Not knowing how to do a proper assessment with online clients is something that pulls back a lot of good trainers from going online. In fact, it's pretty simple to do a great assessment with online clients. Here's how it's done.
If you prefer to read, here's a written guide.
To make things really simple aim to replicate your face-to-face assessment as much as you possibly can with the tools available to you online.
You can easily do movement screens, range of motion testing, cardio tests, strength endurance tests, tape measurements, weight measurements, and cover pretty much everything.
The first thing to do is create your assessment and have a single rep video of each test. That way you can send it out to clients and they can see exactly what to do, but you're not teaching them all the movements and teaching them how to do the movement, you're just letting them view it with one rep. This means that when you're actually on the assessment, you don't have to demo things which saves a lot of manoeuvring around of laptops or whatever device you're on.
Once you've sent the assessment with the videos you have two great methods to carry out your assessments:
1 - Live assessment.
This is easily done using something like Zoom, Skype, or Face Time. Your client then clicks the assessment videos you sent, sees what to do, and then repeats the movement, you watch what they do and record the results while they're doing their assessment.2 - Video assessment.
With video assessments you again send out the assessment to your clients and they see exactly what they need to do, they then video record themselves doing each one of the movements and each one of the tests. This then comes back to you and you can view the videos while recording the results and your observations. Of course this is easily done directly inside your clients assessments using the PT Distinction software.Live assessments allow you to prompt your clients and to begin building a great relationship with them, while video assessments are much more convenient, clients can do it when it suits them and you can check the results when it suits you, which with international clients is very, very useful.
To see exactly how to carry out both of these types of assessment, have a look at this article showing how to perform an online assessment.
