GOALS
A personal trainer helps their clients achieve certain fitness goals. For each client, target fitness level and goals can vary.
THE HUMAN TOUCH FACTOR
As a personal trainer, you are invaluable in so many areas. You need to have good people skills, empathy and presence. Some of the most important contributions from a personal trainer include learning technique, nutrition recommendation, guidance to behavior change, and sustainable lifestyle change, instructing clients how to get the maximum from any exercise and strengthening regime.
ADDITIONAL PERSONAL TRAINER QUALITIES
Personal trainer certification provides the basic knowledge to begin a career, and provides a strong foundation. Being a well-educated and experienced trainer does not always correspond with success. You also need to have marketing skills, networking capabilities, establish a social media presence, and possess business sense to be successful.
OBJECTIVE STANDARDS TAKE THE GUESSWORK OUT OF THE EQUATION
Our Experience Bank can provide you with important guidance and experience by looking at programs and program designs where you can find other strength athletes similar to your clients. Use this to set realistic goals and find optimal programs. If your client has some special needs or specific challenges, you can learn from these programs and create a more effective-, customized workout plan using the Program Designer profile.
Showing objective measures of your client’s results in your PT profile will reassure potential clients and give a clear and concise idea of what they can achieve by choosing to work with you. It is the best and most accurate marketing tool you can have.
What does it really mean to be in good shape? The strength standards will show your clients’ objective levels in selected exercises.
ADDING MORE TOOLS TO THE TOOLBOX
Our platform adds more tools to your personal trainer toolbox. Under Contacts you can save your clients’ names, what offers they have purchased, and how many sessions they have available. You may also add potential clients here by sending them a friend request.
Being active in the personal trainer Newsfeed provides you with excellent and effective marketing opportunities, like writing blogs to show that you are at the top of you game.
When your clients have created a strength athlete profile, you can provide them with feedback and guidance on their newsfeed, online coaching, and progress monitoring. You can also communicate by email, etc.
Read more about these features in the Strength Athlete section.
Maximize your training schedule and stay on top of all appointments in your Booking Calendar. Display your services and prices, and let strength athletes know when you are available for training sessions.
Strength athletes can then purchase one of your Offers by opening your booking calendar where they can then book as many hours as they have bought. Booked PT sessions will also show in the strength athlete calendar. Your workplace address is where PT sessions will be held.
TRACKING PROGRESS
Your clients will track their sessions in the Workout Log where the load for each set is calculated and customized to the individual client or strength athlete. The Workout Summary indicates how well your client has adapted to a session. After each session your client will enter from a scale from 0 to 10 how they are currently feeling regarding sleep-, energy level and stress level. They may also register injuries and make workout notes. During the PT session we recommend that as their personal trainer, you track your client’s session in the Workout Log.
After completing a program, the results will be analyzed in the Strength Athlete profile under the Performance Table. Compare the pre- and the post-one repetition maximum test and the results or percentage increase in the test exercises.
Each program is connected to the Experience Bank which gathers information about strength athletes’ physical traits and results in the test exercises. Here you can see how characteristics like body weight, waist- to- hip ratio, age, injuries, dominant muscle fiber type and gender affect an outcome.
Fatigue & recovery monitoring will provide you with visual and intuitive understanding of your clients’ fluctuations in sleep patterns, energy- and stress levels. The blue Autoregulation of Load column informs about how well they adapt to each session or load progression throughout the whole program.
The Top Program Design table provides information on which program designs a particular strength athlete responded best to, and is divided into levels and body parts. The most important program designs are volume, intensity, and frequency.
On the Trophy Wall you can really go deep on selected test exercises. Every time your client reaches a new and higher level, they will be rewarded with a golden trophy.
SPECIALIZATION
Focusing on a certain area or clientele can be a key to your personal trainer success. The platform focuses on the development of physical skills such as:
- Muscle increase or hypertrophy
- Maximum strength
- Power
- Muscular endurance
- Body composition and weight loss.
- Sports performance
A digital platform where you can track multiple activities is undoubtedly good for achieving health benefits. However, in order to excel at something in terms of performance, you need to specialize. That is why Optimal Strength Gains emphasizes strength training.
PROGRAM DESIGNER PROFILE
Use your knowledge to design comprehensive and effective programs. In the Calendar Builder you create a static program, meaning that there is no progression. The next step in the Progression Builder will be to create one or several progression strategies. Progressive overload is perhaps the most important training principle. Progressive overload is a gradual increase of stress on the body to achieve a goal-oriented adaptation. The Principle of Diminishing Returns refers to the slowing of progress or exercise adaptations as a lifter becomes fitter and more experienced. It takes greater effort to progress further, while progress can become painstakingly small. Progressive overload for experienced lifters requires more advanced strategies and specialization. We divide strength athletes into individual levels based on their objective performance in the test exercises: untrained, novice, intermediate, advanced and elite.
