Trainers: Short-Sided Thinking Personified

At this very moment, we’re in the eye of the storm that is a fitness revolution that we will likely only be able to fully appreciate in its wake. There are a number of stakeholders in this revolution. There are the participants getting fit, living more capable lives, and improving health markers. There are the surrounding industries. Everyone from food chains, the medical community, and advertising firms are slowly being forced to adapt to this changing landscape. There’s also the fitness professionals who are making a living in these changing times.

As movement skill takes the main stage there is an entire segment of fitness professional that is emerging. More men and women than ever are becoming “coaches”, which is a job that is different in many ways than that of a personal trainer or fitness instructor. While the space is creating demand and increased rigor of the craft, there is a fork being driven in the road with these men and women.

One one hand, these coaches are choosing to develop something substantial that is connected to a business and a subsequent brand either for themselves or something bigger than themselves. While this long view approach requires courage and commitment from both the business owner and the coach, it scales up, has the opportunity to be long lasting and transcend itself, and offers a potential future of exponential growth. The opposite, more short-sided path, is far and away the most popular of the two, which is a coach-for-hire, mercenary-style approach. This style has much less strings attached, remains a hustle for the coach, and has virtually no chance to scale.

Unfortunately, the short-side approach has a negative impact on the entire industry and is a house of cards for the future of the industry. This coach-by-the-hour style makes it nearly impossible for a coach to make a livable wage or develop requisite skills to progress into positions of leadership, which is both fragile to market fluctuations and normalizes lower value propositions for gym communities in the space.

When I posed the question as to what will happen when the year is 2025 and all of these non-committal, fitness coaches are no longer young hustlers and they haven’t built anything for themselves, one of our leaders said it best when he said, “We’re going to have a high school quarterback generation of coaches that are going to be left behind.”

That imagery struck me. Believe me when I say it’d be much easier for us to hire mercenary coaches by the hour, but we won’t. We won’t because we want to be around in fifty years, we want to provide a remarkable experience, and we want our coaches to be professionals that can make a living working at being the best in the world at this.

If you’re interested in our processes, you can learn about them here.

 

Logan Gelbrich

@functionalcoach