100 Rules of a Successful Personal Trainer

December 2, 2017
Photo by Maria Fernanda Gonzalez on Unsplash

 

Being a personal trainer is more than just transforming your client’s health. You become a friend, teacher, cheerleader, but most importantly you become a business owner. In health and fitness, while there always remains some basic truths that stay the same, there are always new techniques and strategies that are developed to improve how you train. The same applies to running your business as a Personal Trainer.

After working in this industry for over 15 years I have developed these rules that will help you become a more successful Personal Trainer, whether you are new or seasoned in the field.

These rules will help you to become more successful as a Personal Trainer. If you want to continue to grow and succeed as a business owner, click on the link below to learn more about the Dumbbells to Dollars course. If you are interested in learning how to increase your income and your client list, then click on the link to learn how you can transform how you run your business as a Personal Trainer.

Being a Successful Personal Trainer can easily be broken down into four main categories:

  • Professionalism
  • Sales
  • Client Management
  • Personal Development

 

Professionalism

Professionalism is key to not only showing that you are skilled in the world of fitness but let’s those around you know that you treat this as a business. Following these rules will show your peers that you take this seriously. Your clients come to you to help them make major life changes. Showing your clients that you are serious about helping them will not only boost their confidence in your ability to help them, but also remind them that you are worth every penny they pay you.

Key Things to Remember about professionalism:

  • Be a fitness professional because you love fitness, not because you think it is easy money
  • Systemize everything. Successful businesses run off of plans and programs, not chaos
  • Setting up a Google Voice Number is important so you can maintain boundaries. If you work inside of a Gym, they tend to give away your personal phone number which means clients will call you at all hours of the night. With Google Voice, phone calls still go to your phone, but you can manage when and where you wish your clients to contact you
  • Make yourself easy to find with professional social media accounts and business cards

The Do’s and Don’ts of Success

Always:

  • Be on time
  • Confirm the appointment the night before
  • Leave your personal problems at home
  • Ignore all distractions while training your client
  • Do follow up measurements to keep your clients informed and motivated
  • Keep exercise logs to show your clients they are progressing
  • Be open to helping somebody with improper form even if you don’t think they will want to sign up for personal training
  • Be willing to lend a helping hand to the gym, even if it’s for free
  • Make a plan for your client. Clients like to know that they’re not just doing random workouts, and they’re actually working toward a specific goal
  • Make sure your workout space is in order because presentation is everything
  • Cut your Fitness Director some slack. Their job is harder than it looks
  • Have an alternate plan in case somebody’s using a machine that you planned to use
  • Learn the ins and outs of marketing and selling as well as training because you are an entrepreneur
  • Purchase Personal Training Insurance because it is too cheap to not have
  • Take advice from other trainers
  • Learn to be organized. A good resource is “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey
  • Read books on more than just training. Read books on Sales, Business Management, and dealing with people
  • Take time to help trainers that have less experience than you
  • Take advantage of the tax benefits for self-employed personal trainers such as purchasing equipment, exercise apparel, and sneakers

Never:

  • Show up to work hungover
  • Answer your phone during a session
  • Use your position to inappropriately touch, look at, or talk to a gym patron
  • Mix business with pleasure
  • Train a client without having them first sign a waiver

A big reason clients leave their Personal Trainers is lack of Professionalism. Following these steps will not only help you to become a more successful Personal Trainer, but will help you build your business as an entrepreneur. These steps, along with a few other secret tricks, will help you get closer to earning a six-figure income as a Successful Personal Trainer.

 

Sales

You may have the technical knowledge to know the difference between triceps and biceps, but to be a successful Personal Trainer, you also need to understand how to sell your knowledge and experience to your client in a manner that keeps them interested and engaged in what you have to offer.

Key Things to Remember about sales:

  • If you want to improve your ability to sell personal training, a good resource is Zig Ziglar’s “5 Steps to successful selling”

The Do’s and Don’ts of Sales 

Always:

  • Speak slowly when going over contract terms with your client
  • Let your client know exactly what to ask for and exactly what they are getting if you know your gym has a slightly underhanded way of selling personal training. If your client is unhappy with their contract, you will be the one stuck with an unhappy customer
  • Assume the sale
  • Get cool with the sales staff, front desk staff, and group fitness trainers if you are at a Box Gym. They are going to be the ones that can feed you clients when you can’t get them on your own
  • Ask for referrals
  • Make friends with physical therapists. They have a lot of qualified leads for you coming off of their therapy
  • Learn how to leverage your time and make more money by offering semi-private and small group training
  • Hand your client off to another trainer if you know you are selling them a package that they cannot train

Never:

  • Show desperation for a sale
  • Let rejection get to you or deter you from your next sale. It will happen a lot in personal training
  • Assume your client’s ability to afford personal training based on items like their jewelry or car

Sales is an essential part of being an entrepreneur and if you can master it, you are one step closer to being a success. These tips will help you become a better personal trainer, but if you really want to take your business to the next step and beyond, follow the link below to learn how to increase your income from your knowledge as a personal trainer.

  

Client Management and Relationships

We are all human. Your clients often come to you when they are most vulnerable. It takes skill to be able to manage and build a relationship that requires so much trust and respect. Understanding how to properly manage the relationship you have with your client is paramount to building and maintaining that trust and respect.

These rules will help you navigate the potential difficulties.

