When it comes to supposed expert personal trainer advice and guidance, there’s a huge amount of misinformation out there, which can lead to future professionals making the wrong decisions, misleading clients, or not having the impact they want to have.
With our article, we’ll provide you with our own, handpicked advice for PTs that’ll ensure you’re providing the best possible service to your clients, as well as boosting your own earnings.
The best advice we can give, though, is to diversify your services through a specialist qualification. OriGym’s Level 5 master personal trainer courses provide just that, setting you apart from your competitors, and giving your clients a fantastic experience.
Expert Personal Trainer Advice & Guidance
As a leading provider of personal trainer certification, we’ve compiled our top advice for those who are still finding their feet in the fitness industry.
#1 – Organise Your Schedule
Perhaps the most crucial piece of expert personal trainer advice we can provide is to ensure that your schedule is always organised and structured effectively.
There’s multiple, very good reasons behind this. By keeping a well-maintained schedule, you immediately appear much more professional to your clients.
They’ll immediately recognise you as someone who’s passionate about what they do, as well as someone who isn’t likely to cancel sessions at the last moment, or to turn up late and unprepared, all of which are red flags for a client.
This level of organisation also allows you to be much more aware of the time where you’ll need to be working, and the time where you can relax, unwind, and spend time with friends and family.
We can’t stress enough how important it is to dedicate time to yourself, outside of being a PT. While it might seem self-explanatory, it’s one of the most crucial pieces of expert personal trainer advice we can give.
Without leaving yourself time to recuperate, you run the risk of becoming overwhelmed and burnt out, which can lead to poorer quality services for your clients, and a lack of enthusiasm for the industry you’re passionate about.
It can have a huge knock on effect on all the services you do, but by building this time into your schedule, you’re able to take the break you need, and approach each session refreshed.
If this is something you feel like you’ll struggle with, we’d suggest trying out a mindfulness practice, like meditating.
This same principle applies to building in time to undertake new developments in your professional life, too, which we’ll touch on more in our next piece of expert personal trainer advice.
#2 – Seek Out Opportunities For Professional Development
Personal training is a hugely popular, but highly contested industry, and for good reason. It’s a hugely rewarding career, the roles of a PT are diverse and interesting, and there’s scope to earn a substantial amount.
However, to do this in the most effective way possible, you should seek out opportunities to develop and grow as a professional, and in turn expand on the services you can offer to potential and existing clients.
The best way to do this is through a Level 5 course. Often referred to as a specialism or “master” personal trainer course, these provide additional benefit for clients, as well as helping to focus the PT packages you offer.
Think about it like this. Given the choice of two equally-priced personal trainers, a client will, understandably, opt for the PT who can ultimately offer them a more complete service.
For instance, our example personal trainer might have completed a Level 5 qualification in Sports Nutrition, or be more equipped to deal with special populations after having completed a Level 5 in Obesity and Weight Management.
The same is applicable to other skills and specialisms. If a personal trainer already has a qualification in becoming a running coach, they’ll be much more appealing to clients who are looking to improve their sprint times, or prepare ahead of a marathon.
You can capitalise on this, by augmenting the skills you already have, and discovering the niche you know that you can most apply yourself to, whether that’s tailoring your services to those who want to focus on weight loss, or specialising in training those at the peak of physical fitness.
Let’s look more closely how finding that niche, and discovering the area of fitness that you’re best equipped to train clients in, forms another key piece of expert personal trainer advice.
#3 – Establish Your Niche
Whether you’re just starting out in the fitness industry, or you’ve been established for any length of time, the importance of establishing yourself in a niche cannot be overstated.
In fact, for many of the most influential trainers in the business, it’s a key component behind their success – they spotted a gap in the market, and used it to their advantage to create a successful, lucrative business.
That’s the reason why it’s a vital piece of expert personal trainer advice, and should be something that you factor into any plans you make.
A niche not only provides you with the necessary focus to produce meaningful results for the clients you want to train, but it also gives you the opportunity to discover an area of fitness that’s not oversaturated, and can therefore be a fantastic way to attract those clients.
Many PTs often neglect this crucial piece of expert personal trainer advice in favour of aiming to appeal to a much wider audience, and end up losing out on a highly focused demographic that would benefit massively from their services.
Instead, we’d strongly advise discovering what you’re passionate about, and structuring your services around that area of fitness.
#4 – Always Be Learning
The frontrunners in any field never stop learning, and that’s never truer than when it’s applied to the fitness industry.
Our next piece of expert personal training advice is to ensure that you continue learning and expanding your knowledge, long after you graduate from your personal training course.
