Most coaching intake forms run to about sixty questions, take a new client half an hour, and are read once. They get that long the same way every time: a question added after every client who surprised you, and none ever removed.
Two things go wrong. Clients stall on it, so onboarding stalls with them. And the answers you genuinely needed — injuries, days available, equipment — arrive buried in thirty you will never open again.
This is the form question by question: what to ask, what each answer changes, and what can wait.
A long form costs you clients before it teaches you anything
Every question is paid for by the client, in the week they are most willing to do what you ask, out of the same willingness you need for their first sessions.
The test for keeping one is narrow: does the answer change something you will do in the next seven days? Programming, screening, scheduling, billing, or a legal obligation. If it changes none of those, it is curiosity, and it can be asked later in conversation, where you will get a better answer anyway.
Applied honestly, that cuts most intake forms roughly in half. Favourite exercises, dietary philosophy, sleep quality out of ten, motivation on a scale — all interesting, none of it changes week one.
Split it: before day one, and week two
The split is the method. Onboarding a new client works when they train inside 48 hours, and that only happens if the form between signup and their first session is short.
| Ask before day one | Leave until week two |
|---|---|
| Contact and basics | Progress photos |
| The goal in their words | Full body measurements |
| Training days, session length, equipment | A week of food logging |
| Short training history | Sleep, stress and step baselines |
| Health, injury and medication flags | Detailed food preferences and dislikes |
| One baseline number | Long-form history and past attempts |
| Waiver and consents | Anything you are only mildly curious about |
The left column is five minutes on a phone. The right column is a second form you send once they have trained twice, when it is far more likely to come back completed.
Contact and basics
None of these are optional.
- Full name, email, mobile. Email is the account and the invite; the mobile is how you reach someone whose invite went to spam.
- Date of birth. It affects programming, and whether they can legally sign your agreement.
- Location and time zone. Sets when your check-in reminders land, and tells you which privacy rules apply to the health answers below.
- Emergency contact. One name and one number.
Skip occupation, how they found you and their Instagram handle. The first two belong on your enquiry form; the third belongs nowhere.
The goal, in their own words
One open text box, not a dropdown: what do you want to be different in six months, and how will you know it happened?
A dropdown returns "fat loss" for a client whose actual answer was that they want to stop being out of breath on the stairs with their kids. Both lead to a deficit, but only the sentence is worth putting back in front of them in month four when the scale stalls.
Two follow-ups earn their place:
- Is there a date or an event attached? A wedding, a comp, a holiday. It changes the timeline and sometimes the approach.
- What has got in the way before? One or two lines. Whatever ended the last attempt — travel, shift work, injuries, starting too hard — is the most likely thing to end this one.
Training history and equipment access
This decides what you can actually write.
- What have you been doing for the last three months? Not their lifetime history. Recent training is what tells you where to start the load.
- How many years have you trained seriously, on and off? One line. It separates a returning lifter from a genuine beginner faster than any movement-experience checklist.
- Where will you train? Commercial gym, home setup, garage, hotel gyms while travelling.
- What equipment do you actually have access to? For home clients, ask for a photo. It takes ten seconds and beats any tick list, because clients misname half their attachments.
- Anything you know you cannot or will not do? Barbell back squats, running, anything overhead. Cheaper to know now than to have the first program rejected.
The photo request is the highest-value question in the section. Programming a home client from a checklist and finding out in week two that the dumbbells stop at 12 kg costs you a rewrite.
Health and injury, and the line you do not cross
Be careful here, but not by asking less. Ask properly, then be clear about what you are qualified to do with the answers.
- Have you been diagnosed with any heart, lung, metabolic or blood pressure condition?
- Do you take any prescribed medication? What for?
- Has a doctor ever told you to avoid, limit or modify exercise?
- Do you get chest pain, dizziness or unexplained shortness of breath with exertion?
- Any current injury, pain or surgery in the last twelve months? Where, when, what makes it worse, and what they have already been told about it.
- Are you pregnant or postpartum?
- Is there anything else you would want a coach to know? An open box catches what your specific questions did not.
What you do with the answers matters more than the wording of the questions. Collecting health information is not the same as being qualified to interpret it. You are not screening a client clinically, and you should not be deciding whether a flagged condition is safe to train around.
