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Stronger Sundays

Dominate your fitness business with this weekly collection of strategies, tips, and tricks.
By trainers, for trainers.

June 30, 2019

Quote of the week:

"For most clients, training is like brushing their teeth: an inconvenient and often painful chore with huge long-term benefit. Your role as a trainer is rarely to perform miraculous feats of transformation and inspiration. If you get them to come in consistently to ‘brush their teeth,’ you’re excelling at your role."

                                                                            - Will Levy on Fit Pros Unite, our free Facebook group


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Watch for this newsletter from the Personal Trainer Development Center each Sunday.

In this issue:

  1. How to be the best of the best      
  2. Even the best clients need boundaries
  3. More to the core
  4. Work on your strengths and buy your weaknesses

1. How to be the best of the best  

Personal trainers are easy to make fun of. Check out Brad Pitt in Burn After Reading (mild profanity warning) if you don’t believe us.

The worst trainers, notes Tony Bonvechio, either don’t assess at all, or assess with the goal of nitpicking every movement the client makes, and chastising anyone who doesn’t "have the flexibility of a gymnast or the strength of an elite powerlifter."

A good trainer, by contrast, "should explain the how and why of quality movement," Bonvechio says, with bonus points for putting a positive spin on it. So instead of saying "you move like the Tin Man," explain why having better mobility in the hips could help reduce the client’s back pain.

The takeaway: At the end of this otherwise critical look at online trainers, John Rusin, DPT says "the top 1 percent" of coaches "inspire long-term change instead of short-term motivation and hype that doesn’t really last." If they can do that for their clients, they’ll also have "a track record of results," proving "they can deliver over and over again."

Go deeper: If you want to be among the top 1 percent of coaches, to make good money and do a good job, you need our newly revised and updated guide to getting started as an online trainer, which outlines the eight critical steps you need to succeed.
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2. Even the best clients need boundaries  - Jerilyn Covert

Just because you can be accessible 24/7 doesn’t mean you should be.

"It’s a topic trainers don’t know they need to talk about," says psychologist Lisa Lewis, EdD. "There seems to be a high bar set for trainers in terms of availability and communication. It can be draining."

You need to set boundaries: Based on your pay, what feels reasonable to you? When are you working? When are you off duty? Write them down.

Then talk to your client. Lewis suggests something like this:

"You’re doing great! Keep the updates coming. I check my email at 9 a.m. and 4 p.m., and will respond then. If you text or email on the weekend, I’ll get back to you Monday."

Ideally, you’ll have this conversation in person, or in a video chat with an online client.

The takeaway:
Don’t be afraid to set limits with clients, and when you do, there’s no need to explain or apologize, Lewis says. Your clients want more access? Offer it as a premium-level service, for a premium-level price.

3. More to the core  - Lou Schuler

I struggle to come up with new core exercises to try. And I say that as someone who wrote an entire book about core training.

So I was almost giddy to find not one but two new variations on the useful but mundane side plank.

The first is the side plank with top leg march from Cole Russo, a strength coach at Cressey Sports Performance in Hudson, Massachusetts. Like the traditional version, it’s an anti-lateral flexion exercise. But as Russo explains, performing hip flexion with the top leg increases the challenge to the hip abductors on the bottom leg, as well as the stabilizing muscles throughout the hips and core.

The second comes in this video from Alwyn Cosgrove, my coauthor on the six books in the New Rules of Lifting series. He calls it an extreme side plank, which is accurate, if not especially descriptive.

As you’ll see, it involves two new challenges: The top leg is elevated on a box, leaving the bottom leg unsupported. And with the top arm extended and holding a medicine ball, there’s not only more load for the core and hips, but an additional challenge to your balance and alignment.

(Make sure you watch to the end to see Cosgrove’s final instruction.)

4. Work on your strengths and hire your weaknesses  - Jonathan Goodman

When I was in high school, my parents hired a math tutor for me. I was just getting by in calculus at the time, so it seemed like an obvious decision.

Looking back, though, I’m not sure it was. Math was never going to be my future.

Meanwhile, I got much better grades in English, which I enjoyed and where I showed natural skill. Maybe I should’ve had an English tutor.

I think back to that tutor as an example of how different school life is from real life.

In school life, we celebrate those who excel across the full spectrum of academics—math and science; languages and social studies; music and sports. In real life, we celebrate those who excel in one thing.

The secret to success, in both business and your personal life, is to crave mastery and ignore balance.

Recognize what you’re great at and master it, getting closer and closer to the tip of the mastery asymptote, knowing you’ll never reach it. The better you get, the harder it is to make marginal gains, and the more valuable those gains become.

The key, in the words of the late Charles Poliquin, is to master your strengths and buy your weaknesses.

You do that first by identifying them, then by having systems and people in place to provide you with the information and help you need at any given time. This resourcefulness is truly the secret sauce.

Personal life is no different. I want to master time and be present with my family. And I want to explore. And I want to travel. Running a multi-seven-figure publishing business can be all-consuming if you let it. But it doesn’t have to be.

So I work on my strengths—spending time with Alison and Calvin, our son—and outsource my weaknesses. We have a nanny who travels with us and does the cooking. We hire someone to do the cleaning and other household tasks.


**Thanks for reading. What to do next**



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earn the business of fitness that your cert should have covered, but didn't.

In this 3 lesson minicourse you will:

  • Rest easy with the 3 (super obvious) time management strategies that burned out fit pros wish they knew

  • Maximize your profit with the perfect pricing model

  • Avoid crippling (and embarrassing) mistakes when asking for referrals

This minicourse is 100% free as a thank you for being a valued subscriber.

--> Click here for instant access
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