That can come in many different forms, including:
- Fitness Magazines – these are often great ways to keep up to date with larger scale changes in the fitness industry, as well as gain insights through interviews and expert columnists
- Online Blogs – more regularly updated than a physical publication, these offer a fantastic opportunity to build up a complete picture of the nuances of personal training, sports nutrition, and exercise. Check out OriGym’s blog for a great example of this.
- Academic Journals – a much more scientific approach to understanding fitness, but no less important. Academic journals represent the very latest in exercise science and developments, and can help inform the training you provide.
- Published Books – while these aren’t necessarily the most up-to-date view into fitness, they can offer suggestions and ideas on how to improve and refine the services you offer.
All of these essential resources for personal trainer knowledge offer unique ways to build on the ideas you already have, and understand on a deeper level how you can best provide for your clients.
It’s a common misconception that, once you graduate from your PT course, you don’t need to do any further research or reading. That couldn’t be further from the truth.
While good personal training courses (like industry leader OriGym’s personal training diploma) provide you with exceptionally solid foundations, you should always seek out new ways to build on what you can already offer clients.
Our top expert personal trainer advice would be to use multiple different sources for your development, learning and absorbing as much as you can to create a well-rounded, complete service for your clients.
#5 – Fully Utilise Online Resources
Technology has slowly become a more integral part of our lives, and our next piece of expert personal trainer advice is to take advantage of that movement.
As we’ve already touched on, personal training is a career that offers numerous options when it comes to incorporating technology into your sessions, whether that’s using data tracking software to effectively plan, or a scheduling app to keep track of sessions and meetings.
However, we’d recommend that you look into going beyond that, especially if you’re at the point in your career where you need expert personal trainer advice to progress.
Offering an online option is an ideal way to achieve this next step. You’re immediately offering something that many of your competitors won’t or can’t, as well as making yourself a convenient option for clients who can’t go to the gym.
This isn’t a hugely difficult option to set up, either.
You will, of course, need a strong Internet connection, and a way to speak to clients over video (softwares like Zoom or Skype offer free options for this), but these are the only strict requirements of diversifying your services to include an online option.
However, as with any kind of training, there’s one crucial piece of expert personal training advice that you need to follow – schedule everything as effectively as possible.
This can be more of a challenge with online personal training. You’re likely to be training clients from your home, and you could struggle to separate work from your personal life.
Take the time to fully plan out your day, and ensure that you leave time to relax, and step away from your role as a personal trainer.
You’ll then be able to devote the necessary time and energy to every session, and approach each session you deliver with enthusiasm and focus.
#6 – Refine and Adapt Your Business Plan
When you first started out as a personal trainer, you should’ve produced a business plan.
If you didn’t (and some trainers are so keen to get started that they neglect this aspect), you’ll need to get one before you start.
If you did, though, our next piece of expert personal trainer advice applies to that aspect of your role. Your business plan should develop just as much as you do.
Think of it this way. As you start to gain more qualifications (whether that’s a Level 5 specialist fitness qualification like sports nutrition or obesity management), you should factor these into your plans for the future, as well as your current services.
Many wrongly assume that a business plan is a static document, and that it should only inform a set period of time in your career.
In fact, a business plan should act as the rudder that steers your business, and guides you through the next steps you’ll need to take to maximise your profits and continue to provide a quality, effective service for your clients.
Our expert personal training advice would be to dedicate time each month to looking over your business plan, and check whether or not the targets you’ve planned out are still applicable.
This should include:
- Auditing both your long and short term goals
- Checking each step of the way you’ve outlined
- Altering any aspects that could change (like your qualifications/certifications)
- Updating any services you provide/plan to provide
- Ticking off any major accomplishments or targets you’ve already achieved
A business plan is ultimately a fluid document, and it should reflect how you’ve changed, and how the changes you’ve personally made affect your business decisions, and the direction you want to go in.
#7 – Market Yourself, Not Just Your Business
When it comes to expert personal training advice, we’d always say that the biggest asset you have isn’t necessarily the service you provide – it’s you.
What we mean by this is that, when a client signs up to your services, regardless of whether that’s in-person or online, they’re not just paying for your expertise, they’re also paying to spend time with you.
Many personal trainers forget this in their quest to try and secure clients, and it can be to their detriment.
While your qualifications, especially specialisms like sports nutrition, will go a long way towards gaining clients, you can (and should) supplement this with your personality and, and how you can help clients reach and understand their fitness goals.
A great example of this is Ollie Chick, who immediately describes their training, but hints towards the additional expertise they possess through unorthodox training methods and experiences.