So set the rule in advance and follow it without exception: anything flagged goes to a doctor or physiotherapist for written clearance before programming starts. Not a call you make because the client says they feel fine, and not one you skip because you have coached someone with a similar-sounding condition. Give the client a short note they can take to their GP describing the training you intend to run, and start them on whatever is uncontroversial while you wait.
If you use a standardised pre-exercise screening questionnaire instead of writing your own health section, use the current version from the body that publishes it, and use it whole. The wording in those forms is deliberate, and one with half its questions removed is not the instrument.
For injuries that are cleared but ongoing, the answers go straight into the program — programming around client injuries covers what to do with a shoulder that only hurts overhead.
Nutrition
Keep this short. Detailed food work belongs in week two, when you can ask for a logged week instead of a self-report.
- Do you have any allergies or intolerances? Safety, and it is the one nutrition answer that cannot wait.
- Any dietary pattern you follow? Vegetarian, vegan, halal, kosher, medically restricted.
- Roughly how do you eat now? Two lines. Meals per day, who cooks, how often you eat out.
- Are you tracking anything at the moment? Tells you whether "hit 150 g of protein" is an instruction they can follow on Monday or a skill you have to teach first.
Leave out the food diary, calorie history and supplement inventory. A logged week in week two gets you closer to the truth than anything a form collects from memory.
Schedule and constraints
The section that decides whether the program survives contact with their life.
- Which days can you realistically train? Days, not a number. "Four days" and "Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday" produce different splits.
- How long is a realistic session? Their ceiling, not their ideal.
- What time of day? It tells you when reminders should land.
- Anything predictable coming up in the next twelve weeks? Travel, shift changes, exams, a house move.
- Does anyone else in the house affect your training time? Small children and rotating rosters are what quietly break a five-day program.
Take the answers at face value and program below them. A client who says five days and manages three has failed at something in their first fortnight, which is exactly what you were trying to avoid.
Agreements and consents
These are the reason intake cannot be deferred entirely. Put them on the first form, required, before the first session.
- Your coaching agreement or waiver. Scope, payment, cancellation, refunds, what you are and are not responsible for. The personal training contract template covers the terms themselves.
- Acknowledgement of the health answers. A line confirming they are accurate and that the client will tell you if anything changes.
- Consent to store their health information, with a plain sentence on what you keep and who can see it.
- Photo and testimonial consent, separately and optionally. Never bundle this into the main agreement. A client who does not want their progress photos on your Instagram has to be able to decline without declining coaching.
Capture all of it in a way you can produce later — a ticked box with a name, a date and a signature against the version of the terms they agreed to.
Where the form lives, and how the answers are stored
An intake form emailed as a PDF comes back as a photographed attachment and lives in your inbox, which is where health information should not live. Whatever tool you use, it should be answerable on a phone in one sitting and the answers should end up attached to the client record. In Fitsly, intake questionnaires and waivers are one-time forms presented when the client opens the app until they complete them, with signature and consent-checkbox questions built in and body-metric answers flowing onto the client's profile.
On privacy: health information is treated as sensitive in most privacy regimes, and the rules vary considerably by where you and your client live. Check what applies where you operate — but three habits travel well.
Collect only what you will use. Every extra health question is data you now have to protect for a reason you could not articulate.
Store it properly. In the platform where the client's record already lives, behind an account with a real password and two-factor authentication, not in a spreadsheet or a folder of PDFs on a laptop.
Say what you do with it. One short paragraph on the form: what you collect, why, who else can see it, how long you keep it, and how they can ask for it to be deleted. Decide what happens when a client leaves, because "it stays in there forever" is a decision either way.
Adapting the form to what you coach
The spine above works for most one-to-one coaching. Four adjustments worth making.
Nutrition-only clients need the food sections expanded, the equipment section removed, and a question on whether they have kitchen scales — macro targets are useless without them.
Rehab-adjacent or post-injury clients need the clearance requirement stated before payment. Put it on the sales page, so nobody pays and then finds out.
Groups, challenges and low-touch tiers keep the health and consent sections in full and cut almost everything else. The screening obligation does not scale down with the price.
Lead capture is a different form. Two or three questions on a public link — goal, availability, budget range — to start a conversation. Do not put a waiver on it.
Whatever you settle on, keep it with the rest of the sequence so it runs the same for every client. The client onboarding checklist covers the steps around it, and the welcome packet is what the client needs from you once they have answered all this.
