One of the keys to the financial success of your fitness business is your ability to create additional revenue streams that support your clients’ goals. Understanding what your clients need and filling that gap (within the appropriate scope of practice) is crucial. For a personal trainer or fitness studio owner, adding in nutrition coaching is one of the easiest ways to create more revenue in your business. It aligns completely with most goals clients are trying to achieve. And, the behaviors around nutrition are where you’ll be providing direction. Therefore, it’s within the scope of a personal trainer.
Even better, Naamly’s nutrition compliance feature has a built-in mechanism to evaluate clients’ adherence to macronutrient recommendations by interfacing with one of the most popular nutrition apps–MyFitnessPal. It’s easy to use and gives you a quick glance at how the client is doing without requiring you to read all the details in their food log or journal.
Further, the communication features in Naamly make it even easier to quickly touch base, give recommendations, and provide ongoing accountability and encouragement. Collectively, this keeps clients coming back for more because they’re seeing the results they pay your business for.
Here we explore the world of nutrition coaching, why it’s an essential service and the benefits of adding nutrition coaching to your team’s personal training services.
What Is Nutrition Coaching?
With the proper education, nutrition coaches are well-versed in various nutrition topics. They know how to find reliable dietary information and emphasize supporting clients in their adherence to nutrition changes in alignment with the client’s goals.
Most clients are aware they need to make improvements to their nutrition and eating habits in general. And most people understand healthy nutrition changes will help them live a healthier and longer life and support their weight loss goals. Therefore, incorporating nutrition into your programs and services should come as no surprise to new or existing clients.
Clients have likely already tried a variety of different diets without much success. Some eating patterns aren’t sustainable and result in failure. But clients often struggle with healthy, sustainable meal plans as well. Lack of accountability, lack of support when things get hard, and the inability to find and differentiate between reliable and unreliable information play a significant role in the struggle–this is where nutrition coaching comes in. And, of course, this is where Naamly can help!
Nutrition coaches are an incredible source of information and motivation. They are the glue that holds together the client as they implement changes to their eating habits. This need creates an opportunity for a fitness business to offer nutrition coaching as an add-on to other services (e.g., personal training and group exercise) or as a stand-alone service.
Personal Trainers and Nutrition Coaching
Because nutrition is such an important factor in how an individual looks, feels, and functions, some foundational nutrition knowledge is essential for all fitness professionals. Without proper nutrition, even the perfect workout plan won’t get the client to their goal. However, when your personal training team obtains nutrition coaching education and credentials, they have much broader knowledge and skills to help clients reach their goals and drive more revenue.
Unfortunately, nutrition and eating habits are often some of the most challenging patterns to change. So, nutrition coaching plays an intricate role in a client’s success because, as we mentioned, without nutrition changes, workout routines won’t make much of a difference. So, nutrition coaching naturally goes hand-in-hand with personal training.
Education
Before your facility offers nutrition coaching, it’s important for your personal training team to have the appropriate education and credentials. Fitness professionals wanting to provide nutrition coaching to their clients should complete a credible nutrition coaching course. This doesn’t have to be a complete degree or a huge time or financial investment. Most fitness certification companies also offer a nutrition coaching specialization that can be done online, at the learner’s convenience. Once the foundational course is complete, additional nutrition education should be pursued in alignment with the needs of your unique niche (i.e., plant-based diets, holistic nutrition, performance nutrition).
Scope Of practice
Prior to the launch of your nutrition coaching services, it’s critical for all your fitness professionals to understand their scope of practice regarding nutrition. Each state has guidelines specific to what a fitness professional can and can’t do regarding nutrition. So, it’s important for your team to understand your state’s scope of practice.
Prescribing specific meal plans for clients is outside the scope of practice for a nutrition coach. However, defining client goals, developing a plan, educating clients on general nutrition concepts, tracking progress, and holding clients accountable for the changes they want to make are the foundations of nutrition coaching.
Nutrition Coaching Software
One of the critical components of client success in nutrition coaching is accurate nutrition tracking. It’s important to have baseline data on a client’s eating patterns to understand what needs to be altered so they can reach their goals. But in addition to the baseline data, consistent and accurate tracking of each meal throughout the nutrition plan is essential for success. Investing in nutrition coaching software your team can use to accurately track this data is vital.
The Value Of Nutrition Coaching Software
Nutrition coaches, personal trainers, and wellness coaches can educate clients on how to read food labels, weigh and measure foods, and grasp concepts associated with healthy, nutrient-dense foods. However, even with that knowledge, it’s common for clients to overestimate or underestimate the amount of food they consume. Those inaccuracies can mean the difference between failure and success. Therefore, it’s critical for a client to have access to an easy-to-use, accurate, and comprehensive nutrition tracking software. Naamly’s nutrition coaching software can also help the client (and trainer) identify patterns and triggers associated with nutrition behaviors that might be impacting the client’s goals.
Implementation & Pricing Structure
Once your team is prepared to offer nutrition coaching services, you can create add-on pricing or a stand-alone nutrition coaching service.
Many clients working with your fitness professionals would likely love to have additional support regarding their nutrition. So, you can offer nutrition coaching and personal training as a bundle for new clients or an add-on for current clients. In addition, you may be able to capture the average gym-goers at your facility who don’t want personal training but want some extra support to improve their nutrition. So, the stand-alone service can be a great way to support that portion of your customer base.
- Standalone Option:
- Calculate how much time it takes you to evaluate food preferences, existing nutrition behaviors, and macronutrient recommendations.
- Add a minimum of one hour to review the recommendations, how to log foods, and the follow-up mechanism you both will use as part of the nutrition coaching program.
- Determine an ongoing follow-up plan. For most clients, 15-30 minutes each week is enough time to review what worked, what didn’t, what their biometric data says, and create a plan for the coming week.
- Add this time together and multiply it by your hourly rate to determine a pricing structure.
- Premium Programming:
- Naamly recommends adding 10-25% onto a lower-tier program price to calculate the cost to include nutrition coaching.
- Non-Member Programming
- This is a great option for people who:
- Aren’t members yet but are good leads or prospects
- Former clients or members who live out of your area
- Don’t want a full workout program but realize the value of good nutrition
- Take your standalone price and increase by 10-25%
- This is a great option for people who:
Although there are a variety of revenue streams you can consider as you work to grow your fitness business, nutrition coaching is a no-brainer.