The newest addition to the OPEX Team - Casey Jenks

How does CCP Coach Sam Smith manage 100+ clients while maintaining a healthy lifestyle? Learn Sam's tips for a fulfilling (and sustainable) coaching career

I spent the first 3 years of my coaching career as a group fitness instructor. While my work gave me fulfillment, I felt a disconnect in the purpose of delivering deeper value to the people I worked with and towards my personal vision. 

Before she knew it, she was helping relieve coaches at OPEX Morgantown and decided she wanted to take her coaching to the next level. And when Smith told her that the OPEX Coaching Certificate Program (CCP) was “more informative, educational and beneficial” than her exercise science college degree, Lewis had no doubt the CCP was the course for her. 

“CCP exceeded my college education. By a lot,” said 26-year-old McCormick. “CCP really gave me a new perspective: To be less dogmatic. In university, they teach you the way things are, but they don’t do a lot of explaining about why this is the case, or why this might not always be the case.”

“CCP armed me to have difficult conversations with patients, and it armed me with supporting people better, especially my rehab clients outside of the clinic. And it has actually made me significantly better at managing my chronic pain clients,” said 37-year-old Reese, who first discovered OPEX when she was a Regionals-level CrossFit athlete. She started following the Big Dawgs blog and soon began working with James FitzGerald.

The goal of this 30-minute video is to show coaches 5 common program design mistakes and a detailed explanation of how each can be avoided. Coaches will also receive a demonstration of how using The OPEX System of Coaching creates better results for both the coach and the client. You can watch the video here.

Then she took the OPEX Coach Certificate Program (CCP) in 2015, while simultaneously working with OPEX coach Mike Lee, who was helping her with her personal fitness goals. The combination of what she learned from Lee and from the CCP helped Zapoli rethink the way she thought about diet and nutrition coaching.

At the time, 39-year-old Pilhofer owned a CrossFit affiliate—today it’s called MSP Fitness in St. Louis Park, Minnesota—and while he said he learned a lot from the CrossFit methodology, he also found himself seeking educational opportunities outside of CrossFit.

As many gyms of all sizes have lost clients or closed their doors completely, and people have quickly grown bored of Zoom classes, OPEX CCP Coach Benny Evien has taken advantage of the pandemic by using it as a time to show people the value of having a personal coach in their corner. 

“There’s no really bad answer—or I mean I guess there are bad answers—but what I mean is if someone asks me a question like, ‘What should I be eating?’ I’m not going to tell them, ‘You need to eat these three things and avoid this entirely.’ I will tell them, ‘It depends,” she explained. 

He held on to this goal through high school, which then led him to earn his degree in exercise science at the University of South Carolina. After that, he began a career as a personal trainer.

But, because her days had her leaving her house at 5 a.m. to coach and not returning until the evening, getting through the course that she knew would make her a way better coach, always got bumped to the weekends. And often she needed time to recharge on the weekends, so she’d bump the education to the next week.