February is a popular time of year to see a lot of those “eager beaver” January clients fall off the band wagon. Not saying that all of them do, but it is common that people tend to lose motivation along the way. What can we do as online personal trainers to keep those new clients we gained in January as paying clients for the rest of the year?

Is it possible for an online trainer? Yes!

Keeping clients motivated through online training is much more difficult than it is for a client you see face to face on a regular basis; however, that doesn’t mean it is impossible. One thing I find works really great is setting a variety of small fitness goals to inspire healthy habits for all of your online training clients and offering great prizes for the winners (such as one month of free training, t-shirts, supplements, or gift cards etc.)

Here are some small goal ideas you can send to your clients to keep the ones who you feel might be losing motivation, inspiring them to adhere to more healthy habits. These also might help you gain new clients at the same time!

Offering rewards can make them more interested!

1. You could challenge your clients to see who can track the most workouts for the month, or even base it on a week. Create weekly or monthly prizes for whoever tracks the most workouts;

2. Challenge clients to “check in” on their social media and tag you each time they do a workout or eat something healthy from their meal plan. Keep track of who has the most check-ins and offer prizes (Added bonus: this is an amazing form of marketing for you too!);

3. Add all of your online training clients to a private Facebook group and give them points for posting healthy recipe ideas or workouts they completed into the Facebook group to motivate each other. Whoever has posted the most by the end of a week or month can earn a prize;

4. Challenge your clients to write down or track everything they eat for a week or month through an app on their phone. If they track every single day of eating offer them a prize.

We all know how hard it is to motivate clients from afar, but there are still many effective ways to do it if you get creative. The key is to keep ensuring your clients that even though you are far away from them, you are still on their team and want them to be successful.