The 'Cook It Up' Promotion (One Of My Favorites)

This post is a promotional idea how you can use your nutritional knowledge and kitchen prowess to dazzle your existing and potential personal training clients into utilizing and taking your calorie controlled meal plans more seriously.

Training clients is easy and one of the best parts of being a personal trainer and it's also easy for your clients because all they have to do is turn up to your sessions and do the work.

The Problem With Weight Loss

If weight loss and good health was 80% working out then a lot more people would be in shape; unfortunately nutrition holds that major percentage in the equation and that's the biggest challenge to incorporate and monitor within the trainer/client relationship.

Without appropriate nutritional training and education, handing out copies of recommended meal plans is about as much as a personal trainer can do in their business with regards to a clients eating habits and your recommendations.

You can't stand and watch them eat like you do a set of squats and you can't follow them around the supermarket and put the biscuits back on the shelf like a mother does to their kids (or partners).

So you have to get a little creative and proactive and this cheap and simple promotion worked great every time.

Can you cook healthy foods?

Through my senior years of high school I worked in kitchens for pocket money and after finishing school I began a chef's apprenticeship.

I worked in kitchens for a few years until I realised that while it was a fun job socially, it wasn't going to be a lasting career choice based on my passion for health and fitness.

Now, even though I've been trained in 'throwing the pans' (as one of my chefs use to say) cooking good, clean foods is pretty easy and I'm sure you do it daily anyway.

So with that background, I use to promote a cooking night about once every three months where I'd set up a grill and a few burners and basically hold my own cooking show right there in the gym.

It was free for everyone to come along and I'd promote it with flyer's and posters in strategic locations (like the gym bathrooms) a few weeks before each one.

I don't know what it is, but people love cooking shows

There's something about watching other people cook that you can't look away from and television ratings are all the social proof you need.

For my cooking nights, I'd prepare two dinner meals and a desert and that would take about 45 minutes to an hour max. I'd also incorporate vegetarian versions if there was a call for it.

About 20 minutes before starting I'd hand out 'menus' to selected people (from my marketing avatar) in the gym to create a little buzz highlighting  the dishes I was going to prepare, the ingredients, cost, serving sizes and nutritional information.

People would stop and watch as they arrived and left the gym and it really was a fantastic promotion for drumming up new business (have plenty of business cards ready).

As I prepared the meals I'd talk about how much it cost, why I was using certain ingredients, throw in some sweet knife tricks and try to get the people juiced and after I prepared each meal I'd hand out small samples to everyone.

My clients loved these nights and I always had a great turnout. They would tell me how they have started to prepare the meals at home for themselves and their families, because they'd seen how simple the meals were to make.

Click Image To Enlarge

The only consideration with this promotion, is to clarify that your gym or fitness center has the appropriate legal structure where you can prepare food on the premises. If they don't and you still want to run this promotion. just don't put any flyer's in your local councils office :).

Wear an apron, take it seriously and your clients will respond positively. You'll also find that this is a very lucrative and inexpensive promotion for your personal training business, so have fun with it.

Ben

Additional Reading:
How To Create A Client Marketing Avatar
I'm The World's Best Personal Trainer
How I Turned Two Hours Work Into Ten New Clients