Utilising aspects that make you unique, in tandem with the expertise you can offer to potential clients, can ensure you’re reaching exactly the clients you want to reach, and telling them what they can expect from you.
You can also carry this over into your social media presence, too. Interact with your followers, and let them see part of who you are, what you believe in, and how you can help them, even if it’s just a small piece of expert personal trainer advice.
Take Preston-based PT Dean Flynn as a good example of this. His Instagram combines occasional personal posts with practical, actionable advice for his followers and clients.
This also gives potential clients a glimpse into what they can expect from you should they choose to become a client.
How you market yourself and your services is an integral part of being successful in personal training, and a huge part of that is putting yourself across in the right light.
#8 – Combine Training With Rehabilitation
As you start to train more and more clients, there’s bound to come a point where a client sustains an injury. This could be during one of your sessions, while they’re working out alone, or just in everyday life.
Naturally, this can create a disruption to your service, the plans you’ve outlined for that client, and (crucially) your revenue from that client.
That’s where one specific additional qualification can be highly advantageous. We’ve already touched on how Level 5 personal trainer courses are hugely beneficial for your business, but a Level 4 in sports massage therapy offers an entirely new facet to your training.
What we mean by that is that you’ll be able to combine your personal training certification with your sports massage qualification, and offer clients a way to return in a quicker and safer way.
You’ll also be able to essentially “double” the revenue you receive from one client. By providing rehabilitation that works in tandem with the workouts you’ve set for them, you’re able to pre-empt any areas that could undergo significant strain or pressure.
The same is true of your sports massage clients. If they’re struggling with injury, you could recommend your personal training services to them, as a way of still achieving progress while mitigating against the strains that can come with working out alone.
Sports massage works excellently as a career on its own, too. If you’re interested in a career switch, or are just uncertain of how to add this skill to your repertoire, check out our full article on the advantages of becoming a sports massage therapist.
Having an understanding of the principles of sports massage can also better inform the sessions you prepare, in that you’ll be more aware of the muscles and joints that might strain during a workout.
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Enjoying our curated expert personal trainer advice so far? Here’s a few suggestions on articles to improve your knowledge:
- How to Become an Online Personal Trainer
- The Ultimate Guide to Personal Trainer Outsourcing
- How to Create Personal Training Packages – Video Guide
#9 – Focus On Your SEO
As a personal trainer, you’ve likely got some form of online presence. This could be in the form of social media pages, a personal training Google My Business page, or a website.
Regardless of how you’re representing yourself and your business online, you should set aside time in your schedule to work on your search engine optimization (SEO), or how Google and other search engines rank your website or profile.
This essentially determines how many people see your page, and how well received it is by the audience you’re aiming to reach. For this reason, many combine their website with their chosen niche.
Here’s a clearer example of what we mean by this. These personal trainers have clearly optimised their website for those who are searching for “personal trainer for disabled glasgow”, and therefore rank highly on Google because of that.
Now, this is a skill that can take time and effort to understand and implement, but it’s one that can pay off hugely in the long run.
By investing the hours into optimising your website to rank better in Google, you’re ultimately increasing the likelihood that clients will find you with a simple search, rather than having to work on other personal trainer marketing strategies that may not have the same payoff.
Here’s a few of our expert personal training tips to help you get started with optimising your content for search engines:
- Scope Out Your Competitors – Check out the competition in the niche you’re planning to optimise your website for. How are they presenting their services? What are they doing that you could make better, or adapt for your PT services?
- Research Your Keywords – Your main keyword should be the most relevant topic for your website, and ultimately the term you’re trying to rank for. In the example we gave earlier, the main keyword would be “personal trainer for disabled glasgow”. With this, we’d recommend using a tool like SEMRush, Google Trends, or Ahrefs. Software like this also provides you with suggestions of other, similar keywords that your site should also aim to rank for. With our example, secondary keywords could be “disabled pt in glasgow”, “disabled personal trainer glasgow”, or “personal trainer for disabled glasgow”.
- Optimise Your Site For Mobile – Mobile is by far the most popular way for users to visit a website, and by ensuring that your site or page is well-optimised for a mobile browser, you’ll be considered more favourably by Google.
- Build Authority – This is often done through link building, which is where you link out to good websites, and good websites link back to your site, which teaches Google and other search engines that you’re a trustworthy site, and one that’s relevant to users who are searching.
These are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to website design, management and optimisation, though.
To learn more, and for a step-by-step approach to creating your ideal site, check out our complete guide to getting traffic for your personal training website.
