Welcome to the post-holiday rush, a prime time for fitness professionals like you to thrive. As clients face their holiday indulgences with new health resolutions, they’re going to be seeking guidance and motivation. This period is ripe with opportunity, not only for re-engaging past clients but also for attracting new ones seeking a fresh start.
Leveraging an innovative app designed for fitness pros, you can offer personalized, comprehensive solutions that go beyond the gym. Let’s explore effective strategies to elevate your service, enhance client engagement, and transform this seasonal momentum into lasting business growth. It’s time to capitalize on the crash and set the stage for a successful year.
Understanding the Post-Holiday Mindset
It’s easy for people to make bold statements, like ‘My New Year’s resolution is to get in shape!” but do they see it through? Studies show that one of the top reasons why people fail to start pursuing their goals, like New Year’s fitness resolutions, is that they don’t have the motivation to get started (1).
To truly understand this phenomenon, we need to realize that the person’s underlying lack of motivation is what got them to a point where they feel they need to resolve it. It’s the same motivation that they lack, which facilitates poor eating and exercise practices.
As found by a survey from Forbes Health, over half of those surveyed shifted from last year’s focus on mental health and are now embracing physical health resolutions(2). However, with motivation being the key ingredient that separates the winners from the losers, it’s clear that as a personal trainer, your number one focus for your clients is helping them achieve and maintain a higher level of motivation.
Further research into the post-holiday mindset has led me to believe that there are positives you can help promote, not just failed resolution attempts, but more along the opposite stance. Here are a few thoughts to consider regarding the client’s attitude around New Year’s:
- Increased Motivation: Clients are usually more motivated to make changes to their lifestyle, driven by resolutions or a desire to counteract the holiday excesses.
- Goal Setting: Many clients set specific and sometimes lofty goals for the new year, such as losing a certain amount of weight, improving performance metrics, or achieving a particular physical appearance. Please help them to realize realistic goals while boosting their motivation to succeed.
- Seeking Accountability: There’s often an increased interest in scheduling regular sessions with a personal trainer for accountability and guidance to ensure they stick to their fitness resolutions.
- Dietary Changes: Clients might express a desire to cleanse or diet to shed holiday weight quickly. They may be more open to trying new dietary strategies or detox plans to jumpstart their progress.
- Initial Enthusiasm Followed by Challenges: The initial enthusiasm can sometimes wane as the reality of daily commitments and the effort required to achieve fitness goals sets in. It’s common for clients to face motivational challenges after the initial few weeks of the new year.
- Expectation Management: Clients may have very high or unrealistic expectations for quick results, especially in contrast to the indulgences of the holiday season. Part of your personal trainer role is to help manage these expectations and set achievable, realistic goals.
Post-Holiday Strategies for Fitness Professionals Seeking Opportunity: Re-engaging Past Clients
Taking advantage of opportunities like the New Year’s resolution phenomenon to reach out to former clients is a great way to re-energize your client list. You can take advantage of the positive motivation to make reasonable changes that are felt around New Year’s and maybe pick back up with clients who lost motivation in the past.
I’ve found that in my experience as a personal trainer, the best way to reconnect with lost clients is to use the holidays as an excuse but use personalized and empathetic messaging strategies to ensure you get back in touch with them. Some other great ideas include offering discounts or a limited-time sale to add urgency to the message. Of course, this all leads back to marketing yourself and your fitness solutions.
Marketing Your Services Effectively
Marketing your services around the holidays is a great way to cash in on the New Year’s resolution hype. However, there’s more to it than merely reaching out to former clients – you need to market yourself and your solutions effectively.
In my guide, Unlocking Success: How to Market Yourself as a Personal Trainer, I go in-depth to explain the different strategies you can use to market your personal training business around the holidays to cash in on the crash. Because I already wrote a guide for you to use, I’ll just give you the quick highlights:
- Understand your target audience. Put yourself in their shoes and consider their pain points. How can you offer solutions that make your clients happy to think about?
- Leverage social media channels. If you’re like me on Instagram, then you also spend a reasonable amount of time on social platforms. Social media offers the opportunity to be seen and heard without the high price of advertising. It takes some work, but it’s a great place to market yourself for free.
- Create valuable content. Whether it’s a blog, regular social posts, or a combination, one thing will set your message apart from others: great content that is helpful and impactful for the reader (your target audience).
Of course, there are many other things you can do, like growing an email list and doing email marketing, working on developing partnerships, or even networking within your industry to look for opportunities.
Leveraging Technology and Resources
One of the best things I did was create an app that helps me manage my personal training business. I use the app not only to communicate with my clients during the holidays but also to build and disseminate workout plans, track fitness, and nutrition goals, and keep my clients motivated with things like regular check-ins.
If you’re not using a robust client management platform, you’re missing opportunities to scale your business. Furthermore, you’re missing out on the opportunities that come during the holidays.
Creating Customized Post-Holiday Programs
I have found that as a personal trainer, you need to spend a little more time than usual around the holidays to keep clients motivated. That’s why it’s so critical to create robust and effective post-holiday workout programs for your clients; you’ll be going up against challenges not faced any other time of year.
Using my app, Elite Trainr, you can create beautiful customized workout sessions and send them instantly to your clients. You can use the more than 3,000+ exercise GIF library to make your client workouts simple to follow and a pleasure to participate in. It really was the game changer for my fitness clients that made the difference.
Here are a few other tips to help you cash in on the holidays.
Nutritional Guidance and Support
One of the most essential services you can provide clients, aside from being motivational about physical fitness, is to provide nutritional guidance and support during the holidays. That’s why I wrote an entire guide to help you navigate your client interactions regarding nutrition: Holiday Leftovers and Nutritional Planning Tips For Top Personal Trainers.
Setting Goals and Tracking Progress
Goal setting is a critical element of the holiday regimen. Your clients may come to you with lofty ambitions for the new year. Your job is to support that motivation while helping your clients realize more likely goals. It can be a delicate balance, so I decided to write an entire guide on the subject that you can read here: Year-End Fitness Goal Setting For You and Your Clients.
Maximize Momentum: Your Post-Holiday Game Plan
As the holiday season winds down, it’s your time to shine. Transform the post-holiday motivation into lasting client success with personalized, tech-savvy strategies. Re-engage, innovate, and inspire every step of the way using Elite Trainr to keep your clients committed and focused. Remember, your expertise is not just in transforming bodies but lives. Embrace this opportunity to elevate your business and create impactful, enduring fitness journeys this new year. Let’s not just capitalize on the crash—let’s create lasting wellness legacies.
Take the leap with Elite Trainr and make this year your most impactful yet.
Article Sources
- Milkman, Katherine L. 2015. “Put Your Imperfections behind You: Temporal Landmarks Spur Goal Initiation When They Signal New Beginnings – Hengchen Dai, Katherine L. Milkman, Jason Riis, 2015.” Psychological Science. 2015. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797615605818.
- Forbes. 2023. “2024 New Year’s Resolutions: Nearly Half Cite Fitness as Their Top Priority,” December 27, 2023. https://www.forbes.com/health/mind/new-year-resolutions-survey-2024/.
