Five things a working trainer can do to build a fuller diary, from the relationships you build on the gym floor to the work you do off it.
Josh Thursby
Founder & CCO · 19 October 2024 · 5 min read
Reviewed by
Adam Rhodes
Owned a gym for eight years before founding Create
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Personal training is competitive. The rewards can be considerable, a full roster of clients paying you £80 an hour, and the pitfalls can be serious: underemployment, long and unsocial hours, and a lot of work outside the gym actually running the business. There are things you can do to tip the balance in your favour, and to stand out as the best personal trainer at your gym.
Five of them are below. None is complicated. All of them take doing consistently rather than occasionally.
Rapport is the difference between a client who books another block and one who quietly stops replying. Clients pay you a lot, spend a lot of time with you, are often at their most vulnerable around you, and are working towards something that matters to them with you at the helm. It is a personal relationship. Treat it as one.
Show empathy, invest properly in their goals, and get to know them as people rather than as slots in a diary. Check in between sessions, track progress so they can see it, and personalise the programme rather than reusing a template. The clue is in the job title.
Fitness moves quickly, and it is your job to keep up with the research and with the practice that follows from it. Read widely, follow people who cite their sources, and take professional development seriously. Workshops, classes and courses are what keep your professional registration current, but treat them as more than a box to tick. What you learn is what your clients are paying for.
Becoming an authority takes sustained study rather than a single qualification. CPD courses are the usual route, and choosing one that matches the clients you already turn away is more useful than picking the subject you personally find most interesting.
There is no better advertisement for a personal trainer than happy clients. Sharing their results, with their permission, shows what you can do far more convincingly than anything you say about yourself.
Whether it is a weight loss milestone, a personal best, or simply walking into the gym without dreading it, mark it. Social media is a useful tool here, and so is anywhere in the gym your operator lets you use.
The gym may feel like a second home to you. For many clients it is an uncomfortable place they have talked themselves into entering. Bring energy, enthusiasm, compassion and patience. People stay with a trainer whose sessions they enjoy.
Keeping sessions varied helps. Training does not have to be relentlessly serious, and variety stops clients getting bored of the same circuit. Finishing on a positive note, with specific feedback rather than general encouragement, leaves them looking forward to the next one.
In two senses. First, you are not confined to the gym floor. If a client likes sprinting, meet them at a hilly park and give them hill sprints. If they like boxing, take pads and gloves outside. People notice a trainer doing something interesting, and they ask about it.
Second, your visibility should not stop at the door. Posting useful content, sharing what you know, and running the occasional group session puts you in front of people who would never approach you cold. Building a community around your clients keeps them engaged, and engagement is what keeps them for years rather than months.
A client who stays for years is worth more than a stream of new enquiries, and costs far less to keep. Every time you hit a goal together, set the next one. That is the difference between filling gaps in your diary and having no gaps to fill.
Restructured into sections, replaced the out-of-date course link and the reference to a superseded registration scheme, removed advice that sits outside a personal trainer's scope of practice, and added a practical checklist and answers to the questions trainers ask most.
Josh Thursby
Founder & CCO
Josh qualified as a personal trainer in 2008 and spent twelve and a half years training clients face to face, delivering 45 to 55 sessions a week at his peak. He co-founded Create and writes about the commercial side of the job.
Reviewed by Adam Rhodes, Owned a gym for eight years before founding Create.
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