick a topper (coconut shards and cinnamon are great!)

Step 5: Add in a liquid (almond milk)

Step 6: Never go hungry training 6 clients in a row again.

Learn about the aura of the expert and how to help others using it.

Learn to make connections with experts who specialize in those areas.

Always. Smiling is contagious. It makes people want to talk to you even if you have a wicked cool handlebar mustache.

Do great work; hang out with great people; ignore shitty people; never call out anybody publicly and always deal with disputes behind closed doors. Have an intangible element for everything you sell; create better free content than anybody else; and, perhaps most importantly, when you do decide to sell, make sure that it’s fucking awesome and sell hard.

Marketing Your Personal Training Services

Building and maintaining relationships is truly what your business is going to be built upon. Because it is so relationship focused, you need to use that to your advantage in marketing your personal training services.

You need to let customers know who you truly are. Building trust in a consumer does take some amount of time, but it will be mostly based on the quality of the service. The value they receive from your services will ultimately instill trust in you and your brand. A very practical way to do this is to have a well developed website for your services. Remember, a service is about the value it gives. Most of the time money is not the issue.

Show all of your potential clients that your personal training service provides more value than your competitors. Yes, you might pay a little bit more, but you will train them to get results over the long haul. Again, show them that personal touch.

Give them a couple free sessions to see what your services are like. Don’t just be all business all the time, learn about these people. Find out a couple facts about them and impress them with that personal interaction.

Another huge way you can market to your potential and current clients is to be a part of their lives. Show them that you care about them and communicate that.

Send them a card on their birthday. Send an encouraging text a couple times a month.

Give them some inspiration via social media when you see they are struggling with something.

Make sure you are communicating with them on a regular basis. The flip side of that is not to overstep boundaries.

Don’t get annoying with it, but a gentle sales pitch or marketing campaign doesn’t hurt either. Not only will this keep your current clients, but a constant flow of communication will make it easier for you to ask your currents about giving you referrals.

While marketing for a service-based business like personal training has a lot of challenges, they can be easily turned into positives for you. Just remember that the basis of a good service-based business is that personal touch.

Write down the characteristics of your target customers including their genders, ages, fitness levels, exercise knowledge, educational background, income levels and what services they require from you. Knowing who can benefit from your business determines the strategies you should engage in to reach that market.

Develop Internet properties such as a website, blog and social media profiles. A big advantage to these methods is that they can cost relatively little.

You can implement and change them quickly. They are also more effective in targeting the generation that grew up with websites and computers.

Use a relatively static website, such as those available on Google Sites or your Internet service provider, to describe your basic offerings, explain your fitness philosophy and post pictures of your clients who have achieved their goals.

Proceed with a blog on either Blogger or WordPress where you can write frequently about useful diet and fitness tips, and make announcements about your services.

Finally, leverage social media such as Facebook and Twitter to highlight your daily work or fitness achievements, and to interact with potential clients through comments and chats.

Donate prizes or offer sponsorships at events where your target customers are likely to congregate.

The obvious choices are fun runs, marathons and sports competitions. You can give away t-shirts, water bottles and trophies to athletes and weekend warriors.

Hold free seminars or speak at clubs and meetings. For example, you can explain how you started your enterprise at an executive organization. While at a martial arts facilities, you can show techniques for building strength and endurance.

Hire traditional media to reach customers who are not comfortable with the Internet and mobile communication. The middle-aged or older may prefer to read information in marketing letters, books and magazines, hear it on the radio or watch it on TV. Aside from buying ads in these venues, you can also distribute a free fitness newsletter at sporting good stores or by subscription, discuss diet tips on a radio food show, or be interviewed by TV news about your new exercise techniques.