Helping Trainers Get More Clients Q&A w/ Chris

Want a steady stream of five-star reviews, real referrals, and a calendar that fills itself without paid ads? We unpack a simple, ethical system that trades meaningful value for timely action, guiding clients to leave reviews while they’re already engaged and excited. You’ll hear how to personalize outreach, make the incentive irresistible, and remove friction so testimonials flow consistently—organically boosting your Google and Yelp rankings for “personal trainer near me.”

We walk through the full lifecycle: crafting offers that clients actually want, scheduling comp sessions tied to reviews, and turning that moment into a clear referral ask that doesn’t feel pushy. Then we layer in a light-touch nurture engine—weekly emails with nutrition tips, fiber and protein guidance, and real-world meal ideas—because most buyers convert after multiple touchpoints. The theme is simple: action beats perfection. Test now, get feedback, improve your scripts, and hit January with systems that already work.

Programming gets equal time. If your gym runs 45-minute blocks, we show how to adapt the CCA framework without crushing your main lift. Learn to pair core patterns with complementary moves, protect rest for performance, and finish with a short, client-driven “fun” block that scratches the itch for sweat and novelty without sabotaging progress. We explain the psychology behind finishers, how to educate clients on rest and RPE, and how to stay creative inside real-world constraints so results stay front and center.

Along the way, we invite you to tap into our community and hands-on seminars where we sharpen assessments, soft tissue work, programming, sales, and confidence. If you found this helpful, subscribe, share with a trainer friend, and leave a quick review—your support helps more coaches build sustainable, client-first careers.

Want to ask us a question? Email email info@showupfitness.com with the subject line PODCAST QUESTION to get your question answered live on the show!

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Website: https://www.showupfitness.com/
Become a Personal Trainer Book (Amazon): https://www.amazon.com/How-Become-Personal-Trainer-Successful/dp/B08WS992F8
NASM / ACE / ISSA study guide: https://www.showupfitness.com/collections/nasm

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Mission
• 0:30 The Review Problem Trainers Face
• 1:45 Incentives That Actually Drive Reviews
• 4:30 Turning Reviews Into Referrals And SEO
• 7:45 Offer Value First And Follow Up
• 10:40 Act Now Not Perfect Later
• 12:30 Seminar Invites And Community Boost

