Quitting your day job and launching your career as a professional coach may sound easy. But, for most new coaches actually finding clients to work with is harder than it seems. With more than 20 years of experience in the coaching industry, we (OPEX Fitness) have learned what works, and what doesn’t. Here are ten steps we use to help coaches get their first clients and your next few as well.

What’s the difference between these successes and failures? Strong relationships with their clients. If you’ve ever coached in person you know the importance of coach-client connection. But how do you build and maintain these same quality relationships through a remote medium?

If you spend enough time coaching functional fitness you are bound to come across a client with shoulder issues. This injury is commonly caused by too much overhead pressing with poor form and without prerequisite shoulder stability.

Do you find yourself creating the same training splits for clients over and over? Always using the weekdays to train and weekends to rest? It’s easy to fall into a training split rut, or conversely, to waste time trying to reinvent the wheel for every client.

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.

And so creates a situation where the gym owner is the only one checking in with clients who suddenly go MIA, the only one actively seeking new clients, the only one taking clients for coffee or lunch, and the only one going to a client’s Christmas concert or having clients over for dinner.

I have programmed thousands and thousands of workouts for athletes over the past twenty years. Despite all this experience, I have made mistakes. Sometimes I see my mistake immediately upon writing and reviewing the program, other times the mistake has taken years to discover. It was only when I became a coach of coaches rather than a coach of athletes that I finally was given a different perspective that allowed me to not only learn what caused my mistakes but how to fix them.

Each year we get asked “how do I become a fitness coach?” thousands of times. Thankfully, it’s simpler than you might think and you can have a new career in an industry you love in as little as six months. Here is how to become a fitness coach and what the career path looks like.

Opening a gym is exciting. The thought of working in an environment you love and being your own boss is motivation enough to sign whatever documents you need to get that loan and open up your own gym. 

The SkiErg is a great piece of equipment found in most gyms that is specifically useful for training the aerobic system. The SkiErg also appears in numerous functional fitness workout routines. But, clients commonly experience difficulties in using the SkiErg.

Writing effective and creative exercise programs is a craft. You develop this craft by sculpting your skillset and technique through hours of practice. To refine it even further, you experiment with variation in your prescriptions. Getting caught in a rut of writing the same programs can be easy to fall in to but can halt your positive growth. The key to keeping your craft fresh and inspired is to introduce new variations to the way you write programs.

“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.

Pull-ups are tough, there is no way around it. This basic demonstration of athleticism requires a high level of relative strength which can be challenging to develop for some clients. Nevertheless, with the right plan, your clients can build the strength needed to do a pull-up.

Chances are, if you’re a coach, you spend a good chunk of time helping your clients warm up before their training session. Sometimes, the warm-up even takes longer than the workout, right?

Energy system training is a massive subject in the fitness and athletic development industry. While many coaches understand the basics of what energy systems training is, they have trouble with the application of this knowledge in the construction of a fitness program. Here are the basics of creating workouts for the aerobic energy system.

Bodyweight training is a type of exercise in which the only resistance used is the weight of the person performing it. Bodyweight exercises are done in six movement patterns: bending, squatting, lunging, pushing, pulling, and core.

In the fitness world, the term ‘metabolic conditioning’ is growing in popularity. Popularized by CrossFit gyms, metabolic conditioning workouts  are now mainstream and can be found at your local Gold’s Gym, YMCA, micro gym, and everywhere in between. But with its rise in popularity, the art of progressing metabolic conditioning workouts safely and effectively has been lost. Here are four steps to follow to use metabolic conditioning safely.  

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.

Teaching clients to manage their workout pacing to create sustainable and repeatable efforts can be challenging for any coach who lacks the right tools. Despite the challenge, developing this self-awareness and autonomy in clients is incredibly valuable.

Weight training is a fundamental part of exercise. Progressing it seems straightforward enough, just add more weight over time right? However, for some, it can be challenging. Thankfully, below you’ll find four different ways you can progress weight training.