3 Common mistakes when using Personal Training Client Tracking Sheets

I’ve spent some time looking at how you guys work. And one of the most common thing I have seen is using personal training client tracking sheet
In this post, I share 3 mistakes personal trainers make when tracking their client’s

• Personal information (measurements, lifestyle info, etc…)
• Workouts (sets, weight used etc)

1) Using paper for your personal training client tracking sheet

You have found great templates on internet, Printed them. And use them to track your clients. That’s great! we do not need to reinvent the wheel.
However there are many scenario where paper is far from Ideal.

First of all, paper is NOT secure. I mean, you are dealing with personal and identifiable information (PII). And while you may not care if a stranger knew about your allergies, number of bowel movements per week, medications, or how much you lift on the leg press… Some of your client would be really upset if you misplaced those sheets. And if you train public figures, a malicious person could target you for this information and you may end up being sued for loosing such information.
There are many laws out there that exists to protect people’s privacy. And as the owner of your personal training business, it is your responsibility to make sure that your client’s privacy is respected and protected. 

Paper is also easy to loose or forget somewhere. How unprofessional is it to ask the same information twice to your client? or worse, what happens when you show up for a PT session and completely lost track of how much weight your client needs to lift. Or that his or her left shoulder is damaged… To be the most efficient, your data needs to be always available and paper simply is not the way to achieve this.

2) Using Digital Documents & Google Sheets

If you use Digital Documents to track your client’s information, you partly solved the paper problem in terms of security and availability.

Only Partly because you may not be backing up and storing your documents every single time, therefore you might get in a situation where you cannot get a hold of a specific sheet.
Additionally, Word, Excel and google doc are easily readable on your phone, but editing is a lot more difficult on smaller devices. As a result, digital documents are not ideal when it comes to tracking workouts. And you end up spreading your data across different types of supports rather than having a single personal training client tracking sheet per client.

3) No proper way to visualize Change and progress

Whether it is about personal information, or about workouts information. it is critical to visualize change over time to understand if your client is going in the right direction. Usually this is done by doing a graph over time of specific information. Like a client weight or BMI change over time, the reps or weight over time for a specific workout etc… And most personal training client tracking templates are not taking this into account

If you are using paper, you have to input all this data back into an excel sheet or a similar app to get your graph. If you are already using Excel or Google Sheet you are a bit ahead since your data is already on the computer. However, more often than not, all the data is spread across several documents or pages. And not already organized to be tracked over time. So you still have to move it around before being able to create those graphs. And visualize key information to help you assess and share your client’s situation.

Visualization is important to you, but I believe that it is even more important to your clients. Many people need to visualize progress to stay motivated, not just be told that they are progressing. And they need to stay motivated to reach goals. So as a PT, it is very important that you share this information often and in the most transparent and professional way

To summarize, your personal training client tracking sheet should always be available. And easily readable and editable wherever you are. They should track information overtime and provide an easy to visualize change overtime. Finally, they should be easily sharable with your clients.
We have designed JustTrain exactly for this and recommend you to see how we do that on this page