How Nutrition Coaching Can Help Build a Resilient Gym

Most owners opened a gym because they wanted to help people become the best versions of themselves. They quickly realized to help more people, you need the systems to grow and ensure a consistent experience. 

Gym owners who built the most resilient businesses learned they needed to ​diversify revenue streams. ​Owners added complementary services to provide their clients with a holistic approach to reaching their health and fitness goals. 

We all know you can’t out-exercise a bad diet, and if your client’s primary goal is weight loss, you need to be talking about nutrition. The problem is most owners ​only talk about nutrition during a challenge or an informal conversation. 

Clients see amazing results during a challenge but regain the weight they worked so hard to lose. They fall into ​the challenge trap. 

Your clients need more support than that. They need a comprehensive nutrition program. 

Here are ​three reasons why you need to be focusing on nutrition: 

1. Nutrition coaching will ​help your clients achieve results.

What happens if your client’s primary goal is weight loss when they join the gym and then they don’t see any? They are going to think your program doesn’t work for them. When in reality if they had nutrition support in addition to coming to the gym, their results would have skyrocketed. Nutrition coaching helps your clients see better results, which makes them happier and builds brand advocates.

2. Nutrition coaching can be ​done from anywhere.

Gym owners around the world had to shut their physical locations for three to four months. Gym owners who had the best retention rates and added clients during COVID-19 shutdowns learned to pivot quickly to support clients virtually. Nutrition coaching can be done from anywhere. With more people stuck at home and realizing they needed to take control of their health, nutrition coaches have been able to add clients during this time.

3. Nutrition coaching will add ​a revenue stream.

When it comes to providing nutrition coaching, you should be providing individualized attention and charging for your time. Your average revenue per member per month increases when you build hybrid packages — i.e. nutrition plus fitness.

When building a successful nutrition program, you can expand your reach. Maybe someone isn’t interested in your gym or goes to a gym down the street but is looking for help with their nutrition. Now you are helping more people and adding more revenue without adding more people in a class. This is especially important when looking at the restrictions gym owners are dealing with right now due to COVID-19. 

What happens if you are forced to shut down again? Will your business survive? To ​build a resilient business​, you need to diversify revenue streams, and adding nutrition coaching is one of the best ways to do that.

Healthy Steps Nutrition hosted a ​Nutrition Business Virtual Workshop ​in July. Hundreds of gym owners around the world joined live to learn how to build a resilient business. Topics discussed included marketing, member retention, FAD diets, and scaling your business beyond your gym walls. To help more gym owners during this stressful time, you can access the presentations recordings and application videos for FREE. ​Register ​here.