Group fitness is killing your business – 5 ways get ahead of it now!
You are an amazing fitness professional. Clients seek out your studio classes and your private sessions. There is a genuine love for sharing what you do with others in your heart. Under your belt are tens if not hundreds of examples of amazing cases studies of people you have helped build up and slim down.Two Problems
Two problems. People have stopped coming to you and are doing classes instead.
Secondly, you are behind the game in your education of mobility and functional movement that more and more people are seeking to learn about and participate in.
The biggest trend in the fitness market today is people moving away from solo training and joining in group classes such as crossfit and insanity that build community and camaraderie. The second is yoga and a holistic approach to training the body. In both these cases male participation is skyrocketing – which means they draw away from the need for your one to one PT sessions.
So what strategy can you take to adapt to these trends and maintain, if not increase, your client base?
Here are five things you can do to up-sell yourself to the mobility and group fitness minded client:
- Create community sessions. Group clients (with numbers from 2-6) with similar goals into the same regular time slots. Your net revenue increases because while individual clients pay a fraction per session, you are afforded more people into the most desirable peak spots and a greater return per hour. Clients are also more likely to book additional sessions per week if the rest of the group is also doing the same thing. And giving the group mid and long range targets will keep them more interested in your programming.
- Build a community outside the sessions. Set up a facebook groups for your clients based on their general goals so they can chat amongst themselves. People in a small group are very eager to share with and elevate the people in their group if you can make them feel like family. Make sure your clients are on your instagram and that you regularly post photos of both them and their workouts.
- Thinking about sessions in terms of body part splits is over. Unless you are training someone who is headed for a physique or bodybuilding competition, you will need to start talking to your clients about their goals more holistically. Don’t get me wrong , you still need to target muscles, but people’s mindsets are more geared to an overall approach now. Clients want it ALL : aesthetic and strength and functionality and fitness. To cater to this new mentality, break
your sessions into what needs to be achieved: be it muscle toning and development, cardio fitness, fat targeting or mobility. Build sessions and overall programming around these and give clients session homework that they need to do on their own to fulfil all the requirements you would want them to do in a week. - Enrol on a mobility course as your next CPD. If you do not know the basic five power moves integrally learn them. REPS has many of these or enrol in the level one Crossfit certification to get you where you need to be to demonstrate and integrate these moves correctly into your sessions. This knowledge will also help you with your personal sessions even if your clients are also opting to also do group sessions. correct mistakes and individual form problems.
- Start learning about yoga. Every sports team in America is in on it for a reason. It works. Granted yoga has gotten a bad rap for the turf of bendy girls and bearded and beaded vegan men. Don’t let that stop you. Yoga has 3000 years of study behind it and for most of that was only practiced by men. It is a mega fitness movement and you need to know the postures and terminology so you can incorporate the injury prevention and increased sport power and performance aspects into your sessions.
Try these out and you are sure to create a whole new market and demand for your talent and passion in personal training.
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