Mobile apps and smartphones have become entrenched in our daily lives, including the way we work out and stay healthy. As a personal trainer, you can leverage these trends to transform your career and set yourself up for limitless growth.
Creating a fitness mobile app puts you in a position to earn more money while working less.
Yes, I’m talking to you, too—yoga instructors, dietitians, fitness coaches, Pilates instructors, CrossFit coaches, gym owners, physical therapists—essentially everyone in the health and wellness space.
Whether you’re an established personal trainer or just getting started, I’ll explain why creating your own mobile app is an absolute must in 2025.
Going Mobile Will Expand Your Reach
Traditional personal trainers are extremely limited in who they can train. If you’re only training people in person, your reach will always be capped by how far your clients are willing to travel.
The average gym-goer commutes 3.7 miles to work out. Even if you’re in a densely populated area with thousands of potential clients within a four-mile radius, you can’t change the fact that there are only 24 hours in a day.
Assuming you want to eat, sleep, and have a life outside of the gym, the most ambitious personal trainers can only handle about 10-12 private sessions per day.
Creating your own fitness app breaks down all physical boundaries and gives you access to clients worldwide. You can set up training programs for people to work at their own pace, meaning you can train hundreds or potentially thousands of clients simultaneously.
This also presents a unique opportunity to reach clients with deeper pockets. Personal trainers located in rural Kansas may not have local clients willing to pay a premium price for fitness coaching. But your mobile app can reach prospects in San Francisco, Miami, New York City, and other major metropolitan areas where people are willing to spend big bucks on their health.
Creating Your Own Personal Training App is Easier (and Cheaper) Than You Might Think
Lots of you reading this right now might assume that creating a mobile isn’t a feasible option based on complexity and cost alone. But this couldn’t be further from the truth.
Gone are the days when you needed to hire a team of developers and spend upwards of $50,000 to $250,000+ to build an app.
Online app builders like Buildfire make it possible for anyone to create an app on their own without writing a single line of code—and plans start at less than $100 per month.
Buildfire has everything you need to build, launch, and maintain a successful personal training app. All you need to do is customize the content and your training programs, and Buildfire will handle all of the technical requirements on the backend.
It’s super low-risk and easy to break even every month with just one or two clients. Scalability is limitless, and everything beyond your monthly subscription fee is pure profit.
Sign up for a 30-day free trial to give it a test drive if you’re not quite ready to commit.
Prospective Clients Are Already Using Fitness Apps For Workouts
Roughly 60% of Americans already use fitness apps on their smartphone—making it one of the most popular app categories on the market.
Studies also show that fitness apps are highly engaging. In fact, 40% of people using fitness apps for workouts use them over 10+ times per week.
So there’s a high probability that around half of your current and prospective clients are willing to use your fitness app and do so on a regular basis.
What’s even more exciting is that there’s still plenty of room for growth here. According to Grand View Research, the global value of the fitness app market is growing at a CAGR of 16.3% between now and 2030.
The demand for fitness apps is there. It’s just a matter of capitalizing on it and getting your share.
You’ll Stand Out From the Crowd and Appear More Professional
As many of you already know, the personal training space is overly saturated and highly competitive.
From a marketing perspective, it’s really difficult to stand out from other trainers in your area who are essentially offering the exact same services at similar prices.
But having your own mobile that totally changes the narrative for your personal branding. It immediately makes you appear as a major player in the space and sets you apart from others.
In addition to providing on-the-go training to clients nationwide, your app will help you create an active and engaging fitness community. Users can connect with each other in your app to motivate each other and establish some friendly competition—providing a fitness class-like atmosphere from different corners of the globe.
Building your app now also gives you a first-mover advantage over your competitors. Don’t wait until they create apps first and you’ll be forced to play catch-up.
Apps Make it Easy to Sell Products and Services Beyond Traditional Personal Training
Most gyms restrict what personal trainers can sell outside of traditional training sessions. But if you create your own app, you can sell anything you want without having to worry about violating your contract or competing with your gym’s offerings.
