10 Tips for Success for Employing the Hybrid Personal Training Model

The fitness world continues to evolve and shift to the digital space. Thus, hybrid personal training models are growing in popularity. What is a hybrid model? Well, it’s essentially about maximizing the reach you have with your clients both in-person and virtually. Blending the two models can increase your business growth and maximize the time you have in your schedule.

However, navigating the world of hybrid personal training can be an interesting learning process for many reasons. If you are a personal trainer who has only conducted in-person training throughout your career, then it can be challenging. However, it is worth understanding how it could improve your personal training. So let’s get into some tips for success and tips for making the transition to the virtual landscape of the hybrid training model.

How can trainers benefit from the hybrid personal training model?

Using the hybrid model, you will find that your time invested in creating fitness programs will be a long-lasting one. When using virtual means to develop your training programs and training style, you have more tools at your fingertips and the ability to work and re-work programs to fit your clients’ needs.

Save more time on repeatedly building out detailed programs or locating files on clients in multiple places. With more time saved, you will have more time for yourself and other clients.

You can even expand your business model to fit in on demand fitness programs for an extra source of revenue. This is a more hands-off approach to providing training and fitness guidance to clients you may actually never meet with in person.

With that being said, you will have the ability to train your clients without the limitation of your time or place. Is there a vacation you have been wanting to book for a while but haven’t been able to make the time for?

By offering virtual training as well as in-person training, you will be able to service your clients from anywhere in the world. Just assign them the workouts, tasks, and nutrition plans you want them to follow for the week while you go live out your dream vacation. Better yet, make money while on your vacation by meeting with clients virtually for sessions.

How can clients benefit from the hybrid personal training model?

Tracking milestones and progress is easy using a virtual platform. When assigning workouts and other fitness plans virtually through an app like FitSW, clients can immediately see their progress for specific exercises and can track other metrics as well.

It’s more flexible for clients who have ever-changing schedules. For clients who have schedules that often throw a monkey wrench in your schedule as a trainer, it’s easier to give them the flexibility of virtual training. You can always meet with these clients in person to have physical check-ins and learning sessions for new exercises.

Shows a mark of progress when clients must hold themselves more accountable for completing tasks and meeting with the trainer less or not at all.

Tips for Transitioning

1. Establish the times you are open for communication
2. Structure your payment options and scale down the price for virtual-only clients
3. Hash out plans with your in-person clients for how to reach them virtually and in-person
4. Designate an office space for yourself
5. Use software like FitSW to house all the information on your clients in one place and scheduling

1. Set Your Availability

Right off the bat, set your times for availability and the times you are willing to communicate with clients. If you do not set these times off the bat, then you leave too much room for clients to dictate your schedule. For best practice, share a living schedule with your clients so that they can see when you are available and request times with you.

Most importantly, establish the times you wish to be open to communicating with clients and then stick to those. Your commitment to the times you set will reflect in your success as a hybrid personal trainer.

2. Structure Your Pricing at Scale of your In-person Training

What do you charge per session for your in-person sessions? Your virtual sessions can be priced similarly. However, the fitness programs you assign with more of a hand-off approach can vary in price.

If you already follow a monthly subscription model for your clients, then it’s best practice to scale that price down by 40-60% for your virtual training.

Moreover, vary the ways you generate income by providing options for one-time purchases, you can set up a subscription membership to your training programs and sessions, or sell packages for your training services.

3. Communicate with Your Current Clients About Transitioning

Before taking on any new clients virtually or in person, sit down with your current clients and ask them for their feedback. Communicating with your clients regularly to see what is going well with your training and what isn’t will keep you on your best game.

Feedback from clients before making a transition in your business model will help you to smooth over any kinks that could occur in the process. Sitting down with each client individually to work out a schedule and communication plan will help you to see where you will have time to fit in more clients and how many more clients you can actually take on.

4. Designate an Office Space for Yourself

Having a space to sit down and focus on work is wildly important to being productive. Personal trainers are often on the go and working at different locations. However, with a hybrid personal training model, you will not be in the position to be on the go all the time. You could conduct almost half of all your training online, from the comfort of your home.

5. Use Client Management Software like FitSW

As a hybrid trainer, you will have clients to manage all over the place, therefore, you need to be able to easily manage them. Using a client management software like FitSW can help you easily communicate, manage, and deliver assignments to your online clients and your in-person clients.

FitSW has features to help you manage your clients from their legal forms and contracts to the workouts and nutrition plans you assign to them. This means you can ditch that cluttered filing cabinet or briefcase where you house any documents on your clients. Not to mention, you will have all progress tracking options located in the app as well. You will not need to spend the time building out progress charts or crunching any data. FitSW does it for you!

