This blog provides you with 15 factors you must consider before deciding if being a Fitness Trainer is a good career for you. These factors include: Will your job pay you enough money initially? Will you get benefits today or into the future? Will you have to work a lot?

Clients may be struggling to gain lean mass because they are not capable of breaking down their muscle tissue. This is because they lack the prerequisite levels of strength. In order to gain lean mass, the client needs to be capable of breaking down muscle and recovering from that breakdown.

Fitness Coaching is unique, unlike other industries, the customer relationship does not end after the marketed good or service is sold. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Successful coaching businesses are dependent on the long term health of the relationship with the client. The ability to build these long term client relationships is the differentiator between professional coaches and group class instructors.

“The coaching profession in general, and I mean fitness coaching, life coaching, business coaching, is a bit of an unfair profession, in that people with the means to gain access to it are the ones who receive great coaching and mentorship,” he said.

If you’re a coach, you probably agree that working with a new client requires way more energy than working with a veteran you have been coaching for five years.

The goal of this article is to provide you with some basic tips to improve efficiency within training programs for busy clients. Ideally, every human being should move every day, but in today’s world that is easier said than done. These basic principles are a great starting point for clients who may have a hard time establishing a base of consistency, when it comes to hitting the gym. This can be applied to any type of client looking to improve their overall health and fitness. 

Prior to taking the OPEX Coaching Certificate Program (CCP) and opening his OPEX licensed gym, Burchfield had gained experience in various avenues in the fitness industry. He started personal training in 2011, spent some time coaching small group classes, and then ran a CrossFit gym in North Carolina. While running that gym, Burchfield took CCP and realized, “this is what I want to do long-term,” he explained. 

This is the WHOOP Strap’s slogan, a wildly popular fitness wearable that straps onto the user’s wrist in place of a watch. Promoted by athletes and influencers alike, this strap tracks daily activity giving users insights into how well their body is recovering and the amount of stress it’s under. 

For this to happen, the client needs a solution to his/her problem—to get and stay fit and healthy. The coach needs job fulfillment and an opportunity to make a professional wage so he can have a long-term career in fitness. And the business needs clients and coaches to stick around in order to be profitable.

When programming the AirBike for general population clients keep it simple. “For good health, most people need some form of good resistance training and easy aerobic work,” says FitzGerald. That’s where the AirBike comes in, as it does not require skill for a client to get an effective aerobic dose-response. While the fitness industry has popularized training the Pain system, with hard intervals, 99% of clients do not need this type of training. They simply need repeatable aerobic efforts, “easy” aerobic work. Learn what repeatable aerobic efforts look like for three modalities in this blog.

In this episode, James refers to functional fitness as mixed modal. By its definition, functional fitness is a mixture of different fitness modalities aptly referred to as mixed modal. It is also the name of James’ latest course that focuses specifically on the sport of competitive functional fitness. If you are an athlete or a coach of an athlete this is the course for you. Learn more here. 

Personalized fitness is very simply one-to-one coaching. The OPEX method requires coaches to uniquely design each clients fitness experience. An OPEX coach always delivers a comprehensive assessment, frequent consultations, personalized program designs, and holistic nourishment programs catered to the specific client. Personalized fitness coaches differ from amateur coaches because they are true professionals seeking mastery of their craft, they realize that each client is different and treat them as such.

At the time of writing this article in late March, COVID-19 is spreading throughout the United States and most of Europe. While some local governments have passed shelter in place ordinances, the full effects of this pandemic have yet to be seen. Here is how OPEX Fitness Founder, James FitzGerald, believes COVID-19 will impact society and the fitness industry.

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.

For this to happen, the client needs a solution to his/her problem—to get and stay fit and healthy. The coach needs job fulfillment and an opportunity to make a professional wage so he can have a long-term career in fitness. And the business needs clients and coaches to stick around in order to be profitable.

For this to happen, the client needs a solution to his/her problem—to get and stay fit and healthy. The coach needs job fulfillment and an opportunity to make a professional wage so he can have a long-term career in fitness. And the business needs clients and coaches to stick around in order to be profitable.

Bioenergetics covers Energy System Training and the core biological adaptations required for competitive functional fitness such as metabolic specificity and the new power-time curve. This topic covers pace theory, metabolic training, and how to create the most efficient progressions of work possible. Learn how to create these efficient progressions with sample programming in Mixed Modal.

In this weeks Ask Me Anything (AMA) sneak peek, James FitzGerald, tackles the question of how important is it to get sunshine? This weekly AMA is available exclusively to OPEX Coaching Certificate Program (CCP) Coaches as part of our never-ending mission to supply our coaches with a quality education.

First, ask the client “does this pain you feel lead to a decrease in your function?”  If the answer is yes then a medical route should be pursued. But, if the pain does not decrease the client’s function than it is up to the coach to identify the cause of the pain and work around it.

By conducting a thorough assessment both the coach and the client get a clear understanding of what the client is capable of. This will quickly ground any fantasies goals the client may have and enable a focused conversation on goals, progression, and appropriate timelines and trade-offs. The assessment is the coach’s chance to help the client fall in love with the long game and the progress they will make over time.