THE NEW YEARS CLICHE

The New Years Cliché

Rewrite fitness culture.

By Eric Bugera

• January is always going to be a peak period for fitness.

• Capitalizing on motivation can ultimately lead to long term commitments, when engaged properly.
• Meet the January surge where they are at, building them towards the routines and habits necessary for success.

New Year, New Me.

There are few dates that provide more of a predictable boon to gym memberships and prospective client gain than January 1st. While pop culture has created a near caricature of the January blitz at your gym, the opportunity is still very real. New members flock to their local fitness center – be it social media influence, peer pressure, or a genuine desire to start fresh, now is the “time for change”. On the fitness professional side of things, there is a tendency to salivate at the potential for low barrier sales or the polar opposite. A bitter, often satirical or contrarian viewpoint on the matter that serves no one.

Ride the Wave

The benchmark for being a client-centered trainer is to meet the person where they are at. In the eyes of the coach, this usually manifests from a physical point of view. The reality is that meeting someone where they’re at extends to their psychology as well. No, you are not a therapist, but you have experience in the field and ideally have some semblance of empathy for a new client just starting out. Whatever motivation exists to get a previously sedentary individual through the door is perfectly fine. Once they have you as an anchor, their real relationship with fitness actually begins.

On the contrary, the fastest way to disenfranchise someone is to immediately invalidate their feelings. Fitness, nutrition, and behavior modification are stepwise evolutions. Engaging with someone currently using tactics that you know are not going to be their long-term play still holds value. Establishing habits, routine, and sustainability takes time, and it makes all the sense in the world to capitalize on motivation to get that ball rolling.

Fitness culture tends to ebb and flow with the tides of algorithms. Controversy creates views and being an edgy “super smart” trainer can generate a ton of traffic. That traffic however is often just your peers, not your actual client base. Your prospective clients on the other hand see your posts, write you off, and move onto someone that truly cares about their development – not just posting witty content to be “right”. Ride the January wave, alter the fitness culture to once again encourage the fresh January faces to develop rather than take the wind out of their sails.

Everybody Wins

It takes a certain degree of self awareness to know when to pull the trigger on your knowledge. It’s completely valid to not put undue pressure on any “starting point” for a client because fitness is a lifelong journey. It requires sustainable commitment and ideally spans the rest of your days. Fitness can be quite underwhelming in that respect, but the biggest point of friction is not consistency per se; but rather, establishing that consistency. Whether there is a magical property to January or not, the reality is that the whimsical surge isn’t going anywhere. Use this predictability to your advantage and tailor your approach to those fresh faces you’ll be seeing. 

• Identify your target demographic during January.
• Tailor your knowledge to their level of motivation and experience,
• Engage with prospective clients in a way that fosters positive long-term habits. Grow with them over time.