8 Niche Ideas for Personal Trainers

Getting Started

May 21, 2021

By Tim Saye



If you want to find success as an online personal trainer, you will need to find your niche. Your niche is your focused market corner, a specific idea of who your target audience is and how you can help them. This will help you build your business model, bring in more clients and help more people with their fitness goals.

Finding your niche sooner rather than later is very important for an online trainer. It distinguishes you from the host of other online trainers who might offer generic programs or work with different types of clients. You can take a slice of the market and focus your efforts to speak to that specific audience in a way that establishes trust and shows competence. 

Remember, the best niche for you is a cross between the people you most enjoy training, those who can and want to afford you, and problems you are qualified and enthusiastic to solve, and you're good at it. In this article, we'll list 8 potential niches you might want to use as inspiration in finding your own. 
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#1. Busy City Professionals

Those who have busy lives in the city are always a fair shout - if only because they tend to be run-down and aware that they need to be improving their lifestyle to make it healthier.

You can appeal to these people by focusing primarily on efficiency and availability - as long as you can fit into their busy schedules and provide them with a unique solution to their circumstances, they will find your service an attractive proposal. This niche is best suited for trainers who live in a busy city and maybe even have some experience working in a dynamic corporate environment.


#2. Training for Disabled

A particularly rewarding niche to consider is to help out people who have gone through some life-altering situations where they had to physically and mentally overcome a challenge. Some examples include people who had a limb amputated or those born with a disability. 

You can encourage them to train their bodies to their fullest capability, helping them to make the most of the life they have. What's needed here is a lot of compassion and patience and a desire to help people 'live their best life'.


#3. Coaching for Military and Police Forces

Two of the most influential groups in society are the police and the military. Anyone wanting to be a part of either is first going to have to get fit, and the better they achieve this, the more likely they can get into the program in question. 

As a PT, you could focus on helping those individuals improve their chances of getting into the police force or defence - or improve the strength and physical well-being of those who are already doing that job. This niche is usually best suited to trainers who have had experience in the Forces, so they understand the training demands and performance levels required to excel in that environment.


#4. Training for LGBTQ+ Community

Another approach is to offer your professional PT services to those who might otherwise feel disenfranchised. Certain groups in our culture will often find it more difficult to find a trainer who accepts them for who they are and is able to understand their needs and what they should do to achieve their goals. A good example of this is the LGBTQ+ community who would benefit from working with trainers who have specific knowledge, understanding, and experience.
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#5. Fitness for Women Before and After Becoming Mums

Pregnancy is one of the most physically transformational experiences a woman can have. Fitness is often about preparing for these kinds of significant life events. You can even go narrower within this niche. If you are keen to help women prepare for pregnancy, you might want to follow in the footsteps of Fitness by Jessi and specifically offer your services to women who are trying to become pregnant, or planning to in the near future. You can also choose to work with mums who have already given birth, whether that occurred a few months, years or decades ago.


#6. Strength Training for Everyday People

Many people are keen to improve their strength and perform better in everyday activities, and they don't mind if their body composition changes in the process. You can advertise to people seeking those results and point out that strength-building increases confidence and even helps burn fat too, so it's a great all-round exercise.


#7. Weight Loss for 50+ Women

As you have no doubt worked out already, a straightforward way to hone in on a niche is to think about a group of people who might have specific needs and desires you can solve. One such group could be women over 50 - who are often keen to keep the weight off and stay feeling young and healthy. 

You don't have to be a woman over fifty yourself to help those people, but having gone through the same experiences with hormonal changes and weight gain might allow them to trust you better. What Lisa does at Body and Soul Coaching is an excellent example of this.


#8. Training for Athletes Of Specific Sports

Maybe you have prior experience in a particular sport, and now you want to help those who are getting into that sport themselves. Or you understand specific sports' strength needs so well that you're best positioned to work with that clientele, and you can show prospective clients your competence via success stories.
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Either way, coaching athletes to become stronger, faster and better is a rewarding journey because you can see your work pay off within weeks and months. This is a beautiful service to offer, as it allows you to use your specific knowledge to help train sportspeople in precisely the way they need to be prepared for the sport. One example is triathlon coaching.


Conclusion

These are only 8 examples of what you can do as a personal trainer and an online fitness coach. It might take some time to experiment with your ideal clients, but once you find them, marketing your services will become a lot more streamlined.

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