#10 – Build An Online Community
With our expert personal trainer advice so far, we’ve already discussed the importance of creating and maintaining an online presence. It’s absolutely vital if you want to succeed in personal training.
However, we’d advise taking this a step further, and creating your own online community that clients can be part of.
This can sound complex at first, especially if you’re new to the idea of having a larger platform for your clients to use, or are uncertain of how best to create an option for sharing larger scale updates to your client base.
It doesn’t need to be, though. The easiest way to achieve this is through Facebook, one of the most popular social media sites worldwide.
Facebook’s guidelines on creating a group are exceptionally simple, and offer a quick and easy way to create a Group that your clients can join and share ideas, ask questions, and start discussions.
Before doing this, though, you’ll need a professional Facebook account.
While it’s simple and available to the vast majority of your clients, having a group on Facebook isn’t the only option. You could also:
- Create a group chat on a messaging app, like Messenger, WhatsApp, or Instagram
- Set up a private, PT-focused Instagram account
- Establish a dedicated subreddit
- Build a group emailing list, and send out weekly/monthly newsletters
Creating and managing an online community also provides you with a way to provide updates to a large group of people.
For instance, you could have a holiday or prolonged absence coming up, and using your online group, you’ll be able to let all your clients know at once, saving you time and effort.
#11 – Produce Online Fitness Programmes
Personal trainers have very busy schedules, and an incredibly diverse role profile that sees them go from training, to structuring their schedule, to building tailored nutrition plans for clients.
All of these roles leave little spare time, but our next piece of expert personal trainer advice can help to supplement your role, and provide additional income even when you’re not training clients.
Online fitness programmes are exceptionally popular, and provide clients with a great way to access professionally-guided exercise routines whenever and wherever is most convenient for them.
These don’t require a huge amount of effort, either – many modern smartphone cameras are powerful enough to support filming, and you’ll just need an Internet connection to upload them to your website or platform of choice.
With this, we’d advise having an idea of which personal trainer payment methods you’re going to use ahead of starting.
This could allow them the option to make a one-off payment (called TVOD, or Transactional Video On Demand) for a set amount of content, or subscribe on a recurring basis to receive regular content updates (called SVOD, or Subscription Video On Demand).
Perhaps the most well-known example of this approach is Peloton, which combines an SVOD service with exercise equipment that helps to track your data, as well as offer integration with their classes.
While this may sound like a strenuous process, it’s actually one of the most actionable pieces of expert personal trainer advice we can give, as it allows you to make passive income while still promoting your brand and services.
For a more in-depth look at exactly how to set this up, plus how it can benefit you, we’ve put together a full report on selling fitness programmes online.
#12 – Work On Your Networking
Communicating as a personal trainer is absolutely essential. Without proper communication, you won’t be able to pass on your expertise, manage a schedule, or progress effectively in the fitness industry.
Part of that should always include networking, and our next piece of tailored, expert advice for personal trainers is that you should include this as part of your schedule.
Now, at first, this can sound demanding, especially as an average PT’s timetable is already overflowing with the different roles and responsibilities they’ll need to undertake to ensure their clients succeed.
But it doesn’t need to be. Networking can (and should) fit seamlessly into your day-to-day life, and is as simple as:
- Talking To Other PTs – This is ideal if you work in a gym environment, and have the opportunity to talk to the other personal trainers during your downtime.
- Messaging Via Social Media – Again, this is simple yet effective, in that it helps to build and maintain your professional relationships, and can even foster partnerships (which we’ll touch on more in a moment).
- Attending Dedicated Networking Events – Sites like MeetUp offer excellent ways to discover conferences, seminars and other events where you can meet other personal trainers to discuss ideas, and learn more about the industry.
- Going To Classes – It may seem like a simple step, but attending another PT’s classes can give you an insight into their training style, and provide you with an opportunity to chat to them after class.
- Joining Social Media Groups – Earlier, we touched on how social media can allow you to create private groups for your clients and followers. It’s also an excellent way to join groups that are relevant to your career development, and provides a fantastic way to network with other PTs.
Of course, these tips and ideas are just a few suggestions on how you can implement this piece of expert personal training advice.
#13 – Collaborate With Others
One of the best resources at your disposal (and one that many personal trainers forget to consider) are your fellow PTs.
While we’ve touched on the importance of building support and information networks with others in the industry, you should aim to take that a step further by collaborating on projects and working closely with other brands and members of the community.
The relationships you build through these collaborations are much stronger than those you can acquire through networking.
You’ll be able to create sponsorship and brand deals that mutually benefit both you and the company.
