Time Management And Your Personal Training Career
If you’re looking to become a personal trainer then you must develop great time management skills. Our work schedules become crazy! Waking up before the sun rises and going to bed after dark is our typical schedule. Also, new people are always coming in and some leave. Clients go out of town, people get sick, or things just happen; because of this our work schedules are truly inconsistent. We must control the little that we have with proper time management. Without it you will become restless or completely burnt out. There must be a balance.
You perform a 55 minute service; your time is money. The number one reason why it’s important to stay on top of time management is to make as much money as possible. To do this, it’s important to schedule as many clients as you can back to back. Having your clients come to one location and scheduling them back-to-back is the most efficient way to make the most amount of money with your time. Try scheduling your clients this way with 5 to 10 minute breaks in-between.
When I first began really grow my clientele, I found myself getting home at 10pm and waking up the next day at 4:50am to train 6-8 clients in downtown San Francisco. My schedule was freakin' crazy…..(still kindof is). I would train 3-4 people in the morning, probably 1 in the evening and 2-3 people in the later afternoon. After doing this for 4 months I began feeling very exhausted. I started to become irritable, fatigued, and LATE! You never want to be late! My schedule eventually caught up to me, and my lack of rest started to really put a wear and tear on my body. This is when I began to manage my time a lot better.
In the beginning of a trainers career, most trainers can't choose their schedules. You pretty much take whatever client you can get. Until you’ve grown your clientele and have consistent people coming in, you can’t be very picky about what time of the day you work. (It takes about a year to build a good amount of clientele.) When You reach the point where you can now pick and choose who you want to work with and what times, decide on a time that works best for you.
Personally, I’ve decided to take a break from training as much in the afternoon. I pushed all of my clientele to the morning and early afternoon. In the process I lost a couple clients, but in the end it was worth it for the bigger picture. I highly recommend choosing one time period to do most of your work. Managing your work, either in the morning or afternoon will save you so much time and will also let you rest. You have to remember our job is to help people, but we cannot help people if we don’t help ourselves first. This will also open up a lot of free time to do other meticulous work that needs to be done to run a business such as emails and file paper work.
We are our own boss, so as a trainer you must decide when to take a day off. Everyone needs a day off! There are times when things get tight and we have a lot of work, but we deal with people aaaaalllll daaaaayyyy looonnngg, so to have time for yourself or your significant other is very important. Trainers should always take at least one day out of the week to dedicate to just themselves and not work.