Are your clients eating how they should outside of the gym?
Isn’t it frustrating when a client just finished a killer workout at the gym, only to destroy all this progress at McDonald’s 30 minutes later?
As a personal trainer, you are accountable for the results of your clients. Your goal is to support and train them so that they can make progress towards fitness and health.
However, as you well know, exercising at the gym is just part of the equation – nutrition plays a crucial role too. As the old adage goes, you can’t outwork a bad diet.
It’s one thing for clients to perform at their best at the gym, when you are personally coaching them and pushing them to work hard. It’s a different story altogether what these clients will do outside of the gym, when you are not watching them.
We all know how easy it is to eat a poor diet nowadays. Junk food is everywhere, ever so cheap and convenient, and it takes knowledge, guidance, and discipline to stick to a diet mentally.
Is there a practical way to help your clients make better dietary choices outside of the gym, and to keep them accountable so that they achieve their fitness goals? Keep on reading to find out a possible solution.
Why do people work hard at the gym, but then eat badly when they are on their own?
It’s harder to eat healthy than to eat junk food nowadays. We are all busier than ever, living hectic lives, and our nutrition and health are often sacrificed under pressure from modern day demands.
A healthy diet used to be a staple in most households a couple of generations ago. People would eat home cooked meals with local produce and seasonal vegetables. Food came from gardens rather than out of plastic boxes.
Today people eat on the go much more often than in the past. There seems to be no time to cook at home, and healthy food is hard to come by in many cities. On the other hand, fast food, heavily processed meals, and unhealthy drinks are everywhere.
In many cases, individuals are not even sure of what constitutes a healthy diet anymore. We are more confused than ever, with food advertisements targeted at us no matter where we go. The word healthy itself has been used so many times in so many questionable ways that it has almost lost its meaning.
It’s also often cheaper and faster to get junk food than to find a healthy meal. Processed foods have long expiry dates, are produced industrially, and are sold cheaply. Fresh vegetables and organic food are usually costlier and harder to find.
Due to all these factors, it’s no surprise obesity rates are skyrocketing in most developed nations. This poses a big challenge for you as a personal trainer and for the fitness prospects of your clients.
It can be hard to stick to a good diet without a plan, and of course, many personal trainers offer meal plans for their clients. However, there are many problems with this approach:
- It can take a lot of time to create a personalized meal plan for a client. This time is often spent behind the scenes, and clients may not appreciate all the effort you put into this extra work
- Clients may only want to pay for the time spent with you at the gym. So it can be hard to justify the time and expenditure of creating personalized meal plans
- You can use a generic meal plan for all your clients to save time, but this won’t be too effective as each individual has unique needs and goals
- Even if you could magically create the perfect meal plan for each client, it’s useless if your clients then don’t follow the plan outside the gym
Due to all the problems mentioned above, plus the fact that you can’t monitor clients 24/7 when they are at work or at their home, bad eating habits outside the gym remains an unsolved problem in many cases.
Personal trainer software to help clients eat healthy outside the gym
What if there was a software tool that allowed you to:
- Effortlessly create personalized meal plans for your clients
- Keep track of each clients’ progress over time
- Monitor clients’ food diaries to ensure they comply with prescribed plans
All of it available on an iPad, phone, laptop, or any device so that you can easily access your data in the gym or on the go. How much would such a tool help you?
Has it ever happened to you that a client threw the towel after months of work because there were no results to show? An event like this can be disheartening, both for you and for the client – but it doesn’t have to be.
In most cases, when a client fails to achieve his or her goals, the problem lays in his or her dietary habits. It’s likely the work at the gym is effective, but that the client is undoing progress by eating unhealthy foods.
If there is a problem with an exercise routine, it should be relatively easy to identify and correct if you are training with your client. After all, you can see what the client is doing at the gym.
On the other hand, it’s harder to influence what and how the client eats when you are not watching. Imagine if there was a software program that could help you here – severally decreasing the chance of a client giving up prematurely.
Imagine if clients came to the gym, feeling at their best after a day of healthy eating. Imagine being able to easily track their food intake, being delighted to find out your clients are actually following your dietary recommendations.
