Why Showing Progress Will Lead to Success at Your Boot Camp

The other day I saw a lady marching in place beside the bleachers at a youth sporting event. She was swinging her arms and raising her knees up to her hips as she stepped, stepped, stepped in place. It was a peculiar sight. But after she looked several times at the band on her wrist, I figured out that she was walking in place to reach her daily step count goal.

Personal fitness trackers are powerful motivators, aren’t they? They work because they show the wearer their incremental progress toward a goal. But you have a much more powerful tool than a personal fitness tracker to help your members, and we’re going to show you how to use it to show progress and deliver an unending supply of motivation.

Motivation and Reward Feedback

We’ve known for a long time that it’s better to set small, manageable fitness goals, instead of the big leap ones. When we set a single, huge goal, like doing an Iron Man Triathlon or losing a lot of weight, we usually aren’t patient enough for the payoff that will eventually come when we achieve the goal. But smaller, easily attainable goals give us a quick enough reward to sustain our motivation. Once we achieve the first goal, we’ve got the ball rolling, and we can set new goals to continue progressing.

The key to making this work is that we need to know where we start so that we can notice our incremental improvement and small goal attainments. Otherwise, we won’t see our progress, and we’ll lose our motivation and interest.

Establishing a Baseline and Goals for Each Member

That’s why you should start each new client out by doing an initial consultation with them. Record their body measurements and weight, establish a baseline workout and help them set healthy goals. Once you have that data recorded, you can use it to show your members their progress over time. Automations in your member management software make this part effortless. You can set them to trigger periodically- maybe every three months- to remind you to meet with each client to check in and establish new goals.

Showing Progress with Workout Tracking

But here’s where that extra powerful tool comes in- workout tracking. When you’re able to demonstrate your members’ progress after each workout, you’re providing that super quick positive feedback reward. Your members will feel motivated when they see their improvements on the number of sets and reps they can do, as compared to their baseline workout from their new client intake. They’ll also see their ability to lift heavier weight and notice their improved cardio endurance.

This workout data is easy to capture and store with workout tracking integrated into your member management software. You just program your daily workout into the system, and your members record their individual results using their Member App on their smart phones. In the same place, they can see their historical progress and how close they are to reaching their goals.

This process becomes social and fun by displaying member avatars with workout data and letting members congratulate each other under a workout result. Members can watch their progress as they climb their way up on the daily leaderboard, and as your members improve, they come in higher and higher on the leaderboard. This process is fun and incredibly motivating. The leaderboard and ability to comment on and like their friends’ results allows members to watch and support one another’s progress over time, which just adds to their motivation.

Workout tracking is far more powerful than personal fitness trackers. Workout tracking delivers unending motivation because you can combine it with your new member consultations, strong community and world class coaching. With this mix, members will look forward to recording their workouts and seeing their progress, all of which will lead to great results, happy members and excellent member retention.

Looking for additional tips to keep your members loyal? Get your copy of our guide, 7 Essential Strategies for Member Retention.