Plan Your Fitness Content Calendar With Our Template & Ideas

Planning your fitness content calendar ahead of time produces better marketing results. It ensures that your social media posts, blog articles, and all your promo content support your business goals. So, how do you create one that helps you stay organized and strategic?

In this article, learn how to create a content calendar for your fitness business with practical post ideas and downloadable templates.

We’re a specialist fitness marketing agency with 15+ years of industry experience, so we’ve created hundreds of fitness content plans for our clients. We’ve helped gyms, fitness studios, and brands streamline their content planning and created a reusable template based on best practices.

Why Create a Fitness Content Plan?

Planning your fitness content ahead of time helps you post more consistently (which is something many of us struggle with). It ensures that your audience hears about your products and services regularly, leads are generated steadily and avoids quiet sales periods.

Posting consistently also helps you stay on the good side of social media and search engine algorithms! Platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Google give more visibility to accounts and websites that share new content regularly. So you’ll get seen by more potential customers just by staying consistent.

Just like a fitness marketing plan, a content calendar can be as simple or detailed as you need it to be. It doesn’t matter whether you sketch it on the back of an envelope or prepare a thorough spreadsheet.

The important thing is that you have a plan.

Without one, your content marketing will just be a series of blog articles and social media posts that don’t tie together or lead anywhere. And all marketing needs to lead somewhere eventually, whether it’s signing up to your email list or purchasing your service. It needs to support the goals of your fitness business.

How To Create a Fitness Content Calendar

Developing your fitness content calendar can be broken down into 3 simple steps…

1. Define your goal – set out the business or marketing goal you want your content to support.
2. Brainstorm ideas – come up with content ideas for your fitness business.
3. Organize them into a calendar – schedule your best brainstorm ideas into a calendar or planning template.

Once you’ve scheduled all your content into a calendar, you can begin to create and share it with the world! But in this guide, we’ll focus on coming up with fitness marketing content and developing the calendar so you have a plan to work from. Let’s look at the three steps of creating a content calendar in more detail…

If you want to learn about the next steps of actually creating and promoting your content, then check out our other articles on post ideas and this promo checklist.

#1 – Define Your Content Goal

The very first thing to do is define your content objective… What are you trying to achieve? Why are you bothering with content marketing at all? Like most goal-setting situations, the more specific you are, the better results you’ll get (think SMART goals here).

For most of us, the end goal is to generate more revenue. But this can mean different things to different companies so it’s important to be clear on what you want to achieve. Examples of fitness content marketing goals include…

• Getting 300 new email subscribers this quarter.
• Having 200 ebook downloads this week.
• Selling 100 training programs this month.
• Generating 50 membership leads this week.

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#2 – Brainstorm Fitness Content Ideas

Once you’re clear on your content objective, think about how to achieve that goal. It’s sometimes helpful to consider these questions…

• What’s the starting point? What is your audience thinking now?
• What’s the end goal? What do you want to get them to do?

Once you’ve identified your start and end points, you can then brainstorm ideas about how to help them bridge that gap…

• What are the common problems that you can solve?
• Are there some common misconceptions that you can clarify?
• What are their barriers to taking action that you can help them overcome?

Which questions might they have that you can answer? Potential clients might want to know…

• What they’ll get for their money
• What’s involved on their part
• Whether they’ll need previous experience or fitness levels
• Why your solution will work
• What scientific evidence it’s based on
• If you get stuck, then look at past email enquiries or social media comments for frequently asked questions

The possibilities are almost endless so set yourself a time limit for this step. Write down as many ideas as you can in 10 minutes.

Note down the best format for each content idea. Some ideas might be suitable for Instagram Reels, Stories, and carousels, whilst other ideas may require a whole blog article.

Don’t forget to include the fundamentals like launch dates for new fitness programs, classes, and products. You might also want to include relevant fitness days like Stress Awareness Month (April) or World International Yoga Day (21st June). Once you’ve got all your ideas, then it’s time to input them into a schedule or content calendar…

This fitness marketing calendar is available as part of our template bundle.

#3 – Organize Your Best Content Ideas Into A Calendar

Now that you have lots of content ideas, it’s time to organize them. It can be helpful to categorize ideas by theme and take advantage of recurring trends like #motivationmonday and #workoutwednesday. Eventually, your audience will come to expect certain types of content on certain days.

Here’s how to approach your fitness content calendar creation…

1. Begin by inputting any activities that aren’t flexible, like global fitness events and product launch deadlines
2. Then add content that builds excitement for, or supports these activities
3. Lastly, add the content that doesn’t have fixed dates, organized by type or theme

Below are examples of how you might organize your calendar ideas by theme, along with some for sourcing content…

Mondays – Motivational Quotes

• Bookmark or highlight phrases that stand out to you in online articles or books
• Lift quotes from your own blog posts
• Perform a Google search for ‘motivational quotes’ to get new ideas
• Align them with fears or barriers that are likely to be holding your ideal client back (e.g. a busy mother who feels guilty about ‘me-time’ might need reassurance that it’s actually ok to look after herself)
• Use hashtags like #motivationmonday or #quotestoliveby

Tuesday – Tips & Tricks

• Summarise one actionable tip from a previous blog article into a social media post
• Pull out a statistic and expand on what it means for your customers
• Answer a frequently asked question
• Make your tips and tricks posts more visual by turning them into an image (Canva is great for this)
• Can you use the #transformationtuesday hashtag?

Wednesday – Promote

• Publish a blog article on your website that promotes your product or service
• Share customer testimonials highlighting why your offering is great
• Include a short teaser sentence about what someone will learn from your blog post (i.e. why should they read it?)
• Use the hashtag #workoutwednesday if it’s relevant

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Thursday – Network

• Share a relevant post from a complimentary Facebook page – your audience will appreciate that you’re opening them up to new sources of info instead of only talking about your own content
• The pages you promote will appreciate you expanding their reach, which opens up networking opportunities for future collaborations (or they might share your content in return)
• To share on Facebook, click on the image so that it appears with a black background, then copy the hyperlink, paste into your timeline and schedule it.

Friday – Interact

• Ask a question that encourages interaction, and builds your community
• Request advice or ask your audience about their weekend plans related to fitness, training, food etc
• Try to make the topic relevant to upcoming blog articles, so you can include their suggestions where appropriate

Saturday – Educate

• Remind them about a previous blog post, but not your most recent one (perhaps a post from the week before last)
• Pull out a stat, quote, or write a different intro – don’t just repeat whatever you said when you originally shared it
• The majority of your audience won’t have seen your original post, so you can re-share it several times with a different twist without sounding repetitive

Sunday – Entertain

• Share a funny GIF or meme that’s related to health, fitness, nutrition, positive thinking etc
• You can find content from Facebook pages like this one and this one
• Or search for content using the hashtags ‪#‎FunnyFitnessMemes and ‪#‎FunnyFitnessGifs

Now you have your fitness marketing calendar outlined, you know exactly what you need to create and share.

Planning Your Fitness Marketing Calendar – Overview

So, now you have a 3-step plan to create your fitness social media calendar or content marketing plan… By following your calendar, everything you create will be posted at the ideal time in support your business goals.

You’ll have a huge advantage over 99% of your competitors who don’t have a content plan. And your lead generation funnel will produce results more consistently. So get organized and create your calendar today!

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The Fitness Marketing & Lead Generation Roadmap is a comprehensive resource designed for gyms, personal trainers, and online fitness businesses. It’s packed with video workshops, marketing templates, step-by-step guides, cheat sheets, and more. We cover:

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