The thought of being able to relax with your feet up in some far away destination while you coach your clients online is enough to make any fitness professional want to become a remote coach. However, while there are many remote coaches in the market only a few manage to succeed in this endeavor. 

If this is you, and you have been contemplating becoming a personal trainer, or a fitness coach of some sort, it’s worth doing a little bit of research about the pros and cons of the various options you could pursue in the industry.

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. 

You’ve probably heard the phrase “time under tension” before. It’s common to hear “it’s the key to growth,” referring to time under tension tossed around the gym. This phrase is commonplace because altering it is a great way to increase the dose-response (effect) of an exercise. But to get the most out of it, one must first understand how much time under tension is needed.

Not getting enough sleep is the worst, we’ve all been there. Whether it’s work or dealing with a newborn there are a plethora of things that fight for attention and move sleep to the back of the priority list. Other than just feeling tired there are numerous things that deteriorate when you are not getting sleep consistently. One of the first things to deteriorate is the balance between the body’s sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. This can be thought of as the body’s balance between stress and rest. When the balance between these two systems gets off track it can cause a host of issues, such as digestion and detox problems stressing the body further than just simple lack of sleep.

As 2020 gets rolling I have decided to take a moment to look back and compile my thoughts about 2019. So much went on last year and it is tough to remember every detail. So instead I broke up my year in review into three different themes.

“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.”

You progress the strength continuum from the left to the right, starting with slow and intense contractions and moving to faster and less intense contractions. Developing the strength continuum in this way allows for maximal expression across the continuum over time.

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. 

When it comes to creating a training program for your client it can be easy to get lost in detailed long-term planning and periodizing, just to end up overlooking the basics of a daily program. Here are three tips to make sure your client’s daily training session is always focused on the goal.  

When it comes to one-on-one fitness coaching, OPEX Fitness has refined the business model that creates success for coaches, clients, and gym owners. Through building over 70 gyms around the world we have learned what works and what doesn’t. Based on this experience we are now offering an opportunity to own a successful, sustainable, and scalable business model through the OPEX Gyms License Program.  

Tennil’s AM Session is an upper body strength day with strongman and strict muscle up work as she prepares her body and mind for the 2018 CrossFit Regionals.

We just wrapped up the first Mixed Modal Apprenticeship in celebration of our newest course Mixed Modal. This three-day experience took place at OPEX HQ in sunny Scottsdale, AZ and was a meeting of the minds for seven top-level coaches led by James Fitzgerald. Over the three days, the apprenticeship focused on maximizing the expertise and experience of the participating coaches via, daily discussion topics, floor observation, debriefs, and AMA style sessions regarding the principles of mixed modal training. Here are what the participants had to say about the experience.

“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.

James starts this conversation by addressing the opinion that some of the events at the CrossFit Games are not always the most entertaining, specifically the Triple Three (For time: 3,000 meter row, 300 double-unders, 3 mile run). “While tests like the snatch may seem entertaining on television it does not come from the movement itself, it comes from the commentary,” says James. “The tests that actually are effective are boring . . .” When it comes to the high-level fitness testing James wants us to remember that “you have to keep in mind that the tests we see at the Games might not be the best tests [of fitness] as they are based on logistics and entertainment.”

The EMOM is a common sight in CrossFit and functional fitness gyms around the world. But while EMOMs are used widely, they are often programmed without a clear intent and used just to fit lots of work into a short period of time. Here’s three distinctive ways this versatile tool can be used effectively in program design.

For example, large gyms like 24 Hour Fitness and L.A. Fitness require almost 30,000 square feet of space. Though the costs of leasing such a facility size are astronomical, they are able to maintain profit by offering cheap gym services and coaching while operating a very large client base. The same analysis can even be applied to most CrossFit or group fitness gyms, because the overlap in when clients train necessitates larger facilities and more equipment.

That’s the number one tip OPEX CCP Coach Sam Smith has for the thousands of coaches who are suddenly transforming themselves into remote coaches since their gyms closed because of the novel coronavirus pandemic.