Training gym clients and training online clients use a lot of the same knowledge. What changes is everything around the coaching: who you can reach, how you get found, and how much of the relationship happens in person.
Josh Thursby
Founder & CCO · 2 November 2023 · 6 min read
Reviewed by
Adam Rhodes
Owned a gym for eight years before founding Create
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Training gym clients and training online clients use a lot of the same knowledge. Programming, progression and knowing when to push are common to both. What changes is everything around the coaching: who you can reach, how you get found, and how much of the relationship happens in person.
In a gym you are working a fixed audience, so breadth wins. Online you are working an open market, so focus wins. Coaches who take their gym floor approach online usually stall, and coaches who try to niche hard inside one club usually run out of people. This guide covers both, and why running the two together is the sensible default.
Walk onto any commercial gym floor and you will see every age, ability and goal under one roof. That is the opportunity and the constraint at the same time. Adaptability and a broad skill set are what let you appeal to the largest possible share of a fixed audience.
The approach we teach on our Level 2 and 3 combined personal trainer diploma builds the week from in person sessions, classes and a small amount of online coaching rather than from one on one hours alone. To fill around 15 hours of in person coaching you will usually need 25 to 30 people on your books, because some train three times a week and some come back once a quarter for a refresher. Our income calculator lets you model what that looks like at your own rate.
Gym clients range from young adults building muscle to older members working on strength and mobility. Each one brings a different goal, a different history and a different reason for turning up, so you need several training methods and more than one way to motivate someone.
You are working a set pool rather than a stream of new prospects, which is the opposite of the online situation.
People join for a small number of broad reasons: build muscle, lose fat, get ready for an event, or improve general health. You can specialise inside those, for example women in their thirties who want to lose fat, but every layer you add takes people out of a pool that was already small. If your club has 100 potential PT buyers, specialising in women takes that to roughly 50.
Staying broad does not mean staying shallow. Pad work appeals to a handful of members, kettlebells to a few more, small group conditioning to others again. Stack several specific skills and you widen your appeal without becoming the boxing coach that only boxers book.
Online coaching fits around gym work neatly. In person sessions cluster into the early morning and the evening, which leaves the middle of the day empty. That time can go into writing programmes, checking in with online clients and building the content that brings the next ones in. Our online fitness coaching course covers how to run that side of the business properly.
The real difference is the size of the market. A gym based PT is selling to the members of one club. An online coach is selling to anyone they can reach, which is exactly why copying your gym floor approach online rarely works.
Do not try to be something for everyone. Be everything for someone.
Depending on the model you run, you need somewhere between 5 and 50 clients. Trying to appeal to all of them is not just unnecessary, it actively weakens what you say.
We would not recommend choosing a niche by working down a spreadsheet. You have to be able to speak to these people credibly, and that comes from overlap with your own life: your history, your speciality as a coach, the job you did before this one, your sport.
A male powerlifter trying to win powerlifters online is competing with everyone else doing the same thing. The same coach who also holds down an office job and has two children under ten can talk to busy working fathers who want to get stronger, and that is a conversation only he can have.
Any qualified PT can fill a book in a gym by being a capable generalist, and the same coach can still stand out in the online market by going narrow. The two models do not compete for the same skills, they compete for your time.
For most coaches the answer is both. Running gym clients alongside online clients spreads your risk, uses the dead hours and gives you two ways to grow rather than one. If you want to go deeper on the coaching itself, read how coaches move from counting reps to delivering results.
Last reviewed August 2026. Refreshed with a direct comparison of the two models, new FAQs, and updated course links.
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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