Commercial gym personal trainers, want more clients?

Written By Harry James Pointon on .

Working in a commercial gym can be a daunting experience, if you want a booked up diary walking the floor is essential, but doing it in a way where people don’t put up all their barriers and tell you to F off is paramount. Unlike door to door sales you are going to see the people behind the door every day, and your first impression really does count. So approaching gym members for the first time correctly is essential. I realise you got into the industry to train people but if you can’t sell your services effectively it doesn’t matter how good a trainer you are, you’ll just be training yourself and sitting in the gym clicking your fingers.

When I first started in a commercial gym, I found it very difficult and almost thought about quitting, but I decided to take a step back and look at what I was doing wrong and how I could change things. I did some studying, changed locations and within 2 weeks was doing 30 paid sessions per week. It was an amazing feeling. First thing you must realise is potential clients don’t want a personal trainer and they don’t care about you, your qualifications, your experience at least thats not what there interested in initially. They want to know how they can achieve the results they are at the gym to achieve quicker. If you can show them how to achieve the results they want quicker than they can themselves, they may decide they want to be your personal training client.

So here is a cheat sheet to build a booked up diary so you don’t need to work free for your gym.

  1. Introduce yourself to gym members, take the time to learn their name, why they are at the gym, what they want to achieve and any problems they are facing. Offer tips for free or give the client a few exercise demonstrations that will speed up their progress. Next time you see them ask them how they have found applying your tips and ask if you could help in any other way, simply look to offer value here.
  2. Take a mental note of the people that you meet that you think could be interested in personal training. Give these people the opportunity to trial your service for 2-4 sessions for free, let them see that you could save them a huge amount of time and heartache in the gym by employing you to help them. This also makes you look busy and other customers will be more likely to ask about your services and even if those on the free trial don’t sign up after as a paid client that doesn’t mean their friends or family wont when there telling people about you.
  3. Ensure you train your clients in a way that they could not do themselves, train them safer, teach them perfect technique, educate them along the way and make them work very hard.

If your consistent with the 3 tips above, you’ll have people knocking at your door not the other way round. Everyone in the gym wants to get in better shape, all you have to show them that you can help them get there quicker. Ensure you don’t try to rush the process. You don’t want them to elicit there “I’m not been sold” guard up. Don’t try to sell, just give, give and then give some more for cash when they are ready to become a full time client.

Once your fully booked up you will face your next problem as a trainer, lack of space in your commercial gym and it being too busy to do the workouts you want to do, when that time comes I may be able to help. I rent my private gym out to the best personal trainers to work alongside my team of expert trainers.