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Welcome to the Show Up Fitness Podcast where great personal trainers are made. We are changing the fitness industry one qualified trainer at a time with our in-person and online personal training certification. If you want to become an elite personal trainer, head on over to showufffitness.com. Also make sure to check out my book, How to Become a Successful Personal Trainer. Don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review. Have a great day and keep showing up. Howdy all, welcome back to the Show of Fitness Podcast. Today I'm going to help you build a better book of business, answering questions from the qualified personal trainers community on Facebook. First one coming from someone talking about how to get more reviews. Now, obviously, if you're in an Equinox or Lifetime, you probably don't have to focus too much on getting reviews for the Google account. You need to focus on yourself and building your book of business. But as an independent contractor, one of the best things that you can do, as I talk about in my book, reputology. How can you drive more reviews to Google Yelp? Whether if it's Thumbtack, any type of an account where you can showcase your successes. I'm going to read to you an example here that I got in an email. I went to a lunch the other day and they had me put my email in and they sent me an email the next day. Thanks for your recent follow. Did you happen to dine with us? If so, we'd love to hear your thoughts on whatever dishes you tried. Just visit our Raves page and write a brief review on a dish. You're not only helping us improve, but you're helping future diners know what's best. Thank you, and we appreciate your business. How many of you are going to go leave a review with that email? It's like Uber when they send you a text. Send us someone and we'll give you a$5 reward. I don't care about five bucks. You have to look through the lens of the consumer. What is in it for them? I'm not going to leave a review. Even if my experience was amazing, it's not a top priority. Now, if they were to think through my lens and send me an email and made it personal, hey, Chris, thank you for coming in on Friday. We want to offer you a free appetizer and drink on us. When can you come in and when would you like to claim this? I'm now enticed. I respond back. I can come in on Thursday for happy hour. Great, come in. And when I go in, the bartender says, we have this contest right now for reviews. If you leave us a review, we're going to give you an appetizer and a drink on the house. I'm there. I'm going to leave the review. I'm going to have my appetizer, probably 15 more drinks. And that is going to be the exchange. That is how you're going to get reviews from your clients. If you have a client, you're training them two days a week, Monday and Wednesday. At the end of Wednesday's workout, say, Paul, how would you like to come in on Saturday for a workout? Nine o'clock, it's on me. He's going to look at you and be like, of course. And normally, Paul, as you know, these sessions are 150 bucks. But if you come in on Saturday, five minutes early and you leave me a review, I'll give you a whole hour. Hell, if you want to bring me a cup of coffee because I'm comping you 150 bucks, that's fine. But if you leave me that review, you're going to get that comp session. Now he comes in, maybe he brings you a cup of coffee or a bottle of whiskey. Who knows? Your clients want your success, but you also need to realize that there's so many things that they have to focus on. We are all busy. Everyone is busy. We have a laundry list of shit that we are preoccupied with. Take that off their plate by getting them in and then have them do the review. I like to write the review, show it to them. Is this okay? You can personalize it if you would like. More times than not, they're just going to push send and review it. And then at the end of that session, talk about your business. One of my goals is to be training 28 sessions at my current rate of 125. In the new year, I'm going to be bumping my rates up to 150 because I'm going through certification A, B, C, and D. I'm leveling up my skills, which allows for me to better serve my clients. If you have any people at work that could benefit from training as you have, and you bring them in next Saturday, I'll comp another workout. You can do this until your book of business is full. So then you have 50, 100 reviews. And so then you're increasing your SEO on the Google and the Yelp. Yelp is the top five biggest search engines. So when people type in personal trainer near me, they're going to come up with the top trainers in that area based off of reviews. If you get 25 reviews in one day, they're going to flag a lot of them. Don't advertise with Yelp. It's a bunch of bullshit because what they'll do is they'll prioritize you at the top. And then when you stop advertising, they take you away and put you at the bottom. Then they'll reach back out and say, see what happens when you don't advertise with us? Yes, I'm guilty. I did that. You have to build it organically. Get one per day. And if you did this from now into the new year, you could get 60 plus reviews. So people are going to find you organically when they search personal trainers near me. But you have to think through the lens of how you can excite your clients. Hop into your story. If you're a nutrition coach, who would like a complimentary nutrition evaluation? Normally it's$75. And you leave the little open question. So they're going to ask, I do, I do, I do. And then reach out to them. We can schedule a call. It's 30 minutes. All I ask, if you enjoyed the 30-minute consultation, you leave me a five-star review. And you ask great questions. You provide excellent service. And at the end of it, they're going to say, that was amazing. That was really insightful. Thank you for the piece of advice. You put them into your email log, you send them weekly emails with little pointers, diet tips, fiber tips, protein tips, what you like to consume, what your cheat meal looks like, whatever it may be. So now they're getting a taste of your information. Most people will not buy on that very first time. It takes five, eight, 10 plus points of contact to get them interested in your product. So offer something complimentary, have them go through it, survey them. How did you like it? What could I improve? If you're just starting out, do not, I repeat, do not strive for perfection. Because what's going to happen is you're going to wait until the new year and then you start doing this, and you're going to get really valuable feedback that you could be getting right freaking now. Action is the name of the game. So then you almost have two months of trial and error. So when the new year does start, your systems are in play. The common questions you're getting from your surveys, which are building your reviews, you then implement into your systems. Speed is the name of the game. Do not wait and for that perfect opportunity. It's never going to come up. Action rewards those. People who are lucky are action-based. You need to do this now. Stop waiting for tomorrow or the perfect time. Your success depends on action today. You need to do it now. Get into your story and start talking about what you want to offer and then survey people and build your brand. Speaking of which, if you want to come to one of the seminars, Sacramento 7th and 8th, November, Dallas, the 21st and 22nd, and then Orange County, December 5th and 6th. If you throw this into your story because you find the valuable information, hell, maybe you've gone to Reddit or a Facebook group and people are asking, how do I become a trainer? And you comment. That helps us so much. There's nothing that rewards me more when someone gets a package will show up fitness. They didn't waste thousands on NASA Mace or