Introduction
A personal trainer questionnaire is a questionnaire potential clients fill out to apply to a personal training program. They are a set of questions the trainer asks to learn more about their clients so they can offer them the best-personalized service possible.
That’s one thing questionnaires are good for; getting more information about your clients. But that’s not the only thing. Trainers also use questionnaires to filter their clients. As much as you want to increase your clientele, not everyone that comes your way can be your client. The questionnaire helps you know if they are a good fit for you as a trainer. This helps you not to take on more than you can chew.
A trainer can’t accept all potential clients, and you just have to be okay with that as a trainer. Being an expert trainer means you can curate a special list of clients to whom you can provide the best services at a time. Having more on your plate than you can do is not good for your business; it’ll end up with some clients not getting the service they paid for and then being unhappy with your business. As a business, you can’t afford that, which is why you must create a process that helps you select the best clients to work with.
What Is the Ideal Number of Clients for a Personal Trainer?
Many variables go into deciding how many clients a personal trainer can and should have. This is important to decide, so you don’t end up stretching yourself too thin. A committed individual will often workout three to four times a week, so with that number, a trainer should be able to have up to 20 clients comfortably. This is the ideal number, it doesn’t mean a trainer can’t have more or less.
Deciding the number of clients a personal trainer should have is dependent on some factors. Let’s consider some of these factors.
1. How much time can you commit to your clients as a trainer?
What is the nature of your training business? Is it full-time or part-time? Obviously, as a full-time trainer, you have more time on your hands to attend to more clients, but as a part-time trainer, you don’t have the luxury of time to take on a load of clients. You need to be able to fully commit to your clients and give them the absolute best service. This includes checking in on them and seeing how close they are to their goals. It is recommended that you ask your clients about their progress every week, two weeks, or even monthly so that you will be able to determine whether or not their program is working, if something needs to be tweaked, or if they aren’t putting in the work.
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2. The packages you offer
The type of packages and sessions you offer would most likely affect how many clients you can have as a personal trainer. For example, if you offer long, intense sessions with your clients, that means it’ll take longer to complete a session with a client and so you can’t have as many clients because you’ll need enough time to effectively complete the training with a particular client. The longer you have to spend with your clients, the shorter your client list will be.
3. The number of clients you need for your business to make a profit
The expenses of running a personal training business can be daunting. You need to know how many paying clients you should have to make it possible for you to cover these expenses.
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After carefully considering these factors, you’ll be able to determine how many clients your personal training business needs.
Why Is It Important That You Filter Clients
A personal training business cannot afford to accept just about anybody that comes their way. This is because, as a personal trainer, you can’t cater to everybody looking for personal training services. Some personal trainers are better suited for some clients, every client does not want the same thing, and if you want to be successful as a trainer, you have to find the right clients for your business. Getting the right clients is just as important as getting clients in the first place. With the right clients, you’re sure to be providing them with the right service as a trainer to produce the right results. You’re putting in your time and energy without getting anything out of it. This is because, as a trainer, what qualifies your success or failure is your clients’ reaching their fitness goals.
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There are also different types of clients, and personal trainers must decide which type of client they want to train. Personal training clients can be grouped into three categories; performance clients, physique clients, and fitness clients. With these categories, you can see there are different clients with different expectations in terms of results.
Performance clients are clients that train for performance in a particular sport; whether recreationally or professionally. They train to ensure they are in optimum physical condition to compete. These types of clients are always looking to push themselves to compete at even higher levels.
Physique Clients on the other hand are those that train to put their bodies in a shape they like. They don’t do it to compete in a sport or anything physically competitive, they do it to achieve a great physical form. These types of clients are not just individuals who want are looking to take lots of photos, the truth is that a good amount of these types of clients are not looking to put in the amount of effort, dedication, and sacrifice they need to make to achieve the results we see in magazines. So when working with these types of clients, you know how to work with them to bring out the best in them as a trainer.
Fitness clients are clients that train to relieve stress, lose weight, and add muscle or tone their muscles. They do it because they enjoy doing it. Although there are many challenges involved with working with fitness clients because there is such a large variety of people to work with, You are also mostly in charge of your client’s overall well-being, unlike high-performance athletes or physique clients.
Depending on the type of client you choose as a personal trainer, you know what your client wants and expects from you. All these clients don’t train the same way, so you must decide what type of client you want to train. When you know the type of client you want to train, you can filter out the ones you don’t want to work with.
Are personal training questionnaires the best way to filter clients?
Personal training questionnaires are a great way to filter clients. It’s one of the most effective ways because it gives you the control to ask the clients the right questions and get the answers you need to decide whether to accept them as a client or not. Without questionnaires, you can’t know if your prospective client is a good match for you as a trainer.
There are medical questions, lifestyle questions, and even personal questions you get to ask in a personal training questionnaire that gives you valuable insight into the type of client you’re working with and if they are the type of client you’re looking for.
This saves you time and energy instead of just going with the flow and training them as a client, only to find out a while after working with them that they are not the right client for your business. This also saves your client money, time, and energy. You get to protect the reputation of your business as well because when you work with a client that’s not right for your business, you won’t be able to help them get the results they need, and that’s not good for your business. Research has shown that customers are more likely to write a review of a business when the service is bad than when it’s good. You can’t risk having a reputation as a personal training business where your clients don’t get what they pay for.
Conclusion
As a business, you can’t serve every personal training client out there in the world. It’s just not possible. Attempting to do so would only wear you out and affect your business negatively. To avoid that, you have to filter your clients. You have to know what type of client you’re looking for before accepting or rejecting them.
Rejecting clients as a business is not something any business enjoys doing, but it is necessary if you want to run an effective business. That’s the important thing as a personal training business, that you are helping your clients reach their goals. Questionnaires allow you to meet them and get to know them before working with them. They let you know their expectations so you can meet them. It’s a wild goose chase trying to meet expectations you don’t even know about.
