What Wealthy Fitness Clients Are Buying

Ask a personal trainer what a client gets for the fee, and the answer is usually the hour. It is 60 minutes, a program written for that client, and the equipment the trainer carries into the house. The hour is what the trainer hands over. A wealthy client pays for what having your work says about them. For a fitness client, that is being someone who keeps training, with an expert they answer to.

Imagine a personal trainer named Keziah Wynne who trains clients in their own homes. In January, Mr. Corliss calls her. He is 54, he runs a freight company, and his doctor has told him to get stronger. He has a gym in his basement that he rarely uses.

Keziah has a client at eight, so she gives her usual answer. She will come to the house three mornings a week at 6:30, with a program written for him, for $180 a session. Mr. Corliss books her.

The sessions are good, and by February he can feel the difference. In March, his company is in the middle of buying another company. He texts at six on a Tuesday morning to cancel, and Keziah writes back, “No problem! See you Thursday.” On Thursday he cancels again. “No worries,” she writes. “Just let me know what suits.”

By May, Mr. Corliss trains once a week. In June, he tells Keziah that he will pick it up again after the summer. When a friend asks about her, he says, “She’s very good. I just stopped going, like I always do.” The friend hires someone else.

Suppose instead that Keziah asks one more question on the first call. “How has training gone for you before?” Mr. Corliss laughs. “I’ve started three times. Work gets busy, I cancel a couple of sessions, and that’s the end of it.” Then he adds, “I run a company of 400 people, and I can’t keep a promise to myself about the gym.”

“Then here’s how I’d work with you,” Keziah says. “When you cancel, I’ll offer you another morning that same week. If you miss two weeks, I’ll call you, not text. Every four weeks, we’ll sit down for 10 minutes and look at what you’ve done.” Mr. Corliss says that is what he needs, and he books her.

In March, he texts at six on a Tuesday to cancel. Keziah writes back, “Understood. I can do Wednesday or Friday at 6:30. Which one?” He takes Friday. In April, the deal closes, and he misses two weeks. Keziah calls him, and they agree on two shorter sessions a week until the end of the month.

By June, Mr. Corliss has trained through the busiest spring his company has had. “She doesn’t let me off,” he tells a friend. “That’s what I’m paying her for.” The friend calls Keziah that week.

The workouts in Mr. Corliss’s basement were the same in both versions. In the first, Keziah sold him the hour, so when he canceled an hour, she let it go. In the second, she heard what he was paying for. He wanted to keep a promise to himself, and he wanted someone who would hold him to it. Keziah said how she would do that before the first busy month came.

So the hour is how a trainer delivers the work. A wealthy fitness client is paying to become someone who keeps training, with an expert they answer to. Here is why, and what three people in the trade found.

A fitness client can find a workout anywhere, and keeping at it is the hard part

Here is the course’s view of what a fitness client pays for. The first part is about who the client is. Picture a client who trains three mornings a week, even in the busiest month of the year. That client can tell themselves that they look after their health. That is a purchase that proves something to the client, and nobody else has to see it.

The second part is someone to answer to. A wealthy client can find a good workout in a book or a video, and many have a gym at home. Two of the trainers below say that keeping at it alone is the hard part. So the client pays for an expert who expects them at 6:30, notices when they miss, and says what to do next.

A survey suggests how much this matters to wealthy clients, though it asked only about satisfaction. In 2025, Long Angle, a network for founders and chief executives, ran the survey. It asked 114 people worth at least $2 million to score 14 services they use. They gave their personal trainers an average of 9.3 out of 10, the highest score of any service. “Improving your balance sheet or bank account doesn’t deliver the same emotional value as improving your health and family life,” said Chris Bendtsen, who leads market research at Long Angle.

A Chicago Pilates teacher cut her rates when clients lost the equipment, then changed her mind

Olivia Bioni is a Pilates teacher in Chicago who teaches private clients, including some in their own homes. In 2022, she told the listeners of her podcast how her view of her rates had changed.

In 2020, the studios shut down, and her teaching moved online. She cut her rates, because her clients no longer had the Pilates machines to work on. “So I said that I’m worth less because you’re not able to do all of the things you were able to do before,” she said. The cut had a cost. Once she taught online, she was “getting paid less for my time.”

She has since changed her mind. “Now I think that what clients actually are buying from us is a solution to their problems,” she said. “And their problem could be that they don’t exercise on their own. It is very hard to have that discipline to exercise on your own. It is much easier to have someone to guide you and tell you what to do and hold you accountable.”

She named two more parts of what she offers. One is her expertise, a program the client wants to keep doing. “Otherwise you would just watch a YouTube video,” she said. The other is the person in the room with the client. “They care about you and they wanna know how you’re going,” she said.

So she no longer ties her rate to the equipment, “whether it’s a mat class, a reformer class, a Cadillac.” The reformer and the Cadillac are two of the machines Pilates uses.

The machines were what Bioni handed over, so she charged less when they were gone. Her clients were paying for the discipline they could not find alone. They were also paying for a teacher who wants to know how they are going. Neither of those needs a machine.

A London trainer watched actors skip the sessions someone else paid for

Matt Hodges is a personal trainer with a private studio in central London. His clients include, in his words, “the celebrities, the millionaires and billionaires, and the professional sportsmen and women.” In 2025, he told Sustain Health about the actors he trained when he was building his business in television and film.

