The Art of Personal Training: Strategies for Client Success

Personal training is lot more skilled job than what most people think. It is a lot more than just recommending any random exercises for 3, 4 or more sets for 8-12 repetitions. A personal trainer can have a huge impact on client’s life. As a personal trainer you do not just transform your clients physically and help in changing their body composition, you also affect their mindset, their body image, their habits which will affect their entire future, their friends, and families too.

The proven way to start as a skilled personal trainer is to start by earning a good personal training certification, this will help you build a strong foundational knowledge about client assessment, program design, common diseases, client psychology, anatomy and physiology of human body, client management and many other aspects of personal training that will help you handle clients.

Use available resources like textbooks on physiology, anatomy, client management, psychology, program design. If you want some recommendations, then you can go for Guyton and Hall Textbook of Medical Physiology, for exercise programming: books by Eric Helms or Mike Israetel are a good start.

So, start with a good certification like ACE, ACSM, NSCA OR NASM, along with that use the online available resources.

Once you have a good skill set and a strong foundation, you can move on to reading and understanding research papers on the topics you find interesting and you want to learn about.

These skills will help you a lot in the future, when you have clients with different problems. A certification can cover most of the things, but it cannot teach you everything there is, so keep learning more and as you deal with more clients, you will realise reading books, research papers was one of the best decisions you ever made.

The second important skill is to make sure that your clients enjoy their workouts. As a coach it is important to understand that making a sustainable workout program is one of the most important and the most under rated tool for the long-term success. Your client will follow the program only if they truly enjoy the program and this is where understanding the client’s mindset is important. Prescribing a bodybuilding program to every client or a cardio workout program to everyone is not a great idea. 

During your personal training course,you will learn about building a program, use of principles like specificity, progressive overload, you will also learn about managing intensity, volume, and frequency.It is important to understand these concepts from a client perspective and how to individualize these concepts, think about how this applies to a CrossFit athlete or a bodybuilder or a general population client. As a general population client one can have a goal to increase strength and improve endurance rather than building more muscle mass, so you need to make sure that you can individualize the program for every client as per needs.

Another strategy that will help you attract more clients and retain your existing clients is having great communication skills. Building better relationship with your clients is vital and this can only be possible if you genuinely care about the client, if you show empathy. Talk to the client outside the training sessions also, talk about their food habits, their meals, their lifestyle habits, the special conditions, and symptoms they are facing and try to make them comfortable, this will build your client’s trust on you. Good communication skills are ever more vital in online personal training.

Next strategy or tool for a personal trainer would be to learn about goal setting. Setting up goals will play a huge role in your client’s journey. As a personal trainer it is important to identify the correct goals for your clients. If you set up wrong goals it can lead to great challenges and obstacles in the future, for example you have a client who has Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease and you are trying to make him gain weight, this can go wrong in the long term. It is important to set up SMART goals to make sure that the goals align with your client’s health markers, performance, short term, and long-term goals. Setting up better goals is critical when it comes to personal training.