You’ve acquired your personal trainer certification and you are now ready to begin your career as a personal trainer. And you are looking forward to becoming a successful personal trainer, who will help to make a real difference in people’s lives.
But to establish yourself as a successful personal trainer, you will need to have a particular set of qualities, which extend beyond having a personal trainer certification. In this article, we will walk you through the qualities of a personal trainer, which will help you to succeed in your career.
1. Great Communication Skills
The best personal trainers share one important trait – outstanding communication skills. In short, if you want to succeed in this career, you need to have great communication skills.
Good communication skills will help you to interact with clients from all walks of life. You will be able to break down technical parts of a workout into an easy-to-understand format, instruct your clients on how to undertake various workouts as well as follow up with your clients via email, social media or phone.
Also, outstanding communication skills will help you to sell your personal training services to prospective clients. Whether you are creating a blog post for content marketing or an email for nurturing leads, outstanding communication skills will make your marketing easier and more effective.
Furthermore, having great communication skills will help you to establish great relationships with your clients. And, having great relationships will help to boost loyalty and retention rates while leading to more referrals.
2. Desire to Keep Learning
Just like other professions, personal trainers who succeed in this industry and go furthest are those who are willing to keep learning. At the end of the day, your job entails helping and encouraging others to become better versions of themselves, and you should apply the same approach to your career.
For instance, if are a level 2 gym instructor, you can’t work as a personal trainer. While you can work on the gym floor, you can’t train people one on one. As you can see, such a certification is holding you back on the services you can provide and who you can work with.
Also, a client who wants to lose weight may sometimes approach you with nutrition-related or diet-related questions. But, if you only hold a basic personal trainer certification, you won’t be able to provide them with helpful and detailed advice on how to proceed, meaning you would have lost that client to another personal trainer.
By ensuring, you continue learning and upgrading your skills, you will establish yourself as the go-to fitness expert on a wide range of fitness-related topics. As a result, you will get an opportunity of choosing whom to work with, what to charge and how many hours you want to work.
3. Keeps in Touch with Industry Trends
Apart from continuously upgrading your certifications, if you want to become a successful personal trainer, you must be ready to keep up with the latest trends in the fitness industry.
Exercise, working out and fitness technologies are all evolving all the time. Hence, it’s vital to keep in touch with everything that’s going on in the industry. Staying on top of the latest happenings in the fitness industry will help you to continue providing outstanding services to your clients.
And the good news is that, there are numerous resources, which can help you to keep in touch with the latest trends in the industry, including social media platforms, webinars, podcasts, blogs, as well as attending networking events like conferences and workshops.
4. Passionate about Fitness
Being passionate about fitness is one of the most important qualities of a good personal trainer. Ideally, you should be fit, be passionate about fitness and be ready to lead by example. If you are not passionate, you will struggle to motivate your clients. And if you can’t motivate your clients, they won’t achieve their fitness goals, meaning they are not getting their money’s worth.
Also, when you are passionate about your job, you will invest more in your clients, making sure you provide them with the best services possible. Furthermore, you will dedicate more of your resources to growing your fitness business, thus helping it to keep growing and thriving.
5. Patient and Understanding
Being patient and understanding is a huge part of being a successful personal trainer. The main reason behind this is that you will be encountering different clients every day at your fitness facility.
Some clients will be highly motivated while others may need a constant push. Also, some will master how to execute various workouts fast while it will take longer for others. By being a patient and understanding fitness trainer, you will be willing to spend more time with the latter group, as opposed to berating them or shouting at them.
You should also note that most people who are starting their fitness journey are likely to have numerous questions along the way. Furthermore, some may feel anxious or uncomfortable in the new environment.
And as their trainer, you need to come across as someone who is more than willing to listen to them, help them, be patient with them, make them feel comfortable, and help them overcome any confusion, fear, anxiety or other difficulties they may be experiencing in their journey.
By being a patient and understanding trainer you will help all your students to settle in comfortably. Also, they won’t feel overwhelmed by their new routine – which is usually the case with most people when they begin working out in the gym.
6. Dedicated to Clients
Clients are the most important aspect of any type of business. And this also applies to your fitness business. So, if you want to establish yourself as a successful personal training business, you must be dedicated 100% to your clients.
To this end, you need to ensure you always arrive punctually for your workout sessions with your clients. And if possible, you should be arriving a few minutes earlier, so that you can get everything set up before your clients arrive.
Also, you should make sure you address any complaints raised by your clients. And you should do it promptly and professionally. Furthermore, remember to engage with your clients on social media. If a client comments, likes or shares your posts, you should reciprocate their efforts.
7. Ability to Motivate
Throughout your personal training career, you will come across some students who are shot on self-confidence, as a result, they may take a longer time to learn how to do some exercises. Also, you may come across some that may have joined your gym, but are not fully convinced whether this new lifestyle is a good idea for them.
And as their personal trainer, it’s your work to motivate them, convince them that this is the right path and help them to learn how to undertake the different workouts. Hence, the ability to motivate is also a key characteristic of an effective personal trainer. You have to find ways to stay motivated yourself!
Some of the methods that you can use to motivate your clients include giving out praise along frequently, even when a client achieves a small accomplishment, providing clear benefits of each type of exercise as well as showing genuine interest in their progress.
Also, you can surprise your students with gifts, whenever they manage to complete one of their fitness goals. These approaches will help to motivate and keep them going, even when they are feeling like giving up.
The better you are at motivating your clients, the more positive and confident they will feel about themselves. As a result, they are more likely to keep coming back to your fitness center for their sessions.
8. Organized
Being an organized person applies in almost all careers. But, it’s even more important for a personal trainer to be organized – especially if you are running a freelance fitness business.
As a freelance personal trainer, you are responsible for running all aspects of your business. For instance, you have to set your schedule, which is usually not the case when you are employed in a gym. And if you are not organized, you will find it extremely hard to attend sessions on time.
Furthermore, you also have to create time for marketing your fitness business, following up on leads and most importantly, keeping your current clients happy and satisfied. And, the only way you will manage to attend to all these tasks is by being organized and managing your time properly.
So, if you are not organized or you have poor time-management skills and you are looking to become a self-employed personal trainer, you need to start working on this important characteristic of a trainer.
9. Professional
Professionalism is also one of the key qualities of a personal trainer. So, from the way you dress to the way you carry out your workout sessions, you should present yourself professionally at all times.
So, don’t be the personal trainer that abandons a client then spends the entire time watching videos on YouTube or Tik Tok. Instead, you should be with your client throughout the entire session, regardless of whether they are doing squats at the rack or cooling down at the treadmill.
Also, ensure you are professionally dressed at all times. As much as you have the luxury of wearing casual or active clothing, that doesn’t give you an excuse to be shabby. So, keep your clothes clean and fresh, trim your nails if you are a male trainer, keep your hair clean and fresh and remember to wear deodorant.
By carrying and presenting yourself professionally, you will come across as a personal trainer who takes his work seriously. And as you may expect, most people would prefer training with a personal trainer who takes their work seriously.
10. Wrapping It Up
Becoming a successful personal trainer requires a combination of both hard and soft skills. And by incorporating the qualities we’ve discussed in this article into your practice, you will eventually become the go-to personal trainer in your area, grow your clientele and establish a successful fitness brand.