Making Well-Being Quantifiable with the Use of Firstbeat Data

As a Personal Trainer, continuously improving your product is the key to creating a successful business. But with only so many hours in a day, there comes a point where it’s not about simply fitting in more clients for face-to-face sessions. Top personal trainers like Luke Worthington are using well-being data to improve their product and create stronger and more meaningful relationships with clients. Read on to find out more. 

Luke’s Professional Background

Luke Worthington is a personal trainer to the elite. From Hollywood actors to Olympic athletes, Luke’s portfolio of high caliber clientele is testament to more than 20 years of experience in the industry. 

Alongside Luke’s successful personal training career, he also teaches and advises the next generation of fitness professionals. Yet, it is his unique, holistic approach to training, coaching client’s physical and mental wellbeing, that has the biggest impact upon those he works with.  

Now, his work with Firstbeat Life allows him to take his client offering one step further, providing real-life insights into their well-being. 

Firstbeat Life Makes Well-Being Quantifiable

Working alongside some of the busiest individuals in their industries, trainers like Luke often need to fit around a client’s fast-moving, busy schedule. This can mean face-to-face sessions are reduced to just a few times a week. Outside of these sessions, trainers are unaware of their client’s schedule and how it could be impacting their wellbeing.  

The Firstbeat Life technology allows trainers to regularly check in on how a client’s lifestyle is impacting their health metrics, including stress, sleep, and recovery, identifying any triggers along the way, in an easy-to-understand format. On this more holistic approach to personal training, Luke says: 

“The conversations that I’ve been having with clients in recent years have been more about what’s happening away from the gym, what’s happening in their personal life, what’s happening in their work schedule and the impact that has on their overall well-being. 

That is why using the Firstbeat Life device has changed and improved my offering. It enables me to move from having anecdotal conversations about someone’s state of well-being through to being able to show them actual numbers and information. The more information you can provide a client, the more likely they are able to successfully adhere to a programme.”

Eye-opening Data Insights Motivate Clients to Make Lifestyle Changes

The Firstbeat Life data helps trainers to convey the relationship between the client’s lifestyle and well-being in a simple, digestible way. Clients can then use these insights to make changes to their lifestyle to improve their overall well-being.  

“Something that has been very useful when working with Firstbeat Life data is being able to help people to understand more of which activities may be stressful and which ones may be restorative. And it’s not always what you might think…this is helping people to better understand the outcomes of the choices that they make.” 

Check Firstbeat Life for Fitness Professionals →

Luke continues to explain by giving a real-life example of a surprising data insight from using Firstbeat Life with a client: 

“One client of mine has a six-month-old baby which, as babies do, wakes up a lot during the night. He’d been quite adamant that this whole process was very stressful for him. He was certain that his data would show lots of big red spikes.  

However, when he was getting up throughout the night to attend to the baby, it showed a little stressful period when he was being woken up, but then the process of attending to the baby and getting the baby back to sleep was quite restorative to him, which is quite a heart-warming story really.  

But what it helped us to understand together, was how important it is to match the Firstbeat Life data to what you were doing at the time of measurement. His process of bonding with his son is very restorative to him. But the process of being woken up is, is not, so waking up throughout the night is, yes, a stressful thing to happen to us, but the reason why we are being woken up is, is quite important.” 

The data insights can be checked during a warmup, so that it’s not a separate service requiring more of a personal trainer’s time but saving some time instead. The service is available worldwide and the app can be used in English, German, Swedish, Italian, Spanish, French and Finnish.

Training Tailored to Real-time Health Metrics

The Firstbeat Life data not only helps to inform lifestyle choices outside of the gym, but also provides actionable insights on how and when clients should work out.  

While successful personal trainers are skilled in creating unique training plans that complement the abilities of each client, having access to the Firstbeat Life data means these plans can be tailored to respond to the client’s health metrics on any given day.  

This could mean increasing the intensity of a session when a client’s data is showing they are well rested and recovered or tapering a session back when periods of limited recovery and high stress are present, helping to improve the client’s overall well-being over time. Luke has also used client’s data to make changes to training sessions: 

“Training time has been another interesting discussion point with my clients since implementing Firstbeat Life. What we’re seeing is not necessarily that they’re over training, but they’re under recovering. So, we’re having to make some different choices about what that workout might look like. The workout might still happen, but it might happen at a different intensity to one that we have scheduled.” 

Building a Success Personal Training Business with Well-Being Data

Accurate data helps to improve the quality of touch points with each client and build longer-term relationships without costing additional time. For example, the data insights can be checked during a warmup, so that it’s not a separate service requiring more of a personal trainer’s time but saving some time instead. 

“I can see the data before I meet with clients and think right, I’ve already changed the training plan because I already know that you’re not feeling it before I’ve even met you. That is very useful.” 

Luke’s approach to training clients has always been guided by his interest in the science behind the human body, specifically the studies of biomechanics and neuroscience. His scientific background allows him to see the value in the clinically accurate data and health metrics that Firstbeat Life provides and how offering this data to clients can enhance their health.  

“To build a successful PT business in the post COVID era, you must be adding significant value to your service. So, any tool that enables you to have more interaction and more traction with your client is going to improve your buy in from the client…and the Firstbeat data allows you to do that.”