When creating a program, the work load per set is stated as a percent of one repetition maximum. Once the strength athlete uploads the program, we calculate their repetition maximum in kilos in all exercises in the pre-interview form. This makes it possible to individualize the programs load or kilo values for every set throughout the whole program, and these are also used as the Target Load for each set. Unfortunately, strength does not always evolve as planned in the Progression Builder since predetermined programs do not take into account an individual‘s fatigue levels on a daily basis. That is why we implemented Autoregulation that automatically individualizes load progression and allows clients to train with higher loads on days with low fatigue and vice versa. By comparing the Target reps with Performed reps and Target RTF with Performed RTF, the load on the next set is either up- or down-regulated. If total Performed Volume Load exceeds Total Target Volume Load for a body part after completion of a training session, this indicates that your client is responding well to the program as displayed in the fatigue & recovery monitoring section.
Once you publish your program, and clients and other strength athletes also complete the program, you will receive feedback in the Program Designer profile on how well different strength athletes have responded. See who got the best results per level and what physical traits these strength athletes have.
Read more about these features in the Program Designer Profile.
HOW IT WORKS
1. CREATE YOUR PERSONAL TRAINER PROFILE
If you don’t have a profile yet, go to Get Started -> Select type of user: personal trainer.
If you already have a PD or SA profile and are logged in, go to «Create PT profile».
2. ABOUT ME
Give a short introduction about yourself. Tell the strength athletes about your education, specialties, experience (years) and location.
Your workplace adress is where you as a personal trainer work and are available for face-to-face sessions with clients or strength athletes.
You can go to settings to update the About Me section, update plan, see your invoices and more.
Each profile type has its own setting page: Strength athlete, Program designer and Personal trainer.
3. MY OFFERS
Display your services(Offers) and prices, available for purchase by the strength athletes. When the strength athlete purchases a service, your calendar will be open for booking.
You will receive a notification every time a strength athlete has booked a PT Offer from you, and you can then send the person an invoice.
4. BOOKING
Displays which days and hours you are available, so that after booking a service, the strength athlete can book face-to-face sessions with you.
SA clicks on the Order button on one of your offers. The order will appear in both the PT and SA Contacts list informing about the offer name, date, offer hours, booked hours and completed hours.
5. THE PT CONNECTS TO THE PROGRAM
If an offer contains 10 hours the SA can book 10 PT sessions in the PT Calendar for the days and hours where the PT are available. If the booked PT sessions corresponds within the timeframe the SA has uploaded a program to his Calendar & Workout log, then the name of the PT will stick to the strength athlete’s program in the Calendar & workout log and Performance table.
6. MAIL
The personal trainer will receive a mail confirming the booked service, and what you need to do next:
7. REBOOKED, CANCELED AND COMPLETED PT SESSIONS
The personal trainer can cancel and rebook sessions, and mark the sessions completed after the PT session is held.
8. NOTIFICATION TO THE STRENGTH ATHLETE
A strength athlete will get notification of changes made by their personal trainer. If the personal trainer has cancelled a PT session, the strength athlete must rebook the session.
When all the PT sessions in the ordered service are set as completed, your client will receive a conformation and your obligation ends.
9. NEWSFEED
Communicate with your clients, give them guidance and answer their questions.
The newsfeed also gives you the opportunity to attract new clients by marketing, blogging and by taking an active approach.
10. THE STRENGTH ATHLETE PROFILE
Register your clients as strength athletes. Follow them closely both as an online coach interacting through their strength athlete profiles, and through physical one-to-one sessions purchased under “Your Offers” and booked in your calendar.
11. CONTACTS
Here you can save your clients’ names, what services/offers they have purchased, how many sessions they have available. You may also save potential clients here by sending them a friend request. The PD and PT profiles are open, and you will get access to the SA profiles once your friend request has been accepted by the potential client.
12. FINDING OPTIMAL PROGRAMS FOR YOUR CLIENTS: THE EXPERIENCE BANK SITE
The Experience Bank gathers information about strength athletes’ progress after completing a program and their physical traits. It also guides you to find the programs that your clients will most likely respond the best to, based on their mirror athletes’ results. You may also search for program names and the name of the Program Designer in the search bar.
13. MY CLIENTS RESULTS
The My Clients’ Results table provides objective feedback on your clients´ results after completing a program, by comparing the pre- and post-test results in the test exercises. There is one table option designed for men and one table for women. You can also sort the tables by category.
The tables are divided into levels and weight classes, and the number in each cell shows the median (average) result of all your clients´ individual “percentage increase” numbers for a particular level and weight class.
14. REVIEWS
Read feedback and star ratings from clients you have worked with. Learn what your clients are content with and what skills you may need to improve further.
Free up your time, reduce frustration and release your potential as a personal trainer!