Gone are the days of personal trainers walking around the gym with a clipboard and pen.

These days, it’s not uncommon to see trainers carrying a tablet or their phone during training sessions to track client stats and make notes (you can always tell who’s working on their phone and who’s not).

Spreadsheet apps are a popular way to record workouts, but they don’t add much to the client experience and often require a lot of manual work on the part of Trainers to interpret the data they’re entering. Trainerize, with its client and trainer-friendly workout tracking features, automation, and custom workout builder has helped thousands of trainers build and organize their online personal training businesses.

But can it be used just as effectively with in-person clients? Absolutely.

Why You Should Use Trainerize With Your In-Person Clients

Stay Organized

First and foremost, Trainerize keeps you organized. I don’t know about you, but my filing cabinet from my early days is a disaster. With Trainerize, you don’t have to worry about losing a consultation form or an important workout—you can keep them all safe and sound in one place. Going paperless will also give you satisfaction in knowing you’re doing your part to help the environment, it won’t take up precious square footage in your office or home, and it makes everything easy to search.

Track Client Progress in Real Time

Another bonus of using Trainerize for in-person training is allowing your clients to see their progress in real-time. Instead of having to flip through old workouts either on paper or in your spreadsheet app, you can simply slide your finger over the name of the exercise to see all of the completed reps, sets, and weight used for past workouts.

Since you’re able to keep progress photos and body stats in the app, you can also quickly pull up changes in body composition and deal with the results on the spot. On top of that, you won’t need to store a ton of progress photos in your phone or computer’s photo app anymore.

Deliver an Enhanced Training Experience

One of the biggest benefits of using Trainerize with your in-person clients is that it increases the value of your services. Your clients will have all of their progress and a record of the work they’ve done at their fingertips. This is invaluable for maintaining motivation and feelings of efficacy.

Many clients hire a personal trainer because they’re tired and they want someone else to do the thinking for them. They likely leave your workouts feeling great, but not remembering every single thing they did. Now they can review the workout in the app once they’re home so they can really see everything they accomplished.

If you provide workouts for your clients to do in between their in-person sessions, whether it’s cardio, mobility work, or full-on workouts, you can keep everything in one place. No more having to deal with PDFs and YouTube playlists!

Just as Trainerize increases accountability for online personal training clients, since they know their trainer will be checking in on them, using Trainerize for your in-person clients also increases compliance between personal training sessions. The little workout reminder that pops up on your clients’ phones might not seem like much, but you would be surprised at how much incentive it can give to actually get the workout done.

Online Marketing for In-Person Services

It’s no surprise that when people go looking for new products or services, more often than not, the first place they look is online—even they’re looking for in-person training. That’s why, as a personal trainer, you need to make sure your visible online so that potential clients can find you and using Trainerize can really help you do that.

With its built-in marketing features, like Trainerize.me and social media add-ons, adding Trainerize to your business helps build your online presence, boost your search results ranking (SEO), and get you into the line of sight for potential clients.

If you’ve never tried your hand at online marketing, Trainerize is the perfect first step, and if you’re a seasoned marketer then it’s the perfect complement to all your favorite tools and tactics.

How to Use Trainerize For Your In-Person Clients

Now you know why you’d want to use Trainerize for your in-person clients, but how do you do it?

The simplest way is to download the app on your phone or tablet. If you prefer not to use technology during a workout, you do have the ability to print the workouts off your computer but you’ll lose the benefit of having all previous stats in one place.

Plan your personal training sessions like you would any other program in Trainerize and use the custom workout builder and exercise library to build workouts for your clients. You can title the workouts anything you like: Personal Training Session [and the date], Strength A, or you can call your workouts something silly, just for fun.

Once your program is created and the workouts are scheduled in the calendar, you can open the workout and track the stats during the session for your client, just like they would do if they were on their own. There is something to be said about having the client become familiar with recording their own workouts, but I believe that when a client is paying you top dollar, you can record the stats in their sessions.

If you need to adjust a workout in the middle of the session, you can tap the three dots to the right of the exercise to bring up a list of alternatives. You can choose to edit just that day if, for example, your client is exhausted and shouldn’t be doing back squats. Or you can choose to edit that workout for all following days, in the case of an exercise not being a good fit.

Upon completing the workout, be sure to highlight any client personal bests (Trainerize is great at celebrating these events), as well as the number of workouts they’ve completed. This will boost the post-workout feel-good factor even more.

Using Trainerize to Keep Clients Motivated—No Matter How They Train

Trainerize is an effective and fun way to not only keep your business organized but also to keep your clients motivated, whether you’re training in-person or not. Those who love technology will be all over having a new app to play with. If you have any clients who are technophobic, you can ease their worries by letting them know you’ll handle the app during workouts and can always coach them through using the platform until they’re ready to use it on their own.

Keep things fun and don’t overcomplicate them. Above all else, be sure to communicate to your clients how this will help them reach their goals.