Fitness — Trainer + Blog
Safety during Covid: Gyms Versus Grocery Stores
July 24, 2020
Author: Nick Corneil
Link to Article
With gyms reopening the question has come up as to how safe gyms are. When looking at the health and safety measures in place for gyms, it can easily be argued that they are a lot more safe than grocery and retail stores at this time.
5 Common Mistakes Trainers Make in Their Websites
December 14, 2016
Author: Nick Corneil
Link to Article
Over the past year, we have talked to dozens of personal trainers about how they run their businesses and attract new clients. Given our background in tech and experience with digital marketing, we always end up checking out their websites (if they have one) and corresponding social channels to see how they are using the different tools to accomplish their goals. What we have seen has not only led us to create content (like this blog) to help support them passively, but also inspired us to make a 30 minute consult with us a part of being a Trainer+ certified trainer.
This experience has shown us that despite best attempts, most trainers do not do a very good job of setting up their own websites, nor do a lot of website makers hired to do the job. We see the same common mistakes in most of the websites we look at, which we have outlined in this post.
Bridging the Gap Between Fitness and Healthcare
Summary:
With fitness as the top form of preventative healthcare and treatment in many cases, the fitness professional and plan still exist much outside the circle of care. Even though more money is being spent on fitness, and more (and more and more) technology has emerged in the fitness space, there has not been a noticeable effect on decreasing negative health outcomes from obesity, cardiac conditions, diabetes, etc. This presentation focuses on why this gap exists and how technology can be used to actually help close it and make fitness a part of the circle of care.
About the Author
Nick Corneil is the founder of Trainer+, a company that builds software that makes it easy for fitness professionals to create, share, track and analyze fitness programs for their clients.
What you need to teach your clients before, during, and after assessments
The fitness assessment is a tough art. Most times, you have an hour to build rapport and history, measure, plan and sell to your potential client, who may or may not know what to expect from the process. Hopefully, if you have time, you also try to educate the assessee so they have a better understanding of the measurements, plan and ultimately, value of your services. Even if you don’t sell them the first time, if you leave them with some knowledge that proves true as they start out on their own you have built trust for them to come back when they realize they need your help.
Summer Struggles of a Personal Trainer
The summer is here, which is usually a means for excitement, however it’s also the toughest time of the year for the fitness industry. It was always difficult for me as a trainer and manager to hit even modest goals in these lean months. But difficult times were also a good time to experiment to try to mitigate these realities; from varying training packages, to group programs and different marketing initiatives, with varying degrees of success.
The Most Effective Ways to Spend Your Downtime as a Personal Trainer
Workout? Write fitness programs? Work toward your latest CEC? Or is it more like: Nap? Shop? Facebook? There are many ways to spend the downtime in between clients, and depending on how you manage your business as a trainer overall, there may be more of it than you would like. Similarly to how you encourage your clients to take a long term perspective instead of a short sighted approach with their fitness goals; our aim at Trainer+ is to encourage you to adopt new solutions that allow you to take a more effective and long term approach to how you manage your business.
The Long Term Approach to Assessments
The key to the approach I use is changing the sales mentality that is often preached of aggressively closing, into one of aggressively caring. The service you are trying to sell is one of support after all, so how better to build your value continuously than setting that relationship up even before they purchase? The best way to demonstrate that care is to take your time to work through the key steps of the assessment and planning process, and ensure there is a follow-up system in place that has been communicated to the potential client. I know this is unbilled time for the most part, but it just has to be looked at as your investment in securing a future sale, or at least retaining a gym member (who could lead to or refer a future sale).
Why the Current Way of Assessing Clients is All Wrong
Welcome back to our 4-part series about how fitness professionals can save time and make more money by taking a long-term approach to managing and executing your business. In the first part of the series, we talked about the language of your relationship with your clients: their fitness programs. In this part, we will focus on the mechanism that sets out the expectations and measures the progress of that relationship: the assessment.
Why You Should Be Taking Time to Write Fitness Programs
Trainers are always too busy for their own good. In fact, even given a tool to help trainers save time, I have found that most of our first users are too busy to adopt a tool to get less busy. At least, that seems to be how they feel given the realities of being a personal trainer: selling time in one-hour blocks and not getting paid for all of the unbilled time managing your business before, after, and in between clients. But the reality is that it is this unpaid time that crowds the schedule with trainers balancing the common activities to manage their business with maintaining their own fitness and ongoing education.
The Evolution of Fitness
In doing some research recently for another blog post, I was struck by how, in many ways, fitness has evolved on a cultural level over the ages in an eerily similar fashion to how the fitness life cycle happens for the average modern North American. As any fitness professional will tell you, especially those that do lots of assessments, there are some predictable factors that influence an individual’s ability to build and maintain their fitness level as they age. As man has evolved, there have been similar macro-factors affecting society’s ability to include and prioritize fitness as a part of the culture.