Keep Clients Training–Even When One of You is on Vacation

As a trainer, there are those times of the year when our clients go on vacation, and then it feels as though all of our hard work has gone to waste! The client comes back feeling bad about all the fun they had on vacation with the lack of any type of exercise, other than say, water volleyball, or dancing the night away. As a trainer, this is frustrating! I feel like I work so hard (as well as the client) to get them in a healthy routine of clean eating and exercising, get them great results, and then they go and drink and eat it all away!

If the tables are turned and it’s my (the trainer’s) turn to go on a vacation–even though my clients promise they will keep up with their workouts while I am gone, I come home find out they turned the time off into a little “staycation”!

Training and Vacation: Finding a Balance

Don’t get me wrong, I am all about taking relaxing vacations once in a while. I preach to all of my clients the “work hard, play hard” principle. But when you have clients working on a specific weight loss goal, one week of going off the deep end can take a few weeks to get back from. As trainers, we generally know how to relax, enjoy life, and take some time off of the gym without doing too much damage to our bodies. Some of our clients, however, have not yet learned how to find that balance.

As much as I joke that taking a vacation every once in a while is like job security for me (because my clients realize how much they can’t live without me), that’s not how I run my business. I want to teach my clients to be independent in their workouts and their healthy eating, so they are able to keep long-term results through vacations, busy work lives, lazy Sundays, and all obstacles life throws at them.

What’s the solution to this “vacation problem”?

• I have clients who travel a lot for work, who keep in touch with me and stay on top of their workouts by adding “hotel room workouts” and “hotel gym workouts” to their training app.
• If I have a client going on a beach vacation that doesn’t have access to a gym, I provide them with a beach workout, or an interval beach walking cardio-type workout.
• As a personal training studio owner, when I go away on vacation, the same process applies to my clients. If I am not able to fit them into one of my Assistant Trainers’ schedules, I set them up with workouts through Trainerize, and make sure they track them.

In these scenarios, I let the clients be well aware that I will be checking in on their Trainerize profiles and messaging them if I don’t see any workouts being done. This way, in the back of their minds, they think about me checking in on them. Even if this gets the client to perform one or two more workouts than they would have if they didn’t have the app, they will never feel like they are left alone without their trainer.