How Important Are Your Relationships with Your Clients?

Communication can be known as one of the most important components to a relationship. Along with trust and accountability, adding a communication aspect to online coaching is something that can make or break a client’s health and fitness progress.

A trainer is very similar to a teacher in school. If a client doesn’t have that accountability to their ‘homework’ (exercise), how can that client learn to trust and believe in their ‘teacher’ (trainer)?

Let’s look at a few ways you can put the groundwork in to build relationships with your clients through Trainerize:

General Communication

A simple message 24-hours after a 1 on 1 workout to a client can go a long way. Simply put, “Great job yesterday, Joe. You really impressed me with that two-minute plank at the end of your workout!”.

Or:

With an online client, from checking the previous day’s automated email sent to your email inbox, you can see what your clients did for the previous day’s training, assessments, or notes left. The automated email is a fantastic tool to help remind a trainer to follow up with a client’s previous day.

Sending a message the next day will speak volume of how much you care about your clients.

One example that is primarily seen is the note of a substituted exercise a client may have left in the notes section. For example, “Hey, Patrick! I was not able to use the 35 Lb dumbbells for my dumbbell rows at 3 sets of 10 reps. Instead, I used the 25 Lb. dumbbells and did 3 sets of 12-15 reps. Is that okay?”

With a message like that, you can easily see that and shoot your client a message the next day. Reassuring the client that it was okay to do that will give the individual a sense of independence. Of course, a trainers purpose is to tell a client what to do for their training. However, educating is one primary purpose of being a personal trainer. So giving a client some freedom to adjust their workout, it will only make the exercise that much more enjoyable for the trainee.

Direct Messaging

Being well known, one of the most important features of the Trainerize app is the direct messaging tool. This is where a client will share any questions, exercise victories, or problems that they encounter. Being able to receive and respond to a message within 24-hours will help build any relationship.

However, being able to respond to a direct message within minutes of receiving the message is something that clients will learn to appreciate greatly. Most of the time, the messages will come during a workout. So if you receive a message from a client, responding promptly will help the relationship between you and your clients in a positive manner. Before online training was popular, personal training was the main avenue of coaching. Now that is changing. So when someone messages their coach, they may not expect an answer right away. Communicating with minimal time between is what will build relationships that much more.

Communication Without Direct Messaging

Personally, one thing that has caught some traction and enjoyment is weekly workouts to trainees. Aside from their personal programming, updating all clients programming with one weekly workout has been something that a lot of clients have seemed to love. This helps a client spice up his or her training. As important as programming is for a person’s goals, there must be some curve balls every now and then. People like surprises, so give your clients some surprises that they will appreciate.

With the weekly workouts, I took that a step further. I have started to add other exercise, motivation, or nutritional tips to their weekly update. This can be done by writing some notes at the end of the weekly workout directions.

Doing these weekly workouts and tips is just another way to separate you from the competitor gym or trainer across town. People love convenience, so give it to them!

Put yourself in your client’s shoes

The most important aspect to building relationships with a person is by putting yourself in their position and understanding what is going on in their life.

This is as simple as treating others the way you would want to be treated. As a coach, we must always have an open mind, especially when communicating through an online platform. It is seen all of the time, frustration or miscommunication via a text message, right? Well, this can happen with clients via the messaging portion in the app. As a trainer, learning to have an open mind and really understanding your client, that can go a long way to possibly working with a client for years or decades.

The purpose of a trainer is to motivate, educate, and inspire people to do things that they may not only need to do, but want to do. Being able to communicate those three traits to a client in a positive manner, that is what will help build positive relationships through Trainerize.