If you have just opened a brand new gym, you are probably in the process of making some crucial hiring decisions. As a business owner, you know how your staffing choices affect your day to day work life, your responsibilities, and your bottom line. If you find yourself confronting the dilemma of hiring in-house personal trainers versus allowing freelancers to work out of your gym space, keep the following factors in mind. Benefits of keeping trainers on staff and paying a salary or hourly rate Often means more consistency and reliability When you hire your trainers as regular staff, you [...]
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Perhaps the most iconic and famous weightlifting move known to beginners and advanced lifters alike, the bench press is another compound movement you will assuredly see members performing in your gym. As with each other movement in the exercise series, knowing the proper form and equipment your gym patrons will need in order to stay safe and healthy puts you ahead of the game in terms of being able to provide a quality experience for your members. Benefits The bench press is known for sculpting fit and strong upper bodies. Chiseled pectoral muscles and bigger arms are the main draws [...]
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As a gym owner, you might not feel the need to concern yourself with the actual exercises your clients are performing. After all, if your business is running smoothly and you have properly delegated responsibilities to your trainers and staff, then why would you need to get involved with the fitness side of things? The answer to this question is multifaceted, but it essentially boils down to two reasons:- In order to provide the best service to your members, you must understand what they want from your gym.- In order to keep your members safe and happy, you must understand [...]
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Fitness trainers are the bread and butter employees of gyms and fitness centers. Knowledgeable, effective trainers lend credibility to their workplace and make clients feel like their money is well spent. However, underqualified or ineffective trainers might have the opposite effect, leading clients to seek fitness expertise elsewhere. How can you, as a gym owner, ensure that your trainers are offering the best and most current industry knowledge and maintaining high standards for health and safety? A good starting point is to evaluate their third party fitness certifications. These credentials prove that a trainer has passed a fitness organization's tests [...]
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Being a great leader to your gym staff is similar to being a great boss or manager in any business where you lead a team. Team management principles are mostly universal regardless of your business, but with some creativity, you can utilize fitness principles you already use every day to hone your management skills and build a strong and cohesive team of employees for your gym. Maintain a good working relationship with your staff. Remember that happy people work more efficiently. It's a fact that employees with the highest mental and emotional satisfaction work harder and more efficiently than employees [...]
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Fitness trends have had lots of ups and downs that are related to culture and fashion. But there is also an influence on trends that comes from the innovations of technology. Still it's hard to read the tea leaves out beyond a year or so, as the apparent trend today can quickly show itself to be a fad that disappears overnight. In the gym business we always have to keep a lookout for what is coming because it can determine the capital investments that we would make and nobody wants to take six months to refurbish for the latest thing [...]
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I recently posted a blog about statistics in the fitness business. I really only just scratched the surface with that one. In this blog post I want to address a few things that I had to leave out, and tie up loose ends. It's always good to know where the next generation of competition could come from. I tend to think the source of competition to watch is self-employed trainers building followings through social media and then establishing studios once they have enough of a revenue flow. Also there were some statistics that relate the demographics of the industry to [...]
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https://youtu.be/4Nc_LFR_-hI In this video, Anthony, a gym owner, shows you how to easily navigate the check-in access software by Gym Insight. He will quickly and efficiently show you how to do the following: Check-in a gym member. Search for gym member's account. View a member's status (green, yellow, or red) and what the status color represents. Edit/update a member's account. Cancel and un-cancel their account. How to accept payments via card on file, with a new card for a one-time payment, or cash. How to run a time/date search for what members where in your facility. If you have any [...]
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Most people have some sort of mobile device connected to an SMS text-messaging network these days. That creates an opportunity for the enterprising fitness center owner to use text messages as another medium in their marketing strategy, with which to engage with gym members. The question is how does that fit into your marketing and how do you get the most out of it? Is Texting The New Email Marketing? As I've stated before, email marketing is a really powerful tool to increase your fitness center's profitability. Health and fitness are such an important marketing demographic that, as an owner, [...]
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As an owner or operator of a fitness center you're probably going to find in the near future that your clientele will include more members of special populations. By this I mean groups such as seniors and people with fitness and diet related health issues. These are growing segments of the population and there is a market to be found by catering to their needs. Start With Special Population Certified Trainers The reason special populations are distinct categories; separate from your average gym member is that they start from such a delicate level of health. They need to work with [...]
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I've been on the hunt for fitness gym business resources but I'm having trouble! For anyone out there interested in starting a gym or buying a gym, there just doesn't seem to be much in the way of information. In fact, some of the only information that I can find is related to the 24 hour gym franchise boom. Although I'm sure that each franchisor provides information to their franchisees, where do the rest of us meet to collaborate? When you search for fitness marketing and related promotional types of information, all you seem to find are various programs for [...]
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