Moreover, use this software for your in-person clients as you would for your online clients (or hybrid ones) to keep track of all information on them. For example, build-out and assign a workout to your client for your next session. This way they can review the workout and what to expect out of the session. Afterward, you or the client can enter in their results from the workout and check it off as complete. Forget about tracking this information on paper.

Tips for Overall Success

1. Evaluate your training regularly by yourself and get feedback from clients
2. Use the virtual means to establish a greater sense of community – bring your clients together for peer support
3. Make sure the programs, workouts, and nutrition plans you build are detailed and reusable. Saves you time and trouble in the long run
4. Survey your virtual clients and what they have access to for equipment and space
5. Build on your communication skills and have multiple forms of reminders set for following up with clients – have your own personal calendar for tracking your goals as a trainer

1. Conduct Consistent Monthly Evaluations of Your Training

You will only find success in the hybrid personal training model if you consistently evaluate how your training is going. Conduct your own evaluation of your client’s progress and the revenue you are generating.

Are you charging enough for your services? Are you charging too much? Do your clients respond well to new assignments? Do you communicate effectively with clients?

Ask your clients to evaluate how you are doing by collecting their feedback on a regular basis. You can actually collect feedback from clients in FitSW with client notes on events. After any task, nutrition plan, or workout clients can leave notes for the trainer on how it went and what thoughts they have on it.

Feedback will be important throughout your career as a personal trainer but will be especially important in building a successful hybrid personal training model. Suggestions from improvement will help you continue to meet your clients’ needs and your clients will appreciate being heard. This makes a huge effect on your client retention rate.

2. Establish a Sense of Community Between Your Clients

As a hybrid personal trainer, you will find yourself needing to communicate much more with online clients or clients that you rarely see in person. This means your position as an accountability partner has to fire on 110% to ensure your clients are getting the attention they need from you to stay accountable.

A way to ensure this the extra mile is by creating a sense of community between your clients. Create Facebook groups and other methods for them to interact with each other so that they have a community for support and accountability rather than just you, the trainer. Often, people do not have a community of support to turn to in their personal lives, so your training would be much more valuable if you can help orchestrate a community to support your clients.

Not only does it hold your clients accountable, but it holds you accountable as a trainer. With a community open for discourse between your clients, you will need to be on your A-game with equal attention to clients, client progression, and overall communication.

3. Build Reusable and Detailed Plans

All the hard work you put into going virtual should be detailed and reusable. Going virtual is supposed to make your life a bit easier and boost your business growth. So let it do just that! Once you put all the initial work into building out your system for communicating and sharing assignments with clients, ensure that it is a system built to last as your personal training business grows.

Everything you create for clients should be copied and saved as templates for ease of use for other clients and reuse. All the elbow grease you initially put in will help you down the road and save you lots of time you can be spending on yourself and your clients.

4. Establish Requirements for Clients Before They Sign Up for Your Training

You must attract and commit to helping virtual clients who you can best serve. Therefore, your clients should fall into some niche that you can best assist in reaching goals. Your clients must also be well prepared to hire a personal trainer, so create a list of equipment for your potential clients to read and invest in before starting any training with you.

This will help keep your clients on the same page as you making it easier to assign workouts, tasks, and meal plans they can actually participate in. Setting these requirements and guidelines will also show an air of professionalism to potential clients. They will know what to expect and that you mean business when it comes to helping them reach their fitness goals.

5. Stick Closely to your Calendar

For hybrid personal training, your calendar will be your best friend. Do not rely on just your memory for following up with your clients. Consistent communication and reminders will help your virtual clients stay successful in their assignments and reaching their goals. That being said, create a calendar for yourself and one that is shared with your clients.

A calendar for yourself will help you to stay on track with the tasks you need to complete for your clients. Schedule times for yourself to create and assign nutrition plans, workouts, and tasks. Assign yourself time to review the results of those assignments for your clients and some time to do any other client management tasks you need to complete. This includes times when you need to reach out to your clients to remind them of assignments or check in with them to see how things are going.

A calendar shared with your clients will help them to know when you are available for a session, pep-talk, or advice. Let your clients request times to meet with you. When your time is taken up, then they will know based on your shared calendar.

Overall, having a detailed agenda for yourself and one that your clients can view will help you manage your hybrid personal training in the long run.

Overall

Your time and service are valuable, so make it available to clients from anywhere. A hybrid personal training model can push you to use tools that will make your business more efficient. It can also make your services more accessible to clients who need help getting started on their journey to being fit and well.

Get started using FitSW today to help you better understand the tools and resources available to you to run a successful hybrid personal training business. With the opportunity to change more lives and open the line for extra sources of revenue, why not give it a try today?