Nutritional challenges are great for many reasons. As an athlete/client/victim it is a great way to meet new people in your gym, you have multiple accountability partners, a guided opportunity to have help to meet your goals or get you back on track. Personal Trainer/Coaches, nutritional challenges are also great for you to lead. You get to connect with your athletes/clients/victims on a personal level (especially if they are not directly your athletes), its a way to be a part of and help someone reach their nutritional goals (who do you think they are going to refer their friends and family to if they get great results), you get to talk about an area you know a lot about (if they have a great experience, who are they going to want to hire as a nutritional coach after the challenge?), plus its a way to earn a little extra income.
Below are a few concepts to consider when running a nutritional challenge (more can be found in the guide).
- Price. I personally like to offer 2 different prices when running a challenge. There is a difference in price between the 2 tracks.
- “Track A” includes just the handouts from the challenge as well as the initial, half way (optional), and final body comps. As well as access to the private Facebook group.
- “Track B” is the accountability track. Not only do the athlete/client/victim receive the handouts, body comp check ins and access to the private Facebook group like Track A, but I read their food logs on the regular/daily leaving comments based on their goals and even contacted them via phone/text 1-3x/wk. I will say I saw the most results from those following Track B.
- Meetings. One of the challenges I ran we meet as a group 1x/wk. I had a topic for us to discuss. I would educate them on the topic and then we would have a discussion about the topic (i.e. macros, bars, etc). The discussions were always great and even I learned something, but there was always someone who couldn’t make it and they were left out or wanted to meet with you personally to catch up. I always felt bad for someone who couldn’t make the meeting and even worse when we couldn’t figure out a time to “catch up”. So that only lasted one round of challenges. However I ALWAYS do the one on ones in person. I block off 1hour for the initial meeting (sometimes it takes that long), 1/2 hour for the half way point and based on the initial meeting and what track they are on half an hour to one hour for the final meeting.
- Tools. Things you are going to want to be familiar with Facebook groups, email, social media, google docs, text messaging, even mailchimp. I used all of these on the daily when hosting/leading a nutritional challenge.
Project X was created from the many variations of nutritional challenges I have lead with athletes/clients/victims. Its a combination of all the documents, guidelines, emails etc that were sent out and or posted. I just combined them into one big document/project and called it Project X because X can be anything to anyone. It is the perfect program to use for a nutritional challenge in your facility or with your clients.
Fitbit. A few of my athletes/clients/victims use them, but I wasn’t engaged with them. One of my athletes would send me his stats weekly. Which as a trainer I liked because I could see his sleep.
