In ACE’s recent webinar entitled “Connecting with Clients during COVID-19,” Todd Durkin, MS, CSCS, ACE-CPT and owner of Fitness Quest 10 & Todd Durkin Enterprises, offered five tips for how to better serve your clients during these unprecedented times.
The key word is “serve.” Todd emphasized that these strategies are not necessarily about expanding your business or making more money, but instead focus on how to best help your clients successfully navigate the dramatic shift in lifestyle and priorities that nearly all of us are experiencing.
- Take care of yourself.
This can be a tough concept for many people in the fitness industry, who often build their schedules and services around the needs of their clientele. But you have to make yourself a priority these days. Remember, you can’t effectively help or coach others if you are not managing your own needs and allowing yourself some time for self-care.
This is also a great time to be mindful of your own habits and then tap into your best ones. We all have habits that affect our health and wellness in positive and negative ways, so think about which of your habits serve you best—whether they influence your physical-activity routine, nutritional intake, stress management or sleep routine—and build on those elements of your lifestyle that strengthen your foundation of health and wellness.
It’s important to remind yourself, and your clients, that the primary goal right now should be to live a healthy lifestyle in order to build your immunity and strengthen your mindset, both of which are essential elements of managing your way through this pandemic.
- Create your virtual gym.
Todd mentioned during the webinar how much he missed his gym, along with the high fives, fist bumps and camaraderie with clients that come from being in that environment. Of course, that outlet—which is what draws many people to the fitness industry in the first place—is gone for now and sure to be quite different for the foreseeable future.
So Todd urged getting creative. Think about how you can duplicate that joy and sense of community in a virtual setting. Offer live workouts, education sessions or even video check-ins where you ask clients how they’re doing, what kind of exercise they’