Unpaid hours of PTs

A new trainer recently wrote me asking if he should do unpaid hours on the gym floor getting to know people so he could get clients. I said "yes and no", but that's the subject for another article. This is about the unpaid hours a trainer does even when they've got a lot of clients. The fact is that your clients are work for you outside their session times, too. 

This is something newbie trainers don't always appreciate, one client is pretty much the same amount of work for you whether you do 1 session a week with them or 5. 

I spend at least 30' each week on each individual client 

• scheduling and rescheduling sessions, 
• researching their injury/illness issues and consulting with medical types, etc. 
• planning the workouts 
• adjusting for injury or illness or 
• sudden few weeks without work/family dramas (chance for some good progress), 
• keeping in touch with them, "how did you pull up after our last session?" answering their questions, keeping them on an even keel when their ship may capsize due to their erratic steering, etc.

And this is of course unpaid. Thus for example 10 clients means at least 5hr a week unpaid.

So if you have the choice between 5 people doing 2x30' each and 10 people doing 1x30' each, the first one is much less work for the same 10 total training session hours and thus money, it's 15hr total vs 20. 

As well, the 1/week clients can be more work than the others because you don't control all their workouts, or even if they do them at all. If I see John on Tuesday and he does SQ60kg 5x5, then I know that on Thursday he'll be able to do SQ62.5kg 5x5. But if I don't see him till next Tuesday, whether he can progress depends on what he did that week, he might have done 2 good workouts and can progress, 4 too tough workouts and be too fatigued to progress, or maybe he just sat around drinking beer in between. Or maybe he comes this Tuesday and next week postpones his session and comes the following Thursday for 1hr to make it up, after 10 days will he be stronger or weaker? With the 1/week clients I'm always having to readjust the workouts to accommodate this sort of stuff. 

The 1/week people tend to reschedule at the drop of a hat, anything else at all comes up and they're out that week. 3/week people almost never reschedule because it's too much hassle finding another time and they'll end up working out 2 or more days in a row. But that's a lot of money for most people, and if the trainer did only 3/week people they'd have to work 6 days, so a mix of 2 and 3/week people is the compromise. 

At some point the trainer will reach the stage where it gets difficult to deal with so many different people. It's then time for the trainer to tell their 1/week people that they're cutting back, they can either do 2+/week or transfer to another trainer. Hard to put it tactfully, though.

However, whether they have 1 client or 40, the trainer must allow for unpaid hours of work associated with each client.