You’re probably not tracking enough in your box
You probably think you’re doing enough to encourage athletes to track their results in the box. After all, your coaches call out to your athletes to jot down their times when they finish the WOD. And most of your athletes remember to track their big numbers most of the time. But are you getting all of the benefits of tracking?
Most of us aren’t. We may be encouraging athletes to track their lifts and times, either manually or in an app like Wodify. And for many, once the day is over, we forget those numbers and move on. But there’s more to tracking than just writing down results.
After all, the difference between hitting a PR or not could be those extra 100 calories of good carbs or one more hour of sleep. If your athletes aren’t correlating their performance to their nutrition and sleep to see what helps them and what hinders them, they’ll never know how to become their best athlete. And if they’re not seeing the results they’re looking for, this can often translate to unhappy customers and reduced retention.
Beyond day-to-day tracking, what are you doing to look at the long term impact of your programming? You should review your athletes’ progress over the past 3, 6, or 9 months. If you expect your programming to help athletes improve by a certain percentage, is that happening?
You won’t know unless you continually test and measure, and chart progress over time. You can do this by entering each day’s whiteboard results into a spreadsheet or using a software app that does the heavy lifting for you.
Finally, what are you doing to track your business? You might be keeping a spreadsheet for your total monthly gross and net revenue. But are you running reports to track what those numbers should be, based on your months of operation and other expenses?
Are you tracking athlete retention? It’s important to ask an athlete why they’ve reduced their class attendance and then note that in their file. Is it cost, lack of time? Was the programming too tough? Tracking these elements will show trends over time that could drastically change your business model and bottom line.
Understanding the nuances here can be the difference between having a successful business with continually improving athletes and one that can’t figure out why it’s not coming together. It’s all in tracking the details. Make sure you get them right.
Guest Post by Ameet Shah
Ameet is the Founder of Wodify, a cloud-based software platform designed to give affiliate coaches and athletes a competitive edge. The app replaces the traditional whiteboard, workout journals, manual class scheduling, and tedious billing process with an effective digital solution that combines comprehensive management and athlete tracking tools into a single application. As of this publication, over 11 million performance results have been logged in Wodify by athletes at over 1,200 affiliates worldwide, making it the most used workout log for affiliate gyms.