7 Reasons To Hire An Online Personal Trainer

Hiring an online personal trainer is a decision people make to invest in their personal health and fitness. Whatever their goals, there will be personal trainers lining up that can help them to get results faster and with less hassle than trying to figure it out on their own. That applies whether a client works with a personal trainer in person or online.

Many online personal trainers who are new to online coaching struggle to see how their ideal clients would value online training and thus fail to market their services to the right audience effectively. If that sounds like you, we're offering some guidance here.

In this article, we collected 9 reasons why people might want to work with you online. Your job is to figure out which of these apply to your audience and ensure all your marketing channels highlight those benefits of your online coaching programme.

1. High Levels Of Expertise

Approaching the personal trainers working in a local gym is one way for clients to find the right trainer for their goal. However, that would only be a very narrow selection compared to when they go and look online.  Shopping around for an online personal trainer allows people to enter a much bigger market place.

This means that they are able to connect with the best personal trainers in the fitness industry, and they can look for someone that's got a well-established track record in helping clients with a problem they also want to solve.

If you look at it from your perspective as a potential trainer for them, you'd want to showcase you clients' successes on every marketing platform you use. This includes your website, your Facebook and Google accounts and also publishing regular content on your social media and on your blog about them.

2. Great Value For Money

When you work with your clients in person, either on the gym floor, in their homes or outdoors, most people would see you fewer than 3 times a week. Usually, this is because spending more time with you starts to become too costly for them. On top of that they would have those sessions with you and not much communication during the rest of the week.

However, with online personal training, your clients can access you more often, even if they just have a question. They can also request a workout plan that involves any number of workouts depending on their goals. Online delivery also allows support with other lifestyle goals and you can help them build better habits to support their training and energy levels while their monthly investment either stays the same or becomes lower.

The amount charged by online personal trainers for the amount of programming and support their clients get from them typically is much better value than from a face-to-face personal trainer.  If you solely work online, you won't have to pay rent to a gym, you can save money on commute travel and serve your clients from anywhere you fancy. 

This means you can provide a more consistent service at the same cost or you can pass the savings onto your clients.  Sometimes you might get enquiries from people who may think that online training shouldn't cost much at all, but if you're able to showcase the benefits of working with a highly skilled professional online, the people you want to work with will be drawn to you.

3. Complete Time Freedom

When you work with clients in-person you will have to schedule the  training sessions around two people’s commitments: when you have a free slot on your schedule and when the client is available. For well-established trainers that are close to fully booked this can create difficulties finding an appropriate appointment time.

This can sometimes lead to very early or very late sessions,  before and after work at anti-social times of the day. This is time that both you and your client could be spending with family, and this can lead to a temptation to skip sessions in favour of a lie-in or the lure of an evening on the couch for the client. Sometimes even a long day at work can result in loss of motivation and last minute cancellations.

While you'll swap face to face time for marketing time, you'll have more freedom to pick and choose when you do which.

From a client's perspective, they could end up settling for which ever trainer is free in the gym at the times they can get there to train. In other words, they might end up with a trainer who is inexperienced, can’t help them, or that they simply don’t enjoy spending hours with each week.

So, for your ideal clients, working with an online personal trainer means they can get their sessions done whenever suits them, they're only trying to juggle one schedule: their own. That also means if your clients are in a particularly busy period of their life, you as their online coach can dial back their training plan and when they need to push hard for an imminent goal you can adjust their schedule as needed.

4. Specific Skills

One of the most important aspects of any fitness programme is the nutritional support needed to capitalise on getting the most out of the training. Many online personal trainers either specialise in nutrition or work with nutrition coaches. It’s not very common for face to face trainers to have invested in deeper nutrition knowledge.

Nutritional support will allow your clients to not only get the best out of their workouts but also to make real lasting change in their  life, by understanding how best to fuel their training.  Similarly,  there may be a range of specific skills that people may want their  personal trainer to have and that it is far easier to shop around for online.

Think about special dietary needs, like eating vegetarian or vegan, working around food allergies and intolerance. There are many women out there needing help after having just given birth or going through menopause to name a few. Imagine someone who is a mum, eats vegan and wants to prepare for a bodybuilding competition. Now that's a specialty they might struggle to find in their local area and easier to look online.

So, if you have skills and expertise in personal training that allows you to work with a narrow niche, you might want to capitalise on that with your online training offerings.

5. Better Accountability

When clients work with you face to face, they see you for a limited number of hours in the week.  That leaves them with 16+ other hours while they're on their own trying to figure out their training and nutrition struggles.

With online personal training, you can become a coach in their corner and answer their questions promptly and any time they message you if you wish. That means you'll be in touch far more frequently,  and you can provide support and accountability not just with the training but with all of the other aspect of your clients' lifestyle that have an impact on their results. These are usually the parts that take much more effort from the client and often appreciate the added help.

6. Removes The Thinking And Planning

One of the hardest things for people who are experienced in programming their own training is it is easy to get stuck in a rut. Turning up to the gym and doing the same boring exercises means that they may not be making the progress they want to make and that becomes demotivating.

Hiring you as their online trainer for them means that they can delegate their training plan to a fitness professional. It allows your clients to focus their energy and attention into the correct things:  giving every workout their very best effort. This is ideal for people who have demanding professional or family lives who feel like they just want to be told what to do, and they know that they can execute the plan effectively.

7. Tailored Exercise Design

When it comes to online fitness, there are a few ways people can go about it. However, working with an online personal trainer can bring results that are not possible by training along with a pre-recorded video, or some workout they found online.

A dedicated online training programme is designed with the clients' particular needs in mind just like when you train someone in-person. You will have plenty of contact time with your client and opportunities to collect feedback from them as well. You will be able to respond almost immediately to your clients' specific requirements, and make any necessary adaptions to their  plan.

For example, if a client is unable to get to the gym, as their trainer can adapt their workout to reflect equipment that they do have available at home. That means your clients can always make progress and they're never left wondering what they should do next. By always being able to do something, progress is continuous, and that’s highly motivating.

Conclusion

If you are considering launching online personal training services, you want to provide your audience with social proof that you have helped people like them with similar goals. The more success stories you can showcase, the better. It's also likely that the longer you stay in the industry, the more established and popular you become.

If your goal is to grow the online coaching part of your fitness business, you will need to double down on focusing on online marketing and building trusting relationships within your online community.

Of course, working online doesn't mean you should accommodate everybody with their goals. You can become super specific about who you want to help, how much you charge and what access you offer to your clients. It will take some trial and error in the beginning, but as long you stick with it, build on your strengths and learn from your clients' feedback, you'll be soon on the way to have more flexibility and growth within your online fitness business.