While the fitness industry has seen more than its fair share of fads and gimmicks, online fitness coaching is an emerging tool that continues to grow and prosper. First, it squarely meets the business needs of gyms and personal trainers. Second, it provides clients the customized interactivity that they have come to expect. Third, today’s societal and business trends, such as the expansion of wellness programs, will help breed the environment for its success. While it may seem at first blush like another technology that allows us to disconnect from people (like portable mp3 devices, etc.), its strength actually comes from how it moves us to interact and how it eases communication.
Online coaching is a tool that includes, at a minimum, an online platform that enables a trainer to more easily communicate with clients in order to give instruction and to track results. It can often provide clients with video-based examples to help them learn how to exercise properly. One of the more interesting features is that it allows trainers the resources and time necessary to give more wellthought, better-researched answers to their clients.
Coaching provides an array of benefits that directly increases revenue for both the fitness centers and trainers. Even by using very little of the trainer’s time, a member can still benefit from the trainer’s professional knowledge and experience. By providing coaching services at the fitness center, current trainer offerings can be significantly expanded. Members who cannot regularly communicate with personal trainers can be motivated by using the online coaching platform. It has been proven that members who are engaged with a trainer – in person or online – keep their memberships longer. It is this type of retention that directly adds to the bottom line.
Typically, only one to five percent of fitness center members use a trainer’s services within a fitness center. Potentially, this leaves a large, untapped population of customers who would pay real money for access to the knowledge and experience possessed by personal trainers. Coaching enables the personal trainers to share their expertise with this population, and provides them with an additional revenue stream.
Coaching is filling a larger role in support of corporate wellness programs, children fitness programs and preventive medicine. In order to capitalize on the society’s burgeoning interest in the juncture between wellness and technology, fitness centers would be well advised to invest in implementing a coaching solution.
Michael Haggerty is the President and CEO of Fitsteps, LLC. He can be contacted at 508.839.1405, or by email at mhaggerty@fitsteps.net, or visit www.fitsteps.net.
