The Digital Fit Series Pt. IV
Welcome to the Digital Fit Series, a collaboration between Australian Fitness Academy and KIXXFIT. This blog series will provide readers with an insight into how fitness graduates can successfully transition into the online coaching space by offering valuable information, advice and practical tips from industry experts.
The life and schedule of a Personal Trainer can look a little bit different to the average person working the usual Monday to Friday 9-5 grind. The opportunity to work independently and on a flexible schedule that works for you is one of the best things about a career in the fitness industry. You can be your own boss, set your preferred availabilities, and build a successful business in a thriving industry that is continuing to grow.
If you’ve got to the point where you’re super keen to grow your health and fitness community online, but still love training clients face-to-face and aren’t sure how to balance your time, let us help you out with some tips!
There’s no denying that building or managing a successful business takes a lot of hard work and dedication, but it doesn’t mean your whole life needs to get thrown out the window. And while it will definitely take some experimenting and some trial and error, once you get the balance right, you’ll reap the rewards of having two successful components to your business, and also have time to enjoy the finer things in life!
Without any further ado, here’s our tips on how to balance your time as an online and face-to-face PT:
Create A Schedule
Have you ever heard of the saying ‘by failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail’? Preparation is the absolute key to success when juggling a busy work schedule.
Creating a weekly plan will provide a foundation for you to manage your time and schedule efficiently. Designing a template for your week can be pretty simple – all you need to do is specify in advance how you want to spend your time during the week. You can set this up either on your phone or computer, or if you’re a bit old school, go and grab a big diary or wall calendar!
You can designate blocks for seeing clients face-to-face, writing programs for your online clients, completing administration tasks, creating content for your socials, and most importantly, spending time with friends and family.
Structuring your week in advance will ensure you are delegating enough time to each part of your business, while also allowing time for yourself.
Allocate Clients To A Regular Time
Locking in a regular time with your face-to-face clients is super beneficial. Not only will it keep your schedule consistent and at a time that suits you, it will also help foster a long-term relationship with that client as it will enable them to build their personal training sessions into their weekly routine.
When building your schedule, aim to create blocks of sessions. If you’re booking a client into your diary, always try and place them next to another client. This way, once you finish with one client, you’ll move straight to the next. This will help you avoid unproductive dead time between clients and allow you to spend your time at the gym much more effectively.
Once you know when you’ll be spending time in the gym training clients face-to-face, you can then start allocating time to your online services. Creating a regular timeslot for sending out check-ins is a great way to keep consistency for your online clients too.
Use Your Time Effectively
There’s no doubting that things won’t always go to plan! You can try and get your clients in back-to-back, but it doesn’t always work. Someone will cancel on you last minute. A client will ask to change their session time half an hour before you’re due to start.
These things happen so try not to get too caught up on it. Instead, use this time effectively and get on top of some daily tasks.
If you’ve got an hour free in between clients, spend some quality time on your online business. Have you got new content you need to film? Do you need to check in with your online community? Are you on top of your social media? Have you got programming to do?
Put that time to good use – you’ll feel so much more productive and better for it!
Choose Quality Over Quantity
The concept of working smarter and not harder most definitely applies when you’re trying to balance your role as both an online and face-to-face trainer. You might think that it’s great that you’re so committed to your career that you never switch off, but overworking yourself won’t make you a better PT.
Make a point of prioritising your productivity over the number of hours you put in.
A good rule to follow is the one touch policy. How often would you sit on your phone or laptop with the intention of working on your online platform, but get distracted by social media or online shopping (me, no never!)? After an hour you realise you haven’t got anything done… damn it.
Give the one-touch policy a go and see where it takes you – the rule is, if you open up your laptop and start replying to an email or start to program a client’s training plan, you’ve now touched it, which means you need to finish what you’ve started before moving on to something else.
Pick The Right Platform
Going online with your personal training services can be a little daunting! If you haven’t had much experience in website development or the tech space, letting the pros at KIXXFIT take care of the scary stuff is the way to go. The time and investment required to set up a digital platform of your own will take away the time you have to put into your face to face clients. Using KIXXFIT’s platform to host your content will take the hassle out of creating your business from scratch and will allow you to balance both communities. You’ll also get the opportunity to expose your business to thousands of potential new clients instantly!
In Summary:
While balancing both an online and face-to-face personal training business will have its challenges, it will certainly be incredibly rewarding. We hope these tips will help you on your journey and ensure you create a healthy work/life balance that also allows you to make time for yourself!
If you’re looking to get started as a Personal Trainer and are keen to find out more about our Cert III & IV in Fitness, click here to speak to a Careers Advisor today.
If you’re already a qualified fitness professional and are excited about the opportunity to grow your health and fitness community online, visit the KIXXFIT digital platform to get started!
If you use this link and sign up as a Coach, you’ll get your first 90 days for only $1.00 with the promo code AFACOACH20.