How To Build A Standardized Exercise Library For Your Personal Training Program

by Matt McGunagle

Whether you are a gym business with multiple locations across multiple states or you’re a small business owner offering personal training, consistency in your workout programming is key for ensuring the quality of your training services.

As a fitness business owner you need your training team to be able to demonstrate how to perform exercises within your team's area of expertise to clients consistently and with the best form every single time, whether it’s in-person or if they’re training clients remotely.

But as an owner and operator you can’t be there for each trainer on your team every time they’re showing their clients how to perform a movement correctly. So how can you be sure your staff are showing clients approved exercises and that clients are performing exercises correctly to avoid injury?

The optimal solution is to curate a standardized exercise library for your fitness business training teams to use as a source of truth.

Not only will this save your trainers considerable time showing clients how to perform exercises, but it will help ensure the quality of programming across multiple locations as you scale your business.

If you’ve never used or curated an exercise library before, this post will show you the key benefits of having one and how to build one for your gyms.

Want to skip straight to setting up a quality exercise library for your gym? Get instant access to 900 exercises and over 300 videos in our professional done-for-you exercise library.

What is an Exercise Library?
An exercise library is a collection of exercises for your training team to utilize for their workout programs. These exercises will have standardized metrics associated with them (such as sets, reps, weight, time, and/or distance), exercise descriptions, and even videos that show your clients the proper form of different exercises.

Whether you have a chain of gyms with hundreds of locations or just a couple of different ones, having a library of approved, correct exercises that all trainers use helps keep services consistent across gyms.

Plus, if you offer a hybrid personal training service, your clients can access your visual workouts to help them when they’re home working on their fitness plans or don’t have access to their trainer.

The Benefits of an Exercise Library for Personal Trainers
Having an exercise library for your clients comes with some key benefits for both gym chains and personal trainers.

For gyms and gym chains

  • Improved branding: Having a massive library of branded exercise videos makes your gym look professional and helps brand your gym to stand out from the competition.
  • Quality control: You can be sure your personal trainers are providing the best service when they are all working from the same catalog of exercises.
  • Easier to scale: For large gym chains, having an exercise list makes opening new locations easier since every member of staff will have instant access to your list of approved exercises and forms.

For personal trainers

  • Improved onboarding: Add this to your educational material to help the newer members in your training teams onboard into your business and reduce the time required to deliver high-end training.
  • Save time: PTs can use exercise videos as a training aid to support clients learning the correct form.
  • Prevent client injury: When clients have constant access to videos showing the proper form, you’re less likely to get unnecessary injuries when you’re not around.
  • Support for hybrid and online remote personal training: Having this library makes it much easier to offer hybrid personal training that lets clients work out without their trainer more safely.

How Do You Create an Exercise Library?

It can take time to produce your own exercise library, but the value it offers clients and the time it will save your trainers makes it a worthwhile investment.

Let’s run through how you can make your own library for your gym or personal training business.

What you’ll need
You’ll need a few things to get started:

  • Video equipment (although shooting with an iPhone can be great to get started if you don’t want to invest in a professional camera).
  • Editing software to crop the videos and make them look cohesive.
  • A hosting platform such as Youtube or Vimeo to store the videos and allow clients access to them.
  • A trainer to perform each exercise (having the same model in all videos will make it look cohesive).

How to film your workout videos

  • You should film all videos horizontally (not vertically) so the videos are easier to view on a laptop, TV screen or rotated phone screen. This will also give the best quality for clients.
  • If you are using a phone to shoot the videos, put it on airplane mode to stop notifications disturbing the video mid-way through.
  • Whether you’re using a phone or camera, setting up a tripod will minimize shaking and give a professional appearance.
  • Make sure lighting is bright and as natural as possible (if you can set up near a window, this will give the best lighting).
  • Work with a background that has little to no distractions in the background and remove any logos or brands apart from your own.

You can film singular exercises to show your clients proper form, or film a set fitness routine to show clients exactly what to do during their gym session.

This can be especially helpful to help track small group fitness workout programs, since you won’t need to go over the exercises multiple times with different clients.

Storing and sharing your workout videos
Once you’ve built up an extensive library of videos, you’ll need somewhere to upload them and share them with your clients.

You can either add them to a secure page on your website which requires log-in credentials from clients to access, or you can use third-party hosting fitness software to take care of this for you.

Having a dedicated dashboard that links to your exercise library is a good way to set it up.

However, this takes considerable time to build and you might need the help of a graphic designer to help with the coding and design of the video library to keep it running smoothly.

Skip the Hard Work: A Done-For-You Exercise Library
Building up a comprehensive, professional-looking exercise library takes time and practice. Your first videos might not be the best quality, and there’s a steep learning curve to editing videos and hosting them efficiently.

If you want to skip all of the setup work to get started training with a software platform immediately, StrengthPortal is a great resource. We’ve created a done-for-you exercise library that has over 900 different exercises and over 300 advanced workout videos you can share with your clients.

The exercise library is totally customizable so you can pick and choose which exercises you want to add to your library, and you can add in your own videos as well.

If you only want to add your own exercise videos, you can use our platform just to host your own and easily share them with clients using our app.

We understand how important it is to have a master list of curated exercise videos to help your clients see the best results, so we’ll help you create a personalized, professional exercise library that clients can use to reach their fitness goals.

Get Started Building Your Exercise Library
Whether you are a personal trainer trying to build up your business from scratch or own a chain of gyms and want to offer a better level of service for your clients, having exercise databases is a must.

It takes a little time to set up, but once you have it, clients will perform exercises with better form, your gyms will have a more consistent level of service, and you can stand out as a high-end gym that cares about client exercise progress.

If you’re ready to implement a video exercise library and want to save yourself time and effort, check out our done-for-you exercise library with over 900 exercises and 300 videos you can start using today.