Key customer care skills needed to be a successful fitness professional

Lack of eye contact, hands in pockets, slouched posture, scruffy appearance, blunt responses, poor advice, authoritarian approach, shy or overly opinionated.

These are just some of the bad traits of a fitness professional that will likely not last very long in the industry!

Yet unfortunately, you see these sorts of things a LOT in gyms all around the world!

The YOUR Academy Approach

At YOUR Academy, we tell our learners from the very start of their professional journey, that excellent customer care skills are a vital attribute of the successful personal trainer. Let’s explain how we do this within our personal training qualifications, and what makes YOUR Academy different.

Assessment Methods at YOUR Academy

The first way we test learners customer care skills is via the learner completing a written worksheet. This allows the individual to get a baseline level of understanding as to what good customer care skills look like. A lot of this information may already be known by the individual based on their career so far. So, passing this assessment is not particularly daunting or difficult, and by itself will not prepare the individual for working competently as a gym instructor or personal trainer once qualified.

So, there are other ways learners need to demonstrated good customer care skills to pass their fitness qualification with YOUR Academy.

Practical Demonstration: Client Consultation

The second way is via learners completing a consultation, demonstrating their ability to be professional, confident and knowledgeable, as well as displaying good communication, listening and customer care skills.

At YOUR Academy, we emphasise to learners the importance of practicing these ‘soft skills’.

Practicing speaking to others about their goals, their barriers, their concerns and their aspirations is VITAL to becoming competent and confident in completing these consultations in the real world. The key takeaway learners realise from doing this, is that a client consultation should be a conversation all about the client, not about how lean the personal trainer is or how far the PT can run or how much they can bench!

The conversation during a client consultation needs to be all about the gym member. All the answers a fitness professional needs to find out to help the gym member train effectively can be found by asking probing questions, to begin understanding the individual sat in front of them.

Too many fitness professionals fall foul during consultations by speaking non-stop, aiming to prove their education, knowledge and value. This is wrong. Within a client consultation, it should be the client that is mainly speaking, with the fitness professional simply guiding the conversation to find out the necessary information to then offer suitable advice.

An example to what we mean is below:

Fitness professional: “So tell me why you joined the gym?”

Gym member: “I want to get a bit stronger”.

Fitness professional: “Ok great, can I ask why you want to get stronger?”

This shows 2 things to the gym member. Firstly, that the fitness professional has listened to what has just been said. And secondly, it gets the client to elaborate on what they actually said to help the fitness professional give more specific advice.

Gym member: “I find I struggle to lift heavy things like suitcases and shopping bags, and I’ve always struggled with press ups so would like to get a bit better at doing those”.

The fitness professional now has a lot more information that they can use to offer the client suitable advice about what exercises would be best for them to carry out at the gym.

But without any further follow up questions, the fitness professional is still slightly limited in giving out suitable advice. So again, digging a little deeper will help reveal more about the individual.

Fitness professional: “You mentioned there you want to lift heavier objects, and improve your press up ability, do you want me to put in some upper body and lower body exercises that could help you improve these things?

This could then be followed up with “Would you prefer using free weights or resistance machines?”

So, it’s the fitness professionals job to ask the right questions, but it’s the client that has all the answers, not the fitness professional!

Getting good at client consultations by demonstrating good customer care skills is a key trait of a successful fitness professional.

Assessment: Delivering a Workout

The third and final way of learners having to demonstrate good customer care skills is via them delivering an assessed workout with the client whom they consulted with.

This assessment still requires the learner to demonstrate good communication skills, but also now tests their ability to display good practical skills such as exercise demonstrations, explanations, teaching points, corrections and adaptations. The language a learner uses needs to match the education and understanding of their client, the exercises they recommend to the client need to be suitable to the client’s ability level and take into consideration any injuries they have, along with their overall likes/dislikes.

By demonstrating all of this, learners will have demonstrated overall that they have good customer care skills. It is also vital that newly qualified fitness professionals continue to practice and develop these key skills in the real world with future individuals, as well as reflect on their performance and identify any areas where performance is not as good as it could be.

These are the skills that sets apart the successful fitness professionals from the less successful ones.

So, get good at communicating with gym members and you’ll be halfway there as a successful fit pro!