What Questions Should Your Personal Trainer Be Asking?

During Your Initial Consultation, Assessment & Induction

When your trainer possesses a personal trainer certification and thus is properly trained, there are a range of questions your personal trainer should be asking you that go beyond simply asking about your weight, money you have to spend, and how much you can bench press.

As well as collecting data on your height and weight (to calculate your BMI), and recording what brought you to the gym in the first place, these and other questions should be asked.

The following are some questions to ask a client, beyond ‘do you have high blood pressure?’

• What is the client’s regular waking and sleeping time?
• Do they exercise in the morning or evening?
• Does the client work shifts?
• Does the client work from home, at a primary location, or from more than one location?
• Is the client employed part-time or full-time?
• The client may walk, cycle, run, take the bus, train, or drive.
• What kind of physical activity or exercise does the client currently engage in?
• The differences are significant.

A construction worker may be physically active due to their job but do no exercise. By contrast, an office worker may be physically inactive (sitting at a desk) but regularly exercise.

• As a personal trainer, it is important to demonstrate to your clients how you, as a trainer, can tailor a training program to fit their lifestyle rather than fitting the client around the training program if you want to increase client attraction and reduce attrition (churn).

It can be difficult to achieve this without answers to the above questions.

This information can be obtained in a variety of ways, including:

• Initial consultation: Via phone, email, or face-to-face at the gym.

• Assessment: Initial or ongoing.

• Induction: When you are first shown around the gym.
• Casually: In other words, the personal trainer casually chats with the client when they attend the gym (i.e. it is not pre-planned).

The point of asking these questions across different time points and over time is to get a sense of how the client’s lifestyle may change, for example if they have a baby, gain a promotion, or develop a medical condition which impacts their ability to exercise.

Building rapport and relationships with clients is aided by anticipating and responding to their needs.

It can be difficult to get an answer if you don’t ask the question.