Seven practical steps for starting an online personal training business, from picking a niche to filming demonstrations your clients can follow.
Robert Taylor
Head of Marketing · 29 April 2024 · 4 min read
Reviewed by
Ollie Bell
Award winning, published author, certified at Harvard and Oxford
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Covid pushed the fitness industry online faster than it would otherwise have moved, and a good deal of that shift has stayed. Online coaching is now a normal way to work, either as a whole business or alongside face to face clients. It removes the ceiling on how many people you can reach, and it replaces the gym floor with a set of skills most trainers have to learn from scratch.
These are seven things worth getting right when you start an online personal training business.
The internet is big enough that trying to appeal to everyone appeals to nobody. Being known for one thing makes you easier to trust and much easier to find. Pick the area of fitness you know best or care most about, and let that decide who you speak to and where you speak to them.
Other trainers are a referral source, not only competition. Reach out to people you already know who coach online, and join the groups where new online coaches gather. Trainers who trust each other pass on clients they cannot take, and that works in both directions when you need time off.
Letting someone try your coaching before they pay removes most of the risk they feel. Build the trial so it demonstrates the specific thing that makes your service worth paying for, whether that is bespoke programming or the quality of your feedback. Think about what would make you sign up, and start there.
As your client list grows, tracking who is where in their programme gets harder. Coaching software lets you build programmes, log progress and stay organised, and it makes you look more professional to the people paying you.
Much of an online coaching business runs through social. Pick one platform you can post on consistently and that your target clients actually use, rather than spreading yourself thinly across all of them. For fitness that is usually Instagram.
Clients need to see a movement clearly before they can copy it. Filming demonstrations properly is the difference between a client who gets it and a client who needs three weeks of correction.
How often depends on your offer. Bespoke programming means regular one to one contact. A group programme might mean a group chat with occasional individual check ins. Either way, contact is what keeps people paying, so decide deliberately how much of it you are offering rather than letting it happen by accident.
Options for building programmes and tracking client progress include MyPTHub, FITR and Trainerize. Compare them on programme building, client messaging and how they handle payments before you commit your client data to one of them.
Coaching online takes away the commute and the gym floor, not the responsibility. You still need a recognised qualification and insurance that covers online delivery, and you are still accountable for programming safely for people you cannot see in the room.
An online coaching business still rests on a recognised qualification. If you are not qualified yet, the Level 2 and 3 Combined Personal Trainer course is the standard route in. If you are already working with clients and want to move online, our online coaching course covers building and growing a business as an online coach.
Rebuilt into blocks, with the seven tips turned into numbered steps, the filming advice pulled into a checklist, the qualification and insurance point added as a warning, and the online coaching course link corrected to its current URL.
Robert Taylor
Head of Marketing
Robert has spent ten years in digital marketing, eight of them around this industry: four with Future Fit as a client and four working inside it. He owns how Create is found, what it says about its courses, and whether that turns out to be true.
Reviewed by Ollie Bell, Award winning, published author, certified at Harvard and Oxford.
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