Whether you are running your own training business or working for a pre-existing company, it’s important to always seek out alternative revenue streams. Why? Because without a variety of revenue streams, you’re trading your time for money—and time is a limited resource.

When a trainer is only making money in the hours they spend physically training clients, they are not only limiting their overall income opportunities but they’re also leaving themselves at the mercy of their paying clients. What happens if a client goes on vacation, gets sick, or takes a break from training? How about if you as a trainer get sick, go on vacation, or want to take a day off? Or if external factors prevent you from training? No money will be made!

There are many options to create multiple revenue streams as a personal trainer such as group training, which allows you to train more clients in an hour, hybrid training, hiring trainers to work underneath you and help with your in-person training hours, exploring corporate partnerships, and/or selling clothing or supplements, etc. These are all great ways to supplement your revenue for times you are not training one on one clients, but there’s one major revenue stream in particular that every fitness professional should be exploring: online personal training.

Discover the Freedom of Online Personal Training

Online personal training is a great way to not only supplement your in-person training hours but also to expand your reach as a personal trainer.

As an in-person only personal trainer, you’re essentially limiting yourself to a client-base of people who live within a few-mile radius of your training facility, while as an online personal trainer your potential client-base is… well, anyone with internet access! With such a large market right at your fingertips, why wouldn’t you want to tap into this revenue stream?

I personally began playing around with the idea of online personal training many years ago and have never looked back. Yes, getting your online training systems and forms set up, marketing, and bringing in your first paying client can take some work; however, it is a huge pay off when after a tiny bit of elbow grease you get this side of your business running smoothly (and the revenue starts to roll in).

Here are 4 reasons why every personal trainer should be adding online training to their service offers:

1. Open Up an Additional Revenue Stream

As I explained above, the traditional approach to in-person personal training is an excellent way to provide services to clients, but it has its limitations in terms of the number of hours you can work, the number of clients you can train, and thus the amount of money you can make.

Adding online personal training to your current services allows you to make money without having to set foot in a gym by delivering personal training entirely online through a platform like (you guessed it!) Trainerize. Your consultations, initial assessments, progress checks, client purchases, and even messaging are all handled in-app—the same place you build your training plans or programs that are then instantly sent to your clients.

If done properly and successfully, this online personal training can allow fitness professionals to decrease the number of long days spent in the gym and gain more time with family and friends without sacrificing (and in many cases, increasing) income.

2. Access and Train More Clients (and Keep Current Clients Training Longer)

Adding online personal training to your services is like opening the floodgates to every person with internet access looking for a personal trainer or a path to fitness. If you don’t currently offer online training you are severely limiting yourself to local clients. Who likes limits? Personal training is all about pushing them!

By going online, you’ll be able to cast a wider net and reach more potential clients than ever before. Plus, having a strong online presence will help build your brand. The more visible and easy-to-find you are, the more people you can help reach their fitness and weight loss goals.

Another common personal trainer problem online training can solve is in-person clients taking a break from personal training because it is getting expensive. When this comes up in my business, I always offer an online training option to my clients during their “break.” Because it doesn’t require a set in-person time commitment on your part, the price point for online training is much more affordable, allowing clients to continue with their training while also letting you keep them as a client. You can also offer hybrid training options to clients who are starting to get uncomfortable with the cost of training or use online training as an option to entice price-wary potential clients.

3. Train Clients From Anywhere

This one is hands-down the best part of adding online personal training to your services!

With online personal training, you can sit at home and still make money. You can also train clients despite stay-at-home measures during COVID. In normal times, you can work while on vacation, you can work from a coffee shop, or you can do your online training on your breaks between in-person clients. You can literally work from anywhere at any time.

This allows fitness professionals a lot more flexibility and freedom, which we all know is a rare and priceless thing in this industry (especially if you have ever done a long 6 am to 8 pm day as an in-person personal trainer).

Even if you prefer going into the gym, having the ability to work from home is an essential option for risk management of your business. I had a baby 5 months ago and needed my team of trainers to cover all of my in-person training clients for a little while, but I was still able to keep up with my online training while I was home with my newborn. A few hours here and there, while the baby was napping, was simple to keep up with and kept my online training clients happy and my income stream steady while I was off “work” for a few months.

4. Make Your Business More Resilient

The last reason why you might want to make online training part of your business (or, at least, the last reason we’ll discuss for now because there are plenty more) is the resiliency it can create in your business.

Life is full of unknowns. From crazy weather systems to public health and safety issues, there are a lot of things that can throw a wrench into your plans. What if you injured yourself and couldn’t get to the gym? What if a pipe burst and your studio flooded? What if a virus is going around and you and your clients need to self-quarantine?

If you’re not running at least part of your business online, these sudden accidents could also be the sudden end to your entrepreneurial dreams.

Many trainers like to get their in-person business shored up before they head online, and that’s ok. Just make sure you don’t keep pushing that next step off for too long. Online training is an amazing bonus to your business year-round, even when your in-person services are humming along as planned, but if the going gets tough, that’s when you’ll see the real superpowers of online training. It could just be your business’s saving grace.