Slide, swipe, swipe, pause… it seems to fit. “I was nervous at first, but he and I were able to have a long chat before I even had my first session with him and I loved his vibe and knew he was the right guy for me,” says Jaclyn Donovan of the private trainer she met at LokaTrain. Since launching three months ago, LokaTrain has connected thousands of trainers and clients and offered hundreds of personal trainers to people around the globe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJApc9H4p4U
Unless you get lucky and find a local gem, you likely will not find a reasonable gym that offers personalised workouts. Often, the choice boils right down to going to Planet Fitness for $10 a month and receiving no personal attention or paying over $500 dollars at Equinox just to find a class that might suit your needs. With LokaTrain, you can browse available trainers in your area and send messages directly to the app until you find out the price and routine that suits both of you. “My favorite part of the app is how you can “meet” the coaches, see what their passions are, their approximate location and based on that decide if they’re a good fit for me. Some and a few not. It’s like shopping for the perfect shoe!” recalls Jaclyn Donavon.
After finding his latest trainer on Craigslist, Donovan considers himself lucky to find a licensed trainer on the website. By viewing and chatting with previous trainers, potential clients can assess whether the trainer is a good fit for them and avoid having to navigate through obscure websites and click on through odd listings. Also, most of the trainers at Lokatrain are happy to offer a free trial session to see if the fight is a match.
Having started his own LokaTrain approximately a year ago, Walid El Jebbari, a former NCAA Division I athlete and bodybuilding competitor, is trying to make personal training accessible to everybody, not just the rich and famous. “We saw how access to trainers was limited to people who had access to gyms and had to rely on gym membership consultants to find trainers that fit their needs. So many people want to change their health and life but don’t know where to start!” said El-Jebbari.
For trainers, this app is a straightforward solution to a long standing problem – hoping you find the right client and end up coaching a big name celebrity, or decide to become an in-house trainer at a gym and play by their rules. LokaTrain is a direct alternative as it allows coaches to choose clients and work in their specialty, making sure they can deliver on their promises and have fun doing it. However, LokaTrain is not going to disregard celebrity trainers, in fact they will soon have their own home within the app so that people interested in working with the biggest names in personal fitness can even find a trainer. For trainers like Attila Toth, who has more than 500k combined followers on social media, LokaTrain presents a common sense way to manage potential clients and keep an eye on the competition. “It becomes a challenge for both parties to connect efficiently. Reaching a fitness personality with a large following on social media, and their high demand for help is usually a problem,” Attila explained, “As a trainee at LokaTrain, all you need to do is send your request to the one Celebrity Trainer you choose to work with. They will be notified immediately, and therefore react as quickly as possible.”
The number of fitness trainer jobs is anticipated to grow 13% through 2022 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, meaning the LokaTrain database will only grow in size as time goes on. While the purpose of launching the app was to be a straightforward way to find your perfect personal trainer, for El Jebbari the LokaTrain experience applies to so much more. “While coaches and clients generally decide to meet at the coaches gym, a facility where the coaches pay a small fee to coach the client, we want to expand to sports such as football and tennis where coaches can meet outdoors or wherever they want, said El-Jebbari. Since many of these activities do not need to be one-on-one sessions to be effective, LokaTrain also offers coaches the opportunity to set up bootcamps. “There are hundreds of group workouts that have been set up for as low as five dollars for some bootcamps to $25 for the more advanced ones, and for that reason those sections and options have become very popular. Looking at user data and goals, our trainees use the app for all kinds of purposes: 2 post-birth getting back in shape to getting ready for a fitness competition and this bootcamp offers a lot of necessities to get started,” says El Jebbari.
However, Lokatrain is not the only app hoping to take its share of the growing fitness market as both Apple and Android app stores feature thousands of apps ready to help you lose weight, gain weight, and everything in between. Because millennials are spending less in other areas, they’re spending more on fitness. In fact, millennials spend up to 18% more on athletic gear than any other clothing according to a Goldman Sachs report. The same report also shows that more than 22% of millennials include exercise in their definition of staying healthy compared to 14% and 12% of Generation X and Baby Boomers, respectively. This new fitness-focused generation is a market that apps like LokaTrain are looking to capture, which is why social media is such a big focus for the fitness company. “We have a lot of exciting features coming our way, making sure it works with our partnerships with social media fitness influencers. Interacting with them will help us grow our user base and serve as a win-win for LokaTrain, influencers and users,” commented El Jebbari.
