How to Stand Out as a Personal Trainer at the Gym

Competing for clients at a gym can be cutthroat. You can have all the passion, education, and skills to work as a trainer, but it’s no use if you can’t win clients. The key to success as a big gym personal trainer is making yourself stand out in a sea of ordinary trainers. 

Why Is it Important to Know How to Stand Out as a Personal Trainer? 

Whether you work independently or as a gym employee, you’ll be competing with other trainers for clients. A common misconception is that gym employee trainers simply have all the clients they need sent their way by the managers. 

The truth is that personal trainers have to hustle in the gym. Sit back and take it easy, and clients will go to other trainers. They have a choice, and you need to set yourself apart to ensure they don’t overlook you. 

Being able to win over new clients is essential to your success as a trainer. Your income is directly proportional to the effort you put in to sign up clients. For these reasons, you need to stand out and offer clients something unique and better than the other trainers. 

Top Tips for Setting Yourself Apart at the Gym

There isn’t one single thing that will ensure you get all the clients you need. You can sell your sessions hard, but if you can’t back them up with results, it doesn’t matter. You can get all the credentials to become an expert in your field, but if you don’t sell yourself, no clients will come your way. Here are the main things you should do to ensure you’re the most sought-after trainer at the gym. 

#1. Get the Right Credentials

You have to start here. This is non-negotiable. At a minimum you need a recognized entry-level personal trainer certification. If a potential client has two options for trainers, everything else being equal between them, they’ll choose the one with a certification. 

Basic personal training certification is a starting point, but it won’t be enough to set you apart in most gyms. It’s likely the other trainers are certified too, but do they have specialties? Are they certified in senior fitness or strength and conditioning? Add extra certifications to your list and become the most educated, credentialed trainer at the gym. 

Learn more: Just starting out as a freshly certified personal trainer? You’ll need to get experience.

#2. Learn to Be a Personal Training Salesman

No one will know you have all those credentials if you don’t advertise it. Working as a trainer means you’re selling yourself and your skills. Selling is an additional skill. Don’t assume anyone can sell successfully without learning how to do it and practicing. 

If you want to catch the attention of gym clients, learn to sell. It might even be worth your while to take a sales course or some business classes. Your passion is fitness, but you must be able to sell your services to make a career of it. 

Start by listing everything you have to offer clients. What makes you a good trainer? What can you do for clients? What’s different about you as compared to other trainers. You need to clarify in your mind what you’re providing before you can sell it. 

#3. Invest in Your Clients

Sales and certifications are concrete and objective. The more abstract side of personal training is how you make your clients feel. They want results, but not from a robot. They enjoy working with a trainer who is personable but professional. 

Clients want to know you care about them as individuals, so take the time to get to know them. Let them see that you’re invested in their success as much as they are. This personal touch is more than most trainers provide, so you’ll really stand out. 

Another way to connect with clients while remaining professional is to be open about your fitness journey. Talk about challenges you’ve faced, how you worked through them, and how you came to get fit and enjoy exercising. 

Connecting with clients is one of the most important functions of a great personal trainer. Listen to this episode of our podcast, Trainers Talking Truths, for more tips on how to build these connections and build your client base.

#4. Demonstrate Results 

Clients want a good experience with their trainer, but ultimately, they come to the gym for results. Any trainer can talk up what they’ll do to help clients meet their fitness goal, but not all take the time to prove that they can do it. 

Assess every client at the beginning and throughout their training program so they can see progress. This keeps existing clients coming back. They’ll also spread the word about how happy they are with their gym results. 

Take this a step further and ask clients if you can share their results with potential new clients, including before and after pictures. Permission is important, especially if you want to use images in marketing materials, but most clients will be happy to help. 

Learn what makes a good personal trainer stand out as a great trainer. 

#5. Embrace Variety and Fun

You may love fitness and working out, but for the average client, it can be a chore that they just want to check off their list. Anything you can do to make the experience more fun will elevate you above the trainers who just do the same routines over and over again. 

Variety is the spice of life and of exercise. Rotate through various workouts and routines so they don’t get bored easily. Ideally, your clients won’t know exactly what to expect when they walk in for a session. Use all the equipment, and different cardio styles, and use sports and games to make sessions more fun for clients. 

Earning additional credentials and taking continuing education courses is one way to be able to offer clients more variety. Take courses in yoga, bodybuilding, kickboxing, powerlifting, sports medicine, and other types of exercise to help you vary the training sessions.

Learn more: How to Write a Personal Trainer Resume

How to Stand Out as a Personal Trainer Online 

Trainers are increasingly working online, which is a completely different ball game when it comes to attracting and keeping clients. Here are some tips to be a standout online personal trainer: 

• Create a strong social media presence. Social media platforms are the best, least expensive way to find and enlist new personal training clients. Become a presence with multiple accounts, connections to relevant influencers, valuable and interesting content, and regular interactions with your followers. It takes some time for the work of building social media pages to pay off, so stick with it and be patient. 

• Find your unique value proposition. This is basically your selling point. What do you have to offer a new client and why should they hire you? This is important in any setting but especially when working online where it’s so easy to get lost in the shuffle. Clearly define what it is you offer—years of experience, proven results, coaching—that is different from other online trainers. Make that the focal point of all your marketing efforts. 

• Home in on your target audience. Online marketing is potentially vast. There are hundreds of millions of people out there. Your efforts will be greatly diluted and ineffective if you don’t focus them on your target client. Define your perfect client, find out where they are online, and market to them. 

• Be responsive. This might seem obvious, but it’s easy to let communication slide when you work online. Lazy trainers will do as little work as possible, but great trainers reach out, interact, and respond to clients in a timely manner. 

Do you have what it takes to be a successful personal trainer? When you understand that success is so much more than simply being a fitness expert, you’ll be ready to make your career dreams come true. 

Becoming the best trainer you can be starts with the ISSA’s Certified Personal Trainer – Self-Guided Study Program. It’s a solid foundation to build your career or business in fitness.