At the end of the day, a tool that improved the chances of your clients doing their homework (eating healthy) outside the gym would lead to great results in less time and with less pain.
When your clients achieve their goals, you achieve your goals too. Happy clients recommend you to their friends and family, and make your personal training journey much more fulfilling and rewarding.
How technology has changed over the last couple of years
Just a few years ago, pen and paper were your best bet if you wanted to create a meal plan for a client on the spot.
Then came desktop computer software. There are some old programs that can allow you to generate a meal plan, but many of these programs are now obsolete, or can only be used in an office setting – not on the gym (say in an iPad).
Nowadays, we live in the age of cloud computing. We have quickly gotten used to login to services online (e.g. Facebook or Youtube), to have all of our data synced across devices, and to use apps on smartphones, tablets, and laptops.
In fact, these days, there are plenty of apps out there. Check out our guide on the best apps for personal trainers to learn more.
Conceiving NutriAdmin
To address the demands of modern life, we have engineered a cloud-computing personal trainer software called NutriAdmin. This is a modern web-app that allows you to connect from any device with an internet connection to do your work.
In fact, NutriAdmin is one of the best apps for nutritionists out there. The app allows you to easily create meal plans, to keep track of clients, and to monitor their progress over time. It’s meant as an all-in-one tool to cover your admin/data needs.
Although NutriAdmin was initially thought out for nutritionists, we have found that plenty of personal trainers find it useful too. Especially if you need to create meal plans or analyze diets.
In fact, using our meal plan generator, you can create a whole plan in 60 seconds. The software allows you to input macros, diet, and other parameters and produces a whole plan instantly. This is our most popular feature amongst personal trainers.
The software can also manage scheduling, online payments, take intake questionnaires (and food diaries) from clients, and print out formatted reports (e.g. before and after picture plus table tracking weight and muscle mass over time).
Interestingly enough, NutriAdmin started as a software for nutritionist and dietitians. However, over the last few years, we have gotten more and more personal trainers signing up and using the service on a regular basis.
Since we haven’t really marketed the software to personal trainers at all, the fact that they have signed up on their own must mean that the software is useful on a gym/personal training setup.
After all, even though the job of a nutritionist and a personal trainer is markedly different, there are many areas that overlap. E.g. Creating meal plans, providing healthy eating guidance, helping clients be healthier, etc.
We have been listed as a recommended app by AFPA – the American Fitness Professionals & Associates association, and hundreds of personal trainers have tried NutriAdmin. Many of our personal trainer users also recommend NutriAdmin.
“It’s not a bloated software with a million features, but a more streamlined, well-organized software”
Marc Perry, Personal Trainer, CEO of BuiltLean, USA
So, how fast is it to create a meal plan in NutriAdmin?
It’s really fast. There are two available options:
- You can auto-generate a meal plan by simply entering the desired diet, calories, and macronutrient percentages
- You can use your own meal presets, recipes, and templates to create a fully customized meal plan
Auto-generating a meal plan
This is the fastest option: You can create a meal plan in as little as 30 seconds. Just think how useful it would be to finish a training session with a client, enter his or her details into NutriAdmin, and instantly have a personalized plan ready.
The meal plan auto-generator lets you choose a diet (e.g. Paleo, Atkins, Ketogenic, etc), as well as the number of calories, protein, fat, and carbohydrate required. Once this data is provided, our software will produce a meal plan matching your criteria.
The auto-generated meal plans will also include a shopping list, step-by-step recipes, and a macronutrient and micronutrient full analysis. Your logo will be available in the final document so that you can give a professional document to your clients.
The only drawback of the auto-generator is that perhaps we won’t have a diet or recipes available for some specific cases. The diets we have are suitable for many clients, but if you need a very specific type of plan, then the option below works best.
Fully customized meal plans
NutriAdmin also allows you to create a meal plan from scratch. This way, you can specify every single ingredient, quantity, and recipe. This should enable you to create any type of meal plan to meet the needs of any client, regardless of his/her goals.
