How To Choose A Personal Trainer (The Question Any Trainer Should Know About)

The best Personal Trainer in the world will only be successful if they have a strong client base. But what makes clients choose one Personal Trainer over another? A 2013 Australian and New Zealand Fitness Industry Survey asked members of fitness facilities and clubs to find out.

What Do Clients Want from Personal Training?

To begin with, the responses showed that 49% of members hired a Personal Trainer to get better results. Other common reasons included needing extra motivation (34%), getting advice on exercise (31%) and creating an exercise program (25%).

How Do Clients Choose a Personal Trainer?

The way that most members chose a Personal Trainer was based on a referral (39%), followed by availability (28%), experience (21%) and qualifications (12%). Surprisingly, 4% of members chose their Personal Trainer based on good looks!

What Does this Mean for Personal Trainers?

The results suggest that new Personal Trainers will need to gain referrals, so make sure you are always on your best form in order to get a recommendation. Referrals should be the main focus of your sales and marketing. You could suggest clients bring their friends or family for a free trial lesson, or offer free workouts to the general public. This doesn’t have to just be done verbally. Make your offer more tangible by sending it out via email, flyers and by giving your current clients little vouchers and cards to pass on to friends, family members and coworkers.

Closing the Deal

The next step is to turn these free referrals into paying clients. Aaron Whear, the managing director of Career Fitness, provided these three points of advice:

• Start the free session by going over the prospective client’s medical history and find out why they are interested in personal training and what their health and fitness goals are. This will allow you to tailor your session to their needs and present you as the professional and caring expert that you are.
• During the actual workout stage, focus on any areas the person wanted to work on and educate them as you go. Try to make the workout interesting, exciting and different to something that they could do in a regular gym or on their own. This could be through doing partner drills like boxing, or using special equipment like kettlebells or ropes. You need to show your worth.
• Finish with a nice stretch or something similar so the last thing they remember is something enjoyable. At the end of a good session the person’s endorphins will be flowing. Now is the time to break down your prices and explain how you can go about helping them to reach their specific health and fitness goals. Whear suggests using a line like, based on your goals, budget and availability, we can achieve your desired results through one of two options – option A and option B. Which one can we get you started on today?

With this new knowledge and strategy you should find yourself attracting a lot more clients and building your personal training business in no time!

• Bio

AIF

The Australian Institute of Fitness

The Australian Institute of Fitness (AIF) is the largest and longest established fitness training organisation in Australia, with dynamic training methods and expert course coaches nationwide - spanning fitness, massage and nutrition. The AIF qualifies more fitness professionals than any other provider in Australia, as well as offering a broad range of continuing education courses (CEC), upskilling resources and partnership programs for existing industry.