Airtable Personal Trainer OS - All your client data and programs in one place
There are apps dedicated to tracking your personal training clients’ workouts and progress. For some personal trainers, those dedicated apps may include too many features they don’t use, or the price may be prohibitive, or they don’t like the functioning and interface of those apps and wish to have their custom-fit system for tracking clients’ data and progress over time.
So, some time ago I launched the Personal Trainer Operating System in Notion and Coda. This post is about the same system in Airtable—which, thanks to its native automation and interfaces, provides even more customizability and powerful workflows.
By using these no-code tools, you as a personal trainer can start from a solid base that I built, and then freely customize it as needed, after you gain some understanding of and confidence in using the software.
And this is a great option to gain more control over how you track and organize clients’ data and collaborate with trainees. There is also an additional layer of customization we can add to this, and I will be launching such an option soon (Airtable + Softr for a custom application).
In Airtable, it is best if you have at least the “Team” plan. This allows you to scale data without issues, and have access to extensions (e.g., custom scripts used in automation), more automation space, and advanced views that are used in the Personal Trainer OS Base (e.g., Gantt, timeline).
As a personal trainer, you can manage all your client data in the Airtable base. The Airtable base comprises three main tabs: Data, Automations, and Interfaces. In the Data tab, you can find all the tables and views at the system's foundation. Once you access the base, you will also find an ERD (entity relationship diagram) depicting all the available tables and their relationship in the overall system. You can watch the video above for a detailed overview of the entire Airtable base, automations, and interfaces.
Tables
The main tables are:
Clients: stores all your client data and biometrics
Training programs: stores all the training programs for your clients. Each client can have multiple programs over time. You can visualize programs in multiple ways (e.g., by clients, on a timeline, on a kanban board, and more). Each program is composed of training sessions.
Training sessions: stores all the individual training sessions within each program. Sessions have a date and a checkbox to mark them as “Done”. Each session is composed of multiple exercises/movements, each with a specific volume and intensity.
Training movements: stores all the possible exercises within each session. This is a list of exercises you can fully customize so that you can select exercises from a pre-defined list upon creating each training session.
Exercise tracking: stores all the trackings over time. Each training session has many exercise trackings. The same exercise can be tracked multiple times across sessions, programs, and clients. This gives you the ability to see the exercise progress over time for each of your clients, as well as track Personal Records and volume per muscle group on each session and program.
There are other tables in the Airtable Base, most of them of “supporting” nature. The five tables listed above are the most important ones. Some data in those tables is populated via automations.
Automations
Automations are ways to facilitate data entry and perform “background” tasks that are important for data integrity and to make the system work effectively over time or facilitate workflows.
Track volume per muscle group: this automation automatically tracks volume per muscle group when you set up training sessions. The volume per muscle group can be visualized within each session on the Interface.
Duplicate program and sessions: this set of automations allows you to duplicate an entire training program and its sessions via a button from your Interface. This can save a lot of time, enabling you to easily use the same program across multiple clients, while still retaining customization capabilities (i.e., after duplication, you can make changes to the new instance of the program to adapt it to your client). This was one of the most highly requested features by personal trainers using my products over the past few years.
Interfaces
Airtable Interfaces are elegant portals to the Base data. You can interact with the data directly in the Interfaces, which have a more friendly user experience compared to the more tabular and fixed views in the Airtable Base. There are three Interfaces in the Personal Trainer OS, each composed of multiple pages.
Personal trainer interface: This interface is for you to easily visualize the most relevant program and session data at any given time. Here you can see all the active programs and duplicate them via a button; a calendar of client sessions; invoices; PR charts, and client metrics (e.g., average lifetime value, average body fat % change, …).
Create a new program: This Interface allows you to create a new program from scratch via a step-by-step system. First, you will create a program. Then add sessions to it (just the first week suffices if the same sessions repeat over time with variation in volume/intensity). You will finally duplicate sessions across all the program weeks via a button, and then organize the calendar and edit each session as needed. You will find a detailed video explaining this workflow in the Interface documentation.
Athlete interface: This interface can be shared (optional, paid) with your clients/athletes. This is applicable if you decided to only use Airtable, and not Softr. If you also use Softr for building the client-facing app, you do not need the athlete interface and may delete it from your Airtable Base. In any case, this interface allows your clients to see their sessions, track exercises, and leave comments/interact with you.
