3 Tips for Managing Your Time as a Personal Trainer

The road to becoming a successful certified personal trainer has a lot of different stages. This career path isn’t for everyone. In order to succeed and be a successful personal health trainer, it takes a lot of hard work, and most importantly, passion. This job is catered toward people who love to help others achieve their goals and are personally passionate about the health and fitness industries. 

For those special people, there are two major parts to learning the necessary skills to succeed. The first part involves all the education and certification. Once you’ve picked the best personal trainer certification for your career, then comes the hard work of earning it. This takes a lot of commitment and determination, as these certificates aren’t easy to come by. The material you study has a large scope and depth, and the exams themselves are difficult. 

Once you’ve done this, however, you then start the second phase of your training, which is actually learning how to become a personal trainer. This includes your first clients and the beginning of your successful career. For a personal trainer to achieve success, it’s imperative that they learn and become very proficient in certain soft skills, such as building client relations, rapport, and listening. 

One area that is challenging for personal trainers to stay on top of, but very important is time management. Time management can be something that a variety of people in a variety of different capacities struggle with. In fact, it’s a common challenge for a lot of people. Finding ways to manage your time properly to take care of yourself, achieve your goals, and not run yourself into the ground is hard work. For personal trainers who are constantly helping others, this can be particularly challenging. 

If you are a personal trainer and you have been wanting to increase your time management skills – here are some simple tips to take into consideration!  

1. Create Space For Strategy

Being busy and having a packed schedule is nothing unique to people who peruse personal training for a career. There are a lot of ways that people can suffer from poor time management skills in almost any career field. However, the unique factor that personal trainers face is that they are often times at the mercy of their client’s schedules and calendars. It’s also good to have other certificates like group fitness certification, to help cater to a wider range of clients. Therefore, creating space for strategy is very important in your daily routine.

Unfortunately, that can come with some unexpected factors like sudden cancelations, or requests to move sessions. To help improve your client experience, it’s a good idea to be as accommodating as necessary. The only bad thing is that when the calendar fills up, this kind of scheduling can become crazy. 

That’s why it’s important to make sure that you are taken care of and ready for the kind of schedule your clients need. With such a packed calendar, in order to spend the right amount of time taking care of yourself, you need to make every moment count.

That’s where simply creating the space to strategize on a weekly basis is the best place to start. If your schedule has been off the hook, it can feel a little daunting and even disorienting trying to figure out how to practice better time management. Blocking off some time to sit down and think through the calendar and come up with a strategy gives you the space you need to make decisions that will improve your time management. 

1. Create a Short List of Non-Negotiables

As a personal trainer, you will be helping people – and even your best clients will ask for more than they give. Create a short list of non-negotiables that you refuse to operate without. Maybe that’s a certain amount of sleep, food, or time off. Whatever makes it onto your list, let that be the guiding factor for how you schedule yourself and how you use your time. 

1. Give Yourself Achievable Goals

You preach this to your clients all the time and now it’s time to preach it to yourself. When it comes to learning time management – there is no such thing as 0-to-100. It will take time, it will take small steps, and it will take encouragement. So start with small goals that can help boost your confidence. Maybe it’s something as simple as really protecting one day off a week where you unplug, or it’s about making sure you have enough time to do your own gym routine. Learning how to use SMART goals could also be a valuable tool to help you manage your time and resources as well.

Conclusion

Just because you help and encourage others toward their goals does not mean that you yourself won’t need help and encouragement. These tips can help to foster your confidence and strength in getting better with time management so you can have a successful, balanced career. Success as a personal trainer doesn’t have to come at the cost of your health, goals, or happiness.