“Back in the day many management agents or production companies used to pay for their actors or singers to get in shape,” he said. “This meant that there was little accountability for the ‘celeb’ to turn up on time or turn up at all.” The result, he said, was “a lot of missed sessions and poor results.” There were also, he said, “some who take it very seriously and get incredible results.”

He built his own method to give ordinary clients “the same service that these high-enders get.” In his view, “The only difference between the two is the motivation to stick to a plan.”

Hodges does his own training in that studio, with no other trainers there. “It’s quite hard to motivate yourself when you work alone,” he said.

Hodges’s actors got the same service as his other clients, and many of them still missed sessions. Someone else had paid, and nobody held them to it. A client who hires you with their own money has a stake in the plan. Your part is to help them keep to it, on the mornings they would rather not.

A Leeds coach says his wealthy clients want their health, not only their wealth

Brendan Chaplin is a trainer in Leeds, England, who works with Team GB athletes and UFC fighters. In 2015, he told the Yorkshire Evening Post about a service he had started for wealthy clients, from £40,000 a week.

His explanation of why they pay was about how they live. “They are used to having the finest things money can buy and our service is just another extension of this,” he said. “People are now much more interested in their health, not just wealth.” In his words, “It’s so much more than just a fitness experience, it’s a whole lifestyle overhaul.”

The paper also reported that his team has “a strict vetting procedure in place to make sure clients are committed to training.”

Chaplin’s clients already had the best of everything else. Training was how they looked after their health, and his team took only the clients who meant to keep at it. A wealthy fitness client wants to be that kind of person.

Why holding a client to the plan with daily reminders goes wrong

Imagine a nutrition coach named Joss Merriweather. Dr. Vanya Kessel, a surgeon, hires him to change how she eats before she turns 50. At the first meeting, she says, “Hold me to it. I’m hopeless on my own.”

Joss has 15 clients, and he sets her up the way he sets up all of them. She gets an app to log every meal, and a text from him at noon each day that asks, “What’s for lunch?” For two weeks, she logs everything. Then she has a week of night surgery, and she logs nothing.

On Friday, Joss writes, “No logs since Monday. We agreed you’d be consistent. What happened?” Dr. Kessel reads it between two operations, and she does not answer. At the end of the month, she ends the work. She tells a colleague, “I felt like I was being marked.”

Joss was right to hold Dr. Kessel to the plan, because she asked him to. His mistake was deciding how without asking her. Then, when she missed a week, he wrote about the miss and about what she had agreed to. A surgeon coming off a week of night surgery does not need to be told she missed it. She needs the next step.

The version that works asks first. “When you say hold you to it, what would that look like? A message every day, or a call on Friday?” Dr. Kessel chooses the call, with no messages in weeks of night surgery. After the hard week, Joss calls on Friday. “That was a long week. For next week, let’s keep it to one meal, breakfast before you leave the house.” That is the teacher Bioni described, who will “back it off when it needs to be backed off.” Dr. Kessel keeps to breakfast, and she keeps Joss.

Holding a client to the plan is not bossing them

Holding someone to account can feel wrong when they run a company and pay your fee. A trainer may worry that a call about two missed weeks will feel like a telling-off.

Mr. Corliss asked for it, and so did Dr. Kessel. In Bioni’s view, her clients are buying someone to hold them to it. That discipline is hard to find alone. The actors Hodges trained had nobody holding them to it, and they missed sessions.

The client decides how they want to be held to the plan, and you do it the way they asked. So a call after two missed weeks is the service the client is paying for.

How to show a fitness client what they are paying for

1. Write down how you describe your work today, on your website and when someone asks what you do. Then rewrite it so the first sentence names the client who keeps going, and the hour comes after it. For example, an in-home trainer’s “60-minute sessions in your home, with all equipment provided” can become “I train busy people at home, three mornings a week, until training is part of their week. Each session is an hour, and I bring everything.”
2. In a first conversation, ask what the training should make possible. Then ask how training has gone before, and write down what stopped the client, in their words. For example, a yoga teacher can ask, “When you’ve practiced before, what usually got in the way?”
3. Decide how you will hold the client to the plan, starting from what stopped them before. Say what you will do when they cancel and when they miss sessions in a row, and ask whether that suits them. For example, a Pilates teacher can say, “When you cancel, I’ll offer you another time that week. If you miss two weeks, would you rather I call or text?”
4. When a client cancels, offer two other times in the same week in your reply. That is the course’s suggestion, because a client who picks a new time is still training that week. For example, a strength coach can write, “Understood. I can do Wednesday at 7 or Friday at 6:30. Which suits you?”
5. When a client misses more than you agreed, get in touch the way you agreed. Give the next step, and leave out the miss and what the client promised. For example, a trainer whose client missed two weeks for a trial can say, “Let’s do two short sessions this week, 30 minutes on Tuesday and Friday. We’ll build back up from there.”
6. Every four weeks, sit down with the client for 10 minutes and show them what they have done. Show the sessions they kept, and what they can do now that they could not do before. That is the course’s suggestion, because the client is paying to become someone who keeps training. The record shows them that they are. For example, a trainer with a private studio might show a client the month she was away twice. She kept 11 of 12 sessions, and she can now carry her own suitcase up the stairs.

Next: You will see why a monthly arrangement suits a fitness client better than paying session by session.