Personal Fitness Professional - June 2008 - (Page 22)

c RAISING RATES THROUGH BETTER Part 1 — Pre-planning and taking notes for next time By Kaiser Serajuddin ince your training session is the actual product you’re selling as a personal trainer, paying attention to how it’s designed is one of your most important tasks. The goal of any trainer that wants to retain a consistent client base is to understand and learn how to design extraordinary sessions. Once you’ve done this, you can reﬁne the process and eventually have your sessions be some of the best on the market. When you can spit out high-quality sessions eﬀortlessly, you’ll see your earnings unleashed, and your practice will start to grow rapidly. Just like any job, this one can become repetitive, but in personal training, that’s a good thing. It is at this point that you can gain mastery, which should be the goal of any professional. When you understand every nuance of how to do your job, you can begin to improve its quality and eventually move up to a leadership role. Training follows a diﬀerent learning curve than other ﬁelds — the job gets remarkably easier as time goes on. But as the job gets easier, your salary will also increase. Unlike most other professions where an increase in pay is usually accompanied by more work and responsibility, it’s the opposite with personal training: An increase in salary will actually occur when the job is at its easiest. THE ILLUSION OF CHANGE If you use common sense, you may think that results are what’s most important to the client and that’s what they’re paying for — after all, it’s the reason they called you in the ﬁrst place, isn’t it? But believe it or not, this is actually a far secondary concern; the higher priority is the feeling that they’re achieving results. This idea was explained well by consulting guru Jeﬀrey Lant: “Advisors provide the illusion of change without the reality.” What does that mean? The session must feel good — the actual experience of the session itself must be worth the money, irrespective of any end result the client is going for. If they don’t like it while they’re doing it, they’re unlikely to wait it out for any particular result. This also means we can implement some techniques to increase this illusion of change: • Pre-planning sessions • Taking notes during the session • Changing locations during the session • Providing outstanding service While these techniques will make a positive impact on how much progress is achieved, they have a more immediate eﬀect. They create the appearance of a higher value session. It’s this image that must be maintained at all times in order to charge premium rates. THE PRE-PLANNED SESSION The key to delivering best-inﬁeld quality workouts to your clients every time comes down to one simple secret: Plan your workouts beforehand. All you need to do is play the workout out in your head before the session, taking into account your clients’ previous workouts and the bigger picture of their goals and future progress. If I had to point to one thing that has 22 JUNE-JULY2008 · WWW.FIT-PRO.COM http://WWW.FIT-PRO.COM

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Personal Fitness Professional - June 2008

Personal Fitness Professional - June 2008 Contents Letter From the Editor, Writers To Franchise Or Not To Franchise? Current Controversies Insuring Success Case Study Exercise Spotlights Raising Rates Through Better Session Design Mark Your Calendar The Perfect Ad The Movement Triad Exercise Spotlights Product Profile New on the Market Spotlight: Brian Boyle

Personal Fitness Professional - June 2008

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