All relationships start with a first meeting, and personal training clients are no different.
There is no greater mistake personal trainers make than jumping straight into training a client without knowing their fitness background and medical history.
In fact, skipping fitness assessments with clients can be dangerous. Imagine if your new client was a diabetic or had a heart condition, you certainly wouldn’t want to jump straight into a super hard cardiovascular regime without knowing how they would respond.
The only way to ensure a good start to your relationship with your new potential client is to make sure to perform a fitness review and screening to gather information about your client’s medical history and current medical conditions, as well as to select safe and appropriate assessments based on that information.
Personal Training professionals know you don’t have to do every assessment during the first session. In many cases, doing just a couple fitness assessments will feel like a good workout for new training clients. Take it slow and use tried and tested fitness assessments that fit your client’s demographic.
The results indicate a person’s current health and fitness status, and trainers use these results to design a fitness program suited to the individual. The results also provide a baseline by which trainers can measure progress down the road.
Schedule fitness assessments periodically so clients will improvements in their fitness level.
- Take photos of their progress.
- Track their strength and cardiovascular fitness.
- Write down data about each workout, including sets, reps, rest, resistance, etc.
Show clients concrete data proving the benefits of exercise and a healthy diet. If you do that, they’ll keep showing up for workouts. If you can’t show them how far they’ve come, they will quit the gym and never reach their fitness goals.