Key Things to Remember about client management and relationships:

  • Clients have a skewed view about fitness. They think they need to be perfect 100% of the time and if you’re the type of person that has a cheat meal every once in a while, let your client know about it. Let them know how you recover and how you get back on track so that they can do the same thing and not feel discouraged when they slip up
  • Learn to talk to anyone. Read Dale Carnegie’s“How to Win Friends and Influence People”
  • If you’re going to be working out with your client, do it on your time, not on their time
  • Learn to do mitt work and box as it’s a great stress reliever
  • Every client should feel that they are your top priority

The Do’s and Don’ts of Client Management and Relationships

Always:

  • Have more energy than your client
  • Forgive your client if they are late once in a while. Occasionally people are late, including you. Acknowledge it and move on
  • Discontinue or move away from an exercise if your client is emotionally uncomfortable with it. They have a personal reason for it. Don’t argue
  • Spend at least as much time correcting nutritional habits as you do correcting form. A great tool is MyFitnessPal to monitor your clients
  • Be so verbally thorough and descriptive in explaining your exercises that a blind person could grasp the concept of what you expect them to do
  • Take fitness beyond the gym with events like 5K’s, mud runs, and sports outings
  • Let your personality shine through in your training. Personality matters
  • Compliment your client. A genuine compliment goes a very long way
  • Ask your clients for feedback
  • Make your clients journal their food
  • Do your best to cater your training environment to your clients’ likes
  • Remember the Jillian Michaels routine does not work for many people, and not a lot of clients respond favorably to it. If that’s not your style don’t try to fake it
  • Encourage your clients to get periodic blood work so they can check their risk for metabolic disease
  • Use the word “we” when discussing goals such as “we have to clean up our eating” or “we have to be more disciplined”
  • Build community among your clients. It may not be a bad idea in case you need to put two clients together and train two for one
  • Hold fat loss contests
  • Let your clients in on your goals. They can benefit from seeing how you approach a challenge for yourself
  • Take time to tell your clients that you appreciate them
  • Be honest with your clients. If you notice a change, either good or bad, let them know
  • Remember they’re clients not test dummies
  • Be a trainer, not a therapist
  • Use the sandwich method when issuing criticism. Compliment first, then criticism, then compliment

Never:

  • Sit if your client is standing
  • Allow a client to disrespect you
  • Use complicated trainer jargon. Clients don’t study it, clients don’t understand it, it’s not going to help them
  • Push supplements onto your clients if you don’t believe in them
  • Make promises that you can’t keep
  • Give all of your time away for free. You can be generous with your free time while still maintaining professional boundaries
  • Say “You’re doing it wrong” if you approach someone you do not know to help them with their form. Instead, start off with “Can I offer you some advice”
  • Make a paying client wait because you’re trying to close a sale on a possible new client
  • Punish poor eating habits with hard workouts. Instead, take the time to educate your client on how they can make better decisions
  • Be afraid to suspend your client for a while if they refuse to adhere to the demands of your training regimen. A week suspension is usually good to show you are serious
  • Be afraid to give a free session to your clients once in a while
  • Walk away from a client
  • Book your sessions in so tightly that you have to rush clients in and out of session. You don’t want them to feel the way that you would feel when you are sitting in a doctor’s office
  • Smoke out a new client when they’re just starting. It will discourage them

Understanding how to manage your clients takes you one step closer to reaching true success as a personal trainer. Balancing such important relationships will not only help you become better as a personal trainer, but a better business owner.

 

Personal Development

You are in the business of helping your clients transform their lives. You teach them and encourage them to develop and reach their goals every day. While it is important to help your clients reach their goals and better themselves, your own personal growth and development is just as important. The better you become, the more you develop, and the more you learn, the better you will be at helping your clients. A better you is a better experience for your clients.

Key Things to Remember about personal development:

  • No trainer is too good to clean up weights to make sure the gym is clean on their downtime
  • When in doubt the simpler exercise is usually your safer, better option
  • As a Gym trainer, if you spend more time on the floor working out yourself than making money and getting clients, you need to work on your priorities
  • It’s not the most glamorous, it’s not the most lucrative, but starting in a big box gym may give you your best experiences, in terms of the business end, as well as the training end into your personal training career

The Do’s and Don’ts of Personal Development

Always:

  • Practice what you preach. You preach fitness
  • Be positive
  • Save money for vacations or personal time off. In the personal training industry, you only get paid when you train
  • Continually educate yourself
  • Make every effort possible to look the part of the personal trainer
  • Be available early in the morning
  • Be opened to teaching some group exercise classes to get some notoriety in the gym
  • Remember the beginning of your career is going to be the hardest
  • Have a specialty in your training but be familiar with a broad span of training methods
  • Remember that encouragement and enthusiasm are as important as instruction
  • Make sure to schedule in time for your own personal workout
  • Give credit to another trainer’s workout if you’re going to blatantly plagiarize their work
  • Take time to help trainers that have less experience than you

Never:

  • Be afraid to keep your clients on the machines until you feel comfortable with instruction if you are relatively new to personal training and working in the gym. Once you are comfortable, you can take them out into an open area for more complex exercises. Safety over fancy
  • Go up to another personal trainer while they are training their client and criticize the way that they’re training. If their client is in a lot of danger, pull them to the side and then tell them. Try to wait until after the session. If you criticize them in front of their client they will hate you for life, I promise you that

 

Now that you have the rules to help you become a successful personal trainer, you need the secrets and tools to help you grow your business.

You became a Personal Trainer because you were passionate about what you do. You love health and fitness. You have dedicated your life to this. Most people are not able to have lucrative careers doing what they love. But you are not most people. You have read these life-changing rules for becoming a Successful Personal Trainer.

Take the next step and learn how to take your passion and turn it into a successful business. You have the opportunity to learn the secrets to earning six figures as a Personal Trainer.

By clicking the link below, you can learn how to gain access to the highly successful Dumbbells to Dollars course that will teach you how to take what you love to new heights and help you earn Six Figures as a Personal Trainer. If you want to learn more about how to successfully run your business as a personal trainer, then learning about this course will change the way you do business. You have nothing to lose and everything to Gain.