- Meal plans
- Supplements
- Equipment and training accessories
- Workout gear and merchandise
- Ebooks
- Corporate wellness programs
- Nutrition coaching
The list goes on and on. You could even partner with different meal delivery services and use your app as a way to generate affiliate sales.
These are all possibilities for you to earn even more revenue on top of your basic personal training packages.
Best of all, it’s super easy to sell these to your clients because everything is just a click away from their smartphone. You can target them with personalized deals and offers as well via push notifications to truly maximize the lifetime value of every client.
You’ll Make Money While You Sleep
There’s always to be a ceiling to how much money you can earn as a personal trainer if you stick to traditional in-person sessions. Yes, you can increase your rate, start doing more group sessions, and add extra availability slots to your calendar.
But at the end of the day, you’re always trading your time for money. If you’re not physically present at these sessions, you won’t get paid—period.
Creating your own mobile app will help you break free of this grueling cycle. Once you build your online training programs through the app, all you need to do is get people to sign up and subscribe.
You can earn monthly recurring revenue via app subscriptions without training a single client in person.
Can you get 500 people to pay $20 per month for your mobile workout program? That’s $10,000 in monthly revenue. What about 1,500 people paying $25 per month? You’d earn $450,000 per year.
The sky’s the limit here, and these example figures are totally within your reach.
You Don’t Need Any Special Certifications or Permits to Train Clients Online
While there’s no legal requirement to become a certified personal trainer, the vast majority of gyms won’t hire you unless you’ve obtained a certification.
Not only does this help those gyms maintain a certain level of professional standards, but most insurance companies won’t cover them unless their trainers have been properly certified.
But this isn’t the case if you want to become an online personal trainer.
You’re in total control over who you train, including where and how you decide to do it—and you won’t be forced into an expensive certification program first.
While it’s still a good idea to get certified, it shouldn’t hold you back from getting started on building your own fitness app.
It’s Easier to Acquire New Clients
Getting new clients isn’t always easy for personal trainers who rely solely on in-person workout sessions. You need to rely on referrals, local marketing, and, in some cases, just hoping someone walks into your gym.
None of this applies to client acquisition with your own fitness mobile app.
You can easily leverage your organic social media following to promote your app and reach new clients. Offering a free training program or meal plan to incentivize app downloads works really well, and then you can constantly market your paid services by sending emails and push notifications to those users.
Plus, your pool of potential clients is never-ending, as your app can be used and accessed from anywhere.
Fewer Clients Will Churn
You’ve landed a new client, great! Now you just need to keep them. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done—and I’m sure many of you can relate to this.
Having your own mobile app combats all of the most common reasons why people cancel their personal training services.
Not everyone can justify paying upwards of $75 to $125 per hour for a personal trainer. But a $20 per month app subscription is much more reasonable so your clients will be far less likely to cancel.
Your clients can access workouts and training programs on their own time without having to find an hour block that fits your schedule—and they don’t have to actually go to your gym to follow your guided workouts.
Even your best in-person clients can use your app to access workouts, meaning you won’t lose out on that income if they’re traveling or moving away.
You Can Future-Proof Your Personal Training Career
If you’re new to the world of personal training, you’ll quickly learn that it’s not always easy to succeed. In fact, 80% of personal trainers last less than two years before they quit and switch careers.
Even if you’re a well-established personal trainer with years of experience, unforeseen circumstances out of your hands could be detrimental to your income.
Your spouse could get a new job in another state, forcing you to start from scratch in a new location. New owners may purchase your gym and jack up prices, causing you to lose clients. And as we’ve all learned, nationwide disruptions to in-person services can happen at any time—forcing you to quickly adjust your business model.
Mobile apps and mobile fitness training are immune to these scenarios. So in addition to making more money today, you can protect your income for the long term, despite any external factors that would otherwise crush your in-person training services.
Final Thoughts: Fitness Apps Are a No-Brainer For Personal Trainers
Creating your own fitness app is a low-risk, ultra-high-reward scenario.
At worst, you’ll be out a couple hundred bucks for trying. At best, you generate hundreds of thousands of dollars per year without having to actually train any clients in person.
There’s never been a better time to create a fitness app and take your personal training career to the next level.
Sign up for Buildfire today and start building for free with a 30-day trial.