The Three Stage Journey

Fitness is a journey, not a destination.

One of the biggest reasons that members don’t stick around is that they have false expectations of what ‘fitness’ really means. The media isn’t helping us here, with fad diets and wonder workouts leading to a mindset of ‘short-termism’ when it comes to health and wellbeing. 

At worst, people are expecting to join a gym and magically get slim and toned. Less extreme but still pretty pie-in-the-sky are the prospects who want to ‘get fit’ and then leave as if magically ‘fixed’.

If you want your retention levels to be consistently high (hint: yes, you do), you need to manage people’s expectations from the very beginning. YOU know you can get them results, but they don’t. You also know how you plan to do this, but they have no idea. 

So lay the process out right from the get-go. As we’ve already mentioned, your trial lowers the barrier to entry and allows clients to ‘try before they buy’. This is the first stage of their training journey with you. 

The second stage of their progress can vary massively in length – some people never move beyond this, and that’s fine. This stage is about establishing the fundamentals of good training habits, and building solid GPP. 

And thirdly, we have the advanced stage. This is ideal for those members who have been at the gym for a while and want to give themselves new challenges and get in peak physical shape.

Your New Joiner Manual will help support this staged journey, as will a properly executed Sales process and a thorough and systematic on-boarding process. 

But when it comes to explaining a client’s progress over the years as a member with you, we find that a separate hard copy outlining the approach is very effective. This can be a brochure, pamphlet, or similar – just make sure it’s properly branded and of a professional standard, like all your materials. 

Don’t take a random approach. Decide when you want to hand these out as part of a systematic trial period – we find that the half-way point works well for us – but gauge the right time based on your own client base. 

And don’t just chuck it at the client and forget about it – this is something you can refer to as the months go on, tying it in with your Gym Standards and Testing Weeks to help track progress and give clients a sense of achievement.