Do you ever find yourself in the situation where you have an abundance of potential clients and plenty of prospects that have an interest in starting a personal training program, but you can not seem to reach a decent conversion rate or you have a surprisingly high dropout rate for your clients already in your fitness program?

If you answered yes to either of those questions you are in the same boat as many other personal trainers. One of the most difficult barriers for trainers to overcome when trying to gain new clients is actually the barriers of those potential clients. You can save valuable time and make your prospecting much more effective by helping these potential clients and new clients overcoming their barriers to exercise.

Almost everyone has a barrier to exercise, some of them are true barriers and some of them merely part of their imagination. The great thing is that these barriers are mostly overcomeable, and done so quite easily. First let’s focus on some of the common true barriers that are actually physical and real.

Some examples are; children, transportation, money, access to a gym, age, a disability, or illness. These kinds of barriers can be overcome by actual solutions, such as; child care, at home workouts, carpooling, public transportation systems, online training, and explaining that exercise can be adjusted for nearly everybody regardless of age, strength, experience, or disabilities.

I can’t go over every solution to every physical barrier but I can tell you that it is important to listen to your potential clients’ barriers and don’t count them out because they have a barrier. Instead, try to work with them and help them find a solution to those barriers.

A whole separate category of barriers are those “imaginary” barriers that many people see as real. These are very common and are mostly used as excuses for people who don’t have the motivation the jump on the “fitness train”. The most common of these barriers is that they do not have the time to exercise. Thankfully this is one of the easier barriers to overcome.

You can do this by recommending a time journal for them to track how they spend their time on a daily basis.  With this tool, they can visually see where they are spending their time. This is a priceless piece of information because now they can make adjustments to how they spend their time and rearrange their schedule to fit working out into their schedule and other things as well.

You can increase your closing percentage and decrease your dropout rate by implementing these strategies that I covered about exercise barriers. Your clients will thank you for helping them overcome a barrier that may have been preventing them from exercising for a long time.

By overcoming these barriers you can help free your clients from their “chains” and show these new clients the amazing world of health and fitness.