The challenges of being a personal trainer include encouraging and motivating clients to perform and do their best, even when the workout is not quite what they imagined.
It’s difficult to get them excited and energized for workouts that they’re intimidated by, especially if they’re new to working out.
That’s why you need to develop beginner-friendly, effective, and engaging workout routines that work all their necessary muscles and bring them closer to their goals. Here are some great tips for certified fitness trainers to develop effective workout routines for new clients:
Understand your clients and their needs
When working with new clients of any kind, the key is understanding their needs and requirements. You have to get to know them, their goals, and their aspirations, whether it’s to lose weight, build muscle, improve their athletic performance, or other fitness and health goals, and find ways to use those in training them.
This will help you design more effective methods and train them more efficiently, keeping an end goal in mind and making your job as a trainer easier.
Identify rep range and sets for their workout
When certified fitness trainers start working with new clients, whether they’re fitness newbies or just new to your workout style, you must be aware of the rep range and sets you will implement. Higher reps with lighter weights have different outcomes. In contrast, heavier weights with lower weights have different results, and based on the collective group dynamic or individual experience and goals, this will be your call to make as a trainer. You have to remember that clients who are new to working out will need to be eased into it, and you have to focus on progressive overload. Often you may need to stick to high reps with bodyweight exercises to keep their momentum going and build up to using free weights, barbells, and machinery in their workouts.
Narrow down the primary exercises to focus on
Beyond rep ranges and sets, however, you will need to narrow down the primary exercises for their workout. Start with basic, multi-joint movements that work multiple muscles, build confidence, and are at the core of each workout. For instance, one major lower-body move, one major upper-body move, one major full-body move, and one additional area of focus that aligns best with what they need. You can change up the primary moves as they progress, get stronger and more agile, and as their goals, physique, and progress begin to evolve.
Primary exercises should take up the bulk of the workout time and be the main focus to get through each session. Whether you’re a certified personal trainer or a group fitness trainer, you should structure your workout routines around these movements.
Add in the secondary and tertiary exercises
Following that, you move on to secondary and tertiary exercises, which take up less time intheir workout but still provide important benefits. Secondary exercises are often single joint movements that are added for specific purposes, such as muscle fatigue, better flexibility, or greater stability, and can be performed in isolation. To maximize outcomes, you can split the workout into these three categories, keeping tertiary exercises at the end and using them as fillers to the primary workout.
A well-structured workout routine prioritizes the right movements to get the best outcomes, ensuring that clients aren’t tiring out too quickly or too much. You have to push them hard enough, but not to exhaustion.
Include a balance of cardio, strength, and stretching
When creating a workout routine for beginner-level clients, make sure that you’re balancing out all the important facets of fitness training. For instance, you should have a healthy dose of cardio like running, walking, HIIT, swimming, or Zumba for fat loss and health benefits, as well as a good balance of strength training and endurance work, and of course, dynamic stretches.
Don’t forget to ease them in with warm-ups and cool them down with stretches that help decompress the body, relax the muscles, and promote recovery. Your workout programs and routines should be engaging, fun, and not so intense that your clients are burnt out and fatigued from the start and have difficulty keeping up. If you struggle with designing workout routines for new clients, you can join our fitness trainer programs to enhance your knowledge and skill set.
Remember to ease them in, check up on them, and encourage them
A certified fitness trainer’s work goes beyond just instructing clients in the gym or studio. You are a mentor, motivator, coach, and authority figure all in one, helping them stay on track through your work. As a result, you need to be more proactive in your involvement, reaching out to them regularly, even when you don’t see them.
Be cognizant of their struggles as new clients, ease them in, hear them out when they share feedback or express concerns, and hold them accountable where they’re slacking off. You should also check up on them to see how they’re feeling, especially between sessions, and encourage them to stick to the program, show up consistently, and give it their all.
It helps certified personal trainers to create engaging workouts that help them meet their fitness goals in fun and engaging ways. We offer advanced personal fitness trainer certifications that you can use to get your clients more excited to work out and kickstart their journey. You can also look at our beginner, advanced, and refresher courses, stackable skills, and courses that teach you more about improving your practice that you can register for.