Take Gymshark as a great example, who work with hundreds of fitness influencers to both provide them with quality products, and to use their platform as a way to build brand awareness and recognition.
Many different companies offer ambassador or affiliate marketing programmes, ensuring you’ll always be able to represent a company that matches with what you want to promote, how you train, and what matters to you.
Our expert personal trainer advice here would be to look locally, too. Small businesses will relish the opportunity to work alongside a qualified personal trainer, and will provide you with everything you’ll need to properly promote their business.
The Lab, a small personal training gym in Liverpool, is a fantastic example of this, partnering with a personal trainer to better promote their facility, as well as provide that PT with everything they need to train their clients.
By outreaching to smaller brands and businesses close to you, you’re able to establish strong relationships, and form meaningful bonds that can allow both you and your partner to benefit, as well as bring in additional rewards and revenue.
#14 – Start Your Fitness Blog
Now, this may not be something you’d considered, but our next piece of expert personal training advice is to start up your own fitness blog.
There’s a number of reasons why you might choose to do this, not least of which is that a regularly updated blog can help to improve your website’s search engine rankings, as well as increase the authority that Google considers your site to have.
By producing a varied range of content and articles, you’re able to attract more organic visitors to your website, as well as demonstrate to search engines that your site is relevant to the reader.
A fitness blog also allows you to keep your clients and readers interested, especially if you use it to inform the sessions you deliver, and the training regimes you implement.
By writing articles and producing content that’s both relevant to the services you offer, and that provides value to potential readers and (crucially) potential clients, you’re proving to your readership and to search engines that you’re a site that can be trusted.
Plus, writing a blog allows you to put research and time into the areas of fitness that really interest you, which can help to inform key areas of your service, including:
- How you plan your sessions
- The exercises you get clients to perform
- How exercises can complement each other
- Communication before, during and after sessions
- How to tailor exercises to match client lifestyles
The variety of content you publish on your blog can also help to reflect your level of expertise, and knowledge of the industry you work in, too. Take OriGym’s blog as a great example of this.
Of course, we’re a personal training course provider, so it makes sense that our content would primarily revolve around personal training, and the clients we train.
However, we make sure to diversify the content that we produce, and have even separated our blog by specific topics.
You’ll notice, though, that all of these relate closely to fitness, to ensure that relevance to our readership, and to the products and services we sell.
Ultimately, by doing this, we both demonstrate our expansive knowledge of the field, but also appeal to a much wider audience, and bring in readers from across a range of interests and search terms.
You can do this, too. Take the service you provide (say, personal training for weight loss), and expand that to include different topics, such as:
- A PT’s favourite foods
- Structuring diet plans
- Addressing misconceptions surrounding food and exercise
- Exercises and exercise variations
- Simple exercises to do daily
- Helpful foods for weight loss
These are just a few suggestions you could incorporate into your fitness blog to better market yourself and your services, as well as increase your standing with search engines.
#15 – Start Your Own Personal Training Business
Our last piece of expert personal trainer advice is one that immediately seems daunting, especially if you’re still relatively new to personal training.
It doesn’t have to be, though. In fact, it can be done on a very limited budget, with time and hard work being the key components that determine your business’ success.
Our video below explores exactly how you can do this for no money at all, guiding you through every step of the way.
To quickly summarise, though, the key concepts all revolve around adapting the services and workouts you provide to fit with a limited budget.
For instance, you could:
- Train clients outdoors, to minimise costs associated with renting a space
- Deliver online training
- Utilise workouts that require limited or no equipment at all
- Develop reciprocal working relationships
While the concept of starting any kind of business can be intimidating, it’s the natural progression for a personal trainer who’s reached their peak, or wants to pursue new avenues to earn more, gain more freedom, and take on additional challenges.
We recommend using all of the tools and resources, like using Google My Business for your personal training, to get the best start!
You’re in control of everything you do with your own PT business, and can make decisions that ultimately influence how you progress, the clients you take, and the money you earn.
Before You Go!
As one of the industry frontrunners when it comes to personal training courses, our expert personal trainer advice comes from our combined years of experience, and a complete understanding of what it takes to succeed in fitness.
Ultimately, the best piece of guidance we can impart is to continue developing and learning, and the best way to do that is with additional training and qualifications.
Specialist courses, such as OriGym’s advanced sports nutrition or our Level 5 certifcate in Obesity Control and Weight Management, provide that extra step, setting you apart from the crowd with a bespoke certification.
Find more information on all of the other health and fitness courses that you can study with us by downloading our free course prospectus.