whatever bundles are out there. And they say someone commented on a Reddit group. And I have them send me the link and I look at what they said and I don't even know the person. I give Carlos a shout out because he made a comment two years ago. And he's going to get a referral commission because someone's going to sign up for the CPT based on his recommendation because they're asking what's the best cert. So we need your help just like you want your clients to help you. That is reciprocity. You throw this into your story, we're going to say thank you by giving you 50 bucks off one of those seminars. And if you come to a seminar with a couple people, we will discount it as well. You will learn more in two days than any textbook certification, hands down. I guarantee it. I'll give you a refund. In those two days, you're going to learn soft tissue mobilizations, how to assess the protocol that we use here at Show Up Fitness, how to program all for upper body. We're implementing new soft tissues that you've never seen. We're going to do some fossing of the elbow. This new seminar style is what we're going to be launching for 2026. We're hoping to do two of these per month. That is our BHAG. And then ultimately start doing them every week because trainers learn so much, not only from the practical side, programming, building confidence. Whether if you're new or you've been a trainer for 10 plus years, it's refreshing your information. You're going to get a fire lit under your ass to go out there and better serve your clients, but we will also add in a ton of sales and business techniques so you can grow your business so you will not burn out. Second question comes from Mr. Cole. He's asking about how he can implement the CCA more effectively at his personal training studio where he works for someone in Charlotte, North Carolina. Make sure to connect up with Tori. We have parks. We have a lot of trainers in North Carolina. You need to build that community because that's also going to level up your confidence. So at the studio, they only do 45 minute sessions. They stack them back to back. And the manager is getting a little upset because his sessions are going longer than those 45 minutes. If you have any advice from me on how to help with my sessions, time them out better because I struggle to figure out how I can cut my sessions down and still have an effective session. The first CCA usually runs about 15 to 20 minutes, three sets of three exercises. And a lot of times he only can do two sets of three exercises in the second CCA. He likes to have optimal rest, as you should, but he's still getting a good workout with an RPE of six to eight. He's hoping for some helps, thoughts, and advice on how he can better structure this. That's the beauty of the CCA, it's a template. So play around with it. You're going to find your perfect recipe. I've been using the CCA for 20 years. I still use it. I had a client this morning. CCA. What is your goal? What are we focusing on? Is it explosiveness? We'll do more power. Is it a main core lift? We're going to do a deadlift. Are we focusing on upper body? I just put the main emphasis as the first core pattern. Now, when it comes to time constraints, which you can do, option A, you could do a CA, CA, and CA. So if you want a lower body specific workout, you do a hinge into an accessory, you do a squat into an accessory, unilateral into accessory. You could do a CC if you want to complement it with upper body. So a hinge into a push, a squat into a pull, unilateral into a press. Or you could do a CCA for the first one and then do CAs and CAs. You could do a CC for two circuits and then whatever time you have left, just ask your client, what do you want to focus on right now? We have 15 minutes left. Maybe it's cardio into bicep curls, into bandwalks, into ski erg. And so you kind of smoke them at the end with those 15 minutes, depending on what they want. So you could create a CCA variation with that 45 minute time block. So it may be a CA, but the CCA is just a generalized term for putting a core pattern followed by something that's not going to tax the core pattern, followed by something that's not going to tax the core pattern. So think of it like an A exercise followed by a B or C exercise, followed by a fluff, just to keep the momentum going. Your clients like the fluff. If you're a bodybuilder, you don't need fluff. Most of our clients are general pop. So they like doing new things. They like abs. You could do a C A and a C A and then do abs for the last 15 minutes. What does your client want? We could relate it back to that question about reviews. What is in it for your clients? Your clients like to sweat, they like to feel the burn. So you could have the first 30 minutes based on their core patterns and then get into 15 minutes of almost like a fluff circuit of things that they enjoy to do. That's the psychology of it. Why do you think so many small group studios are successful? Because they only need 200 to 300 people that are paying two to 300 bucks a month and they're just going to get annihilated. There's a lot of people that like getting annihilated. Just have an honest, candid conversation with your clients. What are the top three things that you want to achieve working with me as your personal trainer? Do you like new exercises? Do you like getting gassed at the end? Or are you really just focused on your results? Because if we want those results, we're going to need to rest a little longer. And you know, I'm not throwing my boss under the table or anything, but we have this 45-minute system they want us to implement. And so I have a tendency to kind of throw in exercises just to throw them in. But if we really want to optimize our goal, my professional recommendation is going to be doing your core movement pattern followed by a complementary core movement pattern. So again, push, pull, leg push, leg press, whatever, upper to lower body. And then we rest for a good 90 seconds so we can optimize that next round. We want to work so then we're tired and we need that rest, but you rest so then you can get the work done. I don't want you to be bench pressing 185 for eight reps, do a bunch of chin-ups for 10, 12 reps, jump rope. And by the time we come back to that bench press, we only can do the 185 for three. That's defeating the purpose. So I think it's also important for you to educate the client on your process because the CCA is built for 60 minutes, but you can regress it, you can progress it to make it more challenging and intensity worthy. I've done CCC, CCCCC, I've done two circuits where it's four C's in the beginning, four C's at the end. It's based on the conditioning of the individuals. You are a creative, smart, competent trainer. So a lot of this is using your critical thought and being the scientist and finding a methodology within the core movement patterns that best fit the demands of your market for 45-minute workouts. You can regress it back for 30 minutes as well. Get into the Facebook group, qualified personal trainers community, ask questions. I love answering them, providing greater feedback than a simple text or an email. We're here to help. What are you struggling with? Let us know. The community is built for your success. The more questions you have, the more people you link up with. You are surrounding yourself with qualified trainers. You will and are turning your passion for fitness into career. Lastly, again, I really appreciate it when you get into those Reddit groups. Let people know there's an alternative to the big three. You can level yourself up, get the best jobs out there, Equinox Lifetime. We'll see you in Sacramento the 7th and 8th of November, Dallas the 21st and 22nd. And then we're going to end off the year, Orange County, December 5th and 6th. Have a great day. And remember, big biceps are better than small ones and keep showing up.