Of course, if you had to always specify every single ingredient in a plan it would take ages to finish the task. That’s why NutriAdmin has several power tools at your disposal to enable you to create meal plans quickly.
Firstly, we have access to a database of recipes including 360,000+ items, so you can find pre-made recipes to add to your plans – saving you a lot of time. Alternatively, you can also create your own recipes form scratch.
The advantage of recipes is that you only need to setup each recipe once – Then, you will be able to add them to meal plans with one click. You can store your own personal library of recipes including prep instructions, photos, tips, etc.
In addition, you can also save meal presets, and whole meal plan templates. Spending some time configuring your highly customized meal options will enable you to create meal plans with a few clicks later.
If you spend some time setting up your recipes and templates, you should be able to complete most meal plans in 10-15 minutes. You don’t need to calculate nutrients (this is automatic) and you never have to re-write any text you’ve used before.
Finally, we provide utilities such as copy/pasting meals, calculating formulas for clients (e.g. BMR, BMI, protein requirement, etc), highlighting micronutrient deficiencies, etc. All of these are designed to make meal planning faster.
What about progress-tracking and workout recommendations?
Some of our personal trainer users also benefit from the reports and templates functionality in NutriAdmin. If you give handouts with exercises or training routines to your clients, then you can save time here too.
A report in NutriAdmin is like a Word document, with the advantage that all the data for the client record is pulled in automatically. This way, you can add the client’s progress report, before/after picture, goals, etc.
Moreover, you can save templates for different exercise routines. E.g. you could save separate templates for pull-ups, squats, and dead lifts. Each template can include a picture showing correct form, reps, weight recommendations, etc.
Once you have a few templates set up, creating a personalized workout routine is as easy as clicking a few buttons to select the appropriate exercises. This can allow you to create personalized regimens with ease. It’s similar to the way meal plans work.
How do you keep track of a client’s progress and goals?
In NutriAdmin, almost everything is customizable. This includes client records in the system.
By default, the client records include over 100 data fields related to nutrition and health. As a personal trainer, it’s possible you won’t need many of them, so you can easily remove them to make the records for focused and clear.
Then, you can customize all of the fields available to keep track of whatever is relevant for a client. This could include fields such as workout frequency, goal, weight, age, gender, diet, injuries, and any kind of relevant note.
Having all this information in one place will ensure you never forget important details about your clients. E.g. who had a knee injury a few months ago, who has special dietary requirements, or who is taking supplements.
It’s also easy to keep track of a client’s progress over time. You can click here for a step-by-step tutorial on how to do this. By default, there is a table to track weight, body fat, etc over time, but you can customize this.
Finally, you can request food diaries from clients to track their meal consumption, or to analyze their diet and find out if there are any problems. You can click here to learn more.
Who is NutriAdmin not for
If you are not interested in providing nutrition guidance to your clients, such as meal plans, recipes, etc, for whatever reason, then there are probably other apps out there more suitable for your use case.
You could still benefit from NutriAdmin by using the calendar, questionnaires, reports, etc, but you would be not making the most out of the software. In any case, you can always try it out and cancel if you see the app doesn’t meet your needs.
How can I try NutriAdmin?
If you are interested in NutriAdmin, you can:
- Read more around our website
- Click the blue Ask a QuestionMail on the bottom-right of the page at [nutriadmin.com](https://nutriadmin.com)
- Check our pricing by clicking here
- Start a 14-day free trial by clicking the button below
NutriAdmin works very well for many personal trainers, but of course, each user is unique and has different requirements. Our 14-day free trial allows you to test NutriAdmin out and to cancel with one click if you are not convinced.
When you contact us, you will typically get a reply within 24 hours. We don’t outsource out customer support, it’s done mainly by me (Diego) the co-founder of NutriAdmin and author of the article you are reading.
I like doing customer support personally because it allows me to better understand what our users need. This helps enormously when designing the features of the software, including those little crucial details that could be missed otherwise.
Please don’t hesitate in reaching out if you have any questions, and I hope NutriAdmin can help you and your clients achieve your goals.
If you are a fitness coach, check out the page below to learn how NutriAdmin can help coaches specifically:
