A personal trainer explains that clients often care more about fun and community than numbers. He uses a framework called BAM and BHAG to set realistic goals like 0.5 to 1 kg per week, and shares how Daniel valued the social side of training while Helen lost 40 kg in a year. The job is as much emotional support as it is physical results.
So let's talk now about addressing clients' needs, wants, and a little more about their expectations. So let me begin by telling you a story. I was PTing a young gentleman named Daniel for many years, and I was focused solely on delivering Daniel the very best results. And Daniel sometimes would get frustrated at me because Daniel actually got really great results. And probably, I don't know, halfway through our personal training, 6 months, 7 months in, something like this. I said, Daniel, you don't seem as motivated. Can I ask you a question? What do you value in the context of our personal training relationship? And he looked at me, paused, and thought. Fun. I said, what do you mean? He said, well, I like coming to the gym after work because you and I, we have so much fun and I get to work on my fitness. I sat there going, What about results? Said, no, we've got good results. I like coming here now because we have fun together and I get to work on fitness and I still think we're getting results. And then everything started to make sense because Daniel would like to talk to me about Family Guy and South Park during his sets and we would laugh and giggle and we had a lot of fun. And but his goal wasn't to get just results because in his head he had already gotten a high level of results he wanted to maintain. So the reason why I tell that story is because on the topic of expectations and wants and needs of what clients, all those things is people come to you through market research, speaking to clients, human emotions. People come to you with a rainbow, a plethora of needs, wants, and desires. And sometimes what someone says and what they actually need and want are two different things. And then it's up to you to kind of figure out where does this client sit? So, Let me give you some, some key things that I say to a client when they start a relationship with us, with me here at Enterprise Fitness. I give clients an outline of if we're looking at results, we have the BAM. The BAM is the bare-ass minimum. And then we have the BHAG. The BHAG is the big hairy audacious goal. So as a BAM, generally speaking, we think that we can help someone lose anywhere from, well, BAM is half a kilo a week. The BHAG is a full kilo a week. Now, obviously they have to have, you know, a certain amount of weight to lose. If someone's already quite lean and muscular, they probably don't have that much to lose. Right. But generally speaking, for a weight loss client, it's going to be half a kilo to a full kilo a week. So the BHAG, the Big Hairy Audacious Goal, is we lose a kilo a week. So if you work with me for 12 weeks, at best case scenario, we're going to lose 12 kilos, bare ass minimum, 6 kilos. So it's probably going to be somewhere between that. We're looking at 6 to 12 kilos depending on how much weight fat you've got to lose and how hard you work. Likewise, if they are lean and muscular and say they want to do a comp, generally speaking, what we recommend there— what I recommend there is the BHAG, the, the bare-ass minimum— sorry, the BAM, the bare-ass minimum is half a percent of body fat lost on skin calipers, which we obviously do and recommend that you learn here at Enterprise Fitness. It's half a percentage of body fat lost a week to a full percentage of body fat lost a week. So in, in 12 weeks, you could lose anywhere from 6% body fat to a full 12% body fat. Now, that is exactly what we found with our clients, and it does depend on how hard the client works and what their starting point is, obviously. You know, we've had a client, her name was Helen, uh, she's on our website. She lost 40 kilos in the space of a little over 12 months. Um, so, you know, the 50 weeks obviously is longer, you know, 40 kilos. But the point there is she's maintained and kept the weight off as well. But it did take her around 12 months. So we hit the goal, right? We hit the goal. It was a little over, but we hit the goal and she's, she's kept to it. So you want to look at your clients. I give that as a general overview for clients to work with so they can gauge. We have had clients and you probably will have clients as well where one client said in her second week of training, I'm not losing weight fast enough. She had lost 5 kilos in the second week. Obviously a lot of that was fluid, right? But she lost 5 kilos and she was upset that, you know, in her second week of training she hadn't lost more weight. And I said, whoa, hang on, you know, the bare-ass minimum is you lose, yeah, half a kilo a week. The, the beehag is you lose a full kilo. So on our schedule you would have lost 2 kilos by now, the best scenario. You've lost 2, you've lost 3 kilos over that. So there's nothing, there's nothing to worry about, right? So sometimes people's perceptions of how fast they're losing, of how much they're losing, all this kind of stuff, you need to temper. So I say, no, we stick to the plan, right? So I'm eating a lot of food, I feel good, great, great, keep doing it, right? It's this— sometimes people lose more, and obviously it flattens out and becomes a bit more even as they start to lose, you know, that fluid and all that kind of stuff. But, um, set those expectations with your clients, be real with them, have a BAM, a bare-ass minimum, a BHAG, let that be kind of guiding for them. And so that way they're not set up with disappointment. And then on top of that, for you as a trainer, understand that it's not always about results. Like the story I told with Daniel, it's not always about results. Some people just, they want to come because it stops them from smoking or going home depressed and drinking and getting into a really bad state. You could be, for a lot of people, and I say this sincerely, you could be the highlight of someone's week every time someone comes into your studio or sees you into the gym and gets through a personal training, you could be the highlight of their week. And, and, you know, there's not many professions where someone can say that. So, um, just understand that it's not always about results. Sometimes people are coming to you just, just to keep them on track with life and, you know, and as a way to connect with physical culture.
