Online personal training has exploded in popularity recently, as more and more clients look to the internet for ways to keep fit and improve their health from home.
It’s a promising time to be in the health sector, with an enormous surge in new fitness software, nutrition apps, and other tech now available to help you grow your business. If you’re a personal trainer online, this article will help you pick the best software for your practice, and show you just how to use it to help others achieve their goals.
Before you read on, we think you’ll love a 30-day, $1 trial of our own personal trainer software. Quenza’s user-friendly tools for online personal trainers include everything you need to motivate and engage your clients, helping you bring them real fitness gains that enhance their health and wellbeing.
6 Benefits of Virtual Personal Training
Like in-person fitness training, online training can be a highly effective way to give your clients tailored workouts that will help them achieve their health and performance goals. But if you’re new to the concept, why bother?
Whether they’re stuck indoors or just don’t feel like hitting the gym, offering virtual personal training is often an affordable, convenient way to deliver professional instruction and programs that are tailored to your clients’ needs.
With the right tech, it’s exactly why more fitness professionals are offering online personal training – complete with nutrition plans, home workouts, check-ins, feedback, onboarding, goal-setting, and beyond.
For clients, virtual personal training is also a great way to enjoy:
- Quick access to workouts anytime, anywhere
- Greater choice of different exercises, sports, goals, and activities
- More flexibility around class or session times
- Professional, accredited instruction from an expert, and
- Convenience, for those who want to avoid the gym.
Moving from an inherently one-on-one service to the digital world might seem like a jump, but good personal training software and a little time is often all you need to create and share your own virtual resources.
Personal Training During Lockdown
The first and last benefits of virtual personal training are particularly relevant in 2021 where increasingly, social distancing and safety concerns often prevent gyms and other fitness businesses from opening.
As a personal trainer, making your services available through video coaching, tutorials, bespoke programs, and other solutions can be a strategic way to help your clients stay on track in a way that’s both safe and permitted.
Moving from an inherently one-on-one service to the digital world might seem like a jump, but good personal training software and a little time is often enough to create and share your own virtual resources. With a library of pre-made content to draw from, tailoring personal client programs is quick and simple.
The Best Online Software For Personal Trainers
The best online personal trainer software for your gym or business should meet your specific needs and help you better serve your clients.
Here are 6 of the top options we’ve come across:
App | Details |
|---|---|
 | If you’re not looking for nutrition databases or exercise libraries and simply want to run your online personal training more efficiently, VCita is an easy-to-use solution. Lightweight and scalable for gyms and trainers that offer online services and packages, it has a suite of practice admin tools that will handle all the basics for you.
Its features include:
|
| Name | VCita |
| Price | $12+ monthly |
| Good For | Mobile Coaching, Video Coaching, Practice Management Software, Coaching Software |
| More info | vcita |
App | Details |
|---|---|
 | Quenza is a complete free-form exercise, workout, nutrition plan, and program builder with everything you need to share HEPs, videos, course content, and challenges with clients. It supports multimedia uploads, uses drag-and-drop tools to support your workout designs, and then shares them with a click to your clients’ free mobile apps. The Quenza app also lets you view client progress in real–ime, with a live chat feature for communicating with your customers on the go.
It comes with:
|
| Name | Quenza |
| Price | $1+ monthly |
| Good For | Workout Plans, Online Coaching, Video Coaching, Occupational Therapy, Physical Therapy, Fitness Software, Personal Trainer Software, Client Engagement |
| Website | Quenza |
App | Details |
|---|---|
 | TrueCoach is designed to help personal trainers online by speeding up personal workout design with videos, from-scratch workout builders, and real-time messaging for answering client questions and checking in. It offers client relationship management tools to help you engage patients or clients, a nutrition library, and comes with free client apps for iOS and Android.
As well as offering more in-depth compliance tracking than some other apps, it comes with:
|
| Name | TrueCoach |
| Price | $19+ monthly |
| Good For | Mobile Coaching, Goal Setting, Physical Therapy, Nutrition Software, Fitness Software, Personal Training |
| More info | TrueCoach |
App | Details |
|---|---|
 | This mobile- and browser-based fitness app, My PT Hub, is specially designed for fitness coaches, personal trainers, and gym owners who want to streamline their client management, design personalized diet and exercise programs, and stay on top of others’ progress and accomplishments.
Easy to use with scalable monthly or annual plans for different business sizes, this app gives you:
|
| Name | My PT Hub |
| Price | $20+ monthly |
| Good For | Goal Setting, Physical Therapy, Nutrition Software, Fitness Software, Personal Training, Online Coaching |
| More info | My PT Hub |
App | Details |
|---|---|
 | WebPT is a physical therapy, occupational therapy, and personal trainer software system for fitness professionals who want to share home exercise programs and run their online business more efficiently. It offers team solutions for gyms, solo plans for online personal trainers, and comes with plenty of engagement tools for your clients.
Also great for health coaches and wellness coaches with EMR capabilities for rehab and prescriptions, it offers:
|
| Name | WebPT |
| Price | Available on request |
| Good For | Mobile Coaching, Video Coaching, Practice Management Software, Online Coaching Tools |
| More Info | WebPT |
App | Details |
|---|---|
 | Nudge Coach is a popular tool for tracking client progress, staying in touch with customers, coaching fitness groups, and sharing online personal training programs. It comes with a customizable interface for personal trainers, gyms, and fitness professionals who want to work under their own brand, and syncs with a plethora of nutrition databases and wearable trackers.
Available with free client apps, its features include:
|
| Name | Nudge Coach |
| Price | $25+ monthly |
| Good For | Mobile Coaching, Coaching Management, Fitness Coaching, Personal Training, Physical Therapy, Occupational Therapy |
| More info | Nudge Coach |
5 Ways Personal Trainers Can Use Quenza Software
Quenza offers a powerful range of specially developed fitness and performance tools, created by coaches with motivation and results in mind.
As a personal trainer, they are particularly useful for:
- Onboarding Clients
- Designing Fitness Programs
- Building Client Engagement
- Tracking Progress
- Questionnaires for Personal Trainers
In the next section, we’ll show you how they work in practice.
Online Coaching via Quenza: Step-by-Step Guide
Let’s take a closer look at how Quenza’s tools are specially designed for personal trainers offering online coaching.
1. Onboarding Clients
Quenza’s Activity Builder is ideal for designing professional, branded business forms easily, so you can share them with clients digitally to understand who they are and where they want to be.
Because health-related information is regularly sent and received in online personal training, Quenza’s HIPAA-compliant platform plays an important role in keeping all client data confidential.
Some useful onboarding forms for effective intake include:
- Medical histories or patient details, all of which can be securely shared and stored
- Goal-setting forms, so you can understand your clients’ fitness ambitions
- Contact information, e.g. Emergency Contacts, e-mail addresses and phone numbers for marketing
- Physical Therapy and fitness assessments, such as Evaluation Forms, and
- Informed Consent Forms, which can easily be customized into Online Coaching or Training Consent Forms.
2. Designing Fitness Programs
With full support for a range of multimedia uploads, Quenza’s Activity Builder is a convenient way for personal trainers to create interactive exercises or physical therapy interventions.
Using drag-and-drop tools for videos, text fields, check boxes, scales, audio, PDFs, images, and more, it’s possible to design tutorials for single exercises or workouts for specific goals:
Including personal videos and audio that you create yourself can up the engagement factor for clients, as it delivers a more real-life experience complete with tips, tricks, and explanations. Here, we’ve uploaded clear pictures of how we used the Activity Builder to upgrade our text.
3. Building Client Engagement
Building and sustaining drive can be particularly tricky when it comes to fitness, especially if you’re used to being physically close to your clients.
To give clearer explanations, answer questions, collect feedback, and share tips, Quenza’s live chat helps you connect with and engage your clients through their smartphone or tablet:
Keeping in touch between sessions is an effective way to help maintain momentum, increase your retention rates, and maximize the chances of your clients sticking with their programs for long enough to see results. Fully encrypted, Quenza’s Chat ensures you can easily communicate with all your clients at any time, or switch off notifications to receive only select messages.
4. Tracking Progress
To give you insight into your clients’ performance, each workout, exercise, or program you create is automatically tracked in real-time, so you can tell whether clients have received an activity, started it, or finished it.
Once they’ve completed an assignment, worked through your tutorial, or filled out a form, their results are instantly visible to you. This way, you can easily identify the Pending Activities where your clients might need a little nudge or some extra encouragement:
Another great way to stay on top of your clients’ achievements is using Quenza’s Pathway tool, which lets you automate your progress tracking by scheduling activities with automatic reminders. For each Activity on the dashboard above, we might send 3-day or weekly reminders to encourage our customers or patients with a prompt.
5. Questionnaires For Personal Trainers
A range of other digital forms can greatly streamline your whole client management when you have them readily available as templates. These can be sent as is if you use them regularly, customized if a personal touch is required, branded with your business logo, and even scheduled for sending out at pre-defined intervals.
Some examples for virtual personal trainers include:
- Feedback surveys for online classes or programs
- Fitness questionnaires, which can even be included in your intake process
- Health screening questionnaires
- Client Engagement Forms, to gather suggestions and ideas, and
- Consultation questionnaires.
Final Thoughts
With personal training tools for video coaching, client communication, program design, and more, today’s online fitness professionals have a wealth of ways to coach others digitally. Becoming the ultimate personal trainer is often as simple as understanding how you add value in their lives, and using modern technology to deliver a great online service.
If you’ve had any experience with the personal trainer software in this article, we’d love to hear about it in a comment.
We hope you enjoyed this article. Don’t forget to try out Quenza’s online personal training tools with our $1, 1-month trial. Our software is professionally designed to help you coach and develop others, and will give you everything you need to bring your clients more effective, personal programs that meet their precise needs and goals.
Frequently Asked Questions
There are several apps that personal trainers use to communicate with and manage their clients. Some popular apps that trainers can use to monitor and communicate with clients include WhatsApp, which enables messaging, voice notes, and media sharing; Fitbit, a fitness tracking app that monitors activity levels and progress; and MyFitnessPal, a nutrition tracking app that helps trainers manage clients’ diets and track progress.
Yes, there are several databases for personal trainers that can help them find new clients and expand their network. Some popular options include IDEAfit, which offers resources for continuing education and connects trainers with clients; ACE Fitness, which provides certification and resources for fitness professionals to market their services; and NSCA, which offers a database of strength and conditioning professionals and provides resources for continuing education and professional development.
The specific capabilities of personal trainer software will depend on the software you choose. However, many personal trainer software options do offer the ability to create customized nutrition plans in addition to exercise plans. This allows you to provide more comprehensive coaching to your clients and to help them achieve their health and fitness goals more effectively. Quenza is an excellent example of software that enables this functionality.
