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Stronger Sundays

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

03/28/2024

Quote of the week:

"Terrible events produce outrage, and when people are outraged, they are all the more likely to accept rumors that justify their emotional states, and also to attribute those events to intentional action."
                                                                                  - Behavioral economist Cass R. Sunstein
Watch for this newsletter from the Personal Trainer Development Center each Sunday.

In this issue:

  1. Right this minute, someone is stealing my stuff
  2. The hidden risks of home workouts
  3. The home workout motivation challenge
1. Right this minute, someone is stealing my stuff – Jonathan Goodman

This is my response to a member of Online Trainers Unite, our private Facebook group, who asked what to do about a client who was posting the trainer’s workouts for her friends without giving the trainer credit.

There’s a legitimate chance that, right this minute, someone is stealing one of my books, or sharing something I created without authorization.

Just the other day, I heard about a site that was illegally selling the Online Trainer Academy curriculum. We’ll do what we can to take it down, since OTA is the most valuable intellectual property I’ve ever created.

But I’ve learned over the years to pick my battles. If I’m on the fence, I think of this story from Marc Ecko of Ecko Unltd:

He and a clothing buyer walked past a street vendor selling illegal knockoffs of Ecko’s products. When he complained, the buyer told him, "You’d be more upset if your stuff wasn’t here."

If we’re being honest, I’ll bet most of us feel the same way. If nobody wanted to do your workouts, wouldn’t that be worse than someone sharing them without your permission?

Given a choice, we’d rather deal with occasional unauthorized use of our content than wonder why nobody cares enough to steal it.

My advice:

When you see someone sharing your workouts without giving you credit, reach out. Tell them you’re flattered to see they like your program so much they want to share it with their friends.

But, understandably, you’d like credit for your work.

You aren’t just looking for attribution. Your goal is to turn that client into a marketing asset. She clearly has the attention of her friends and followers. Will she give you access to the people doing your workouts to see if they’re interested in working with you?

Most important is this:

Spend your time trying to get good. Try to put yourself in a position where people want to do your workouts.

And if someone steals one of them? To paraphrase a thousand Oscar nominees, it’s an honor just to be plagiarized.

2. The hidden risks of home workouts

When COVID-19 locked us out of our gyms, we not only had to scramble to come up with home workouts for our clients, we also had to create programs for ourselves, based mostly or entirely on body-weight exercises.

"Many people are finding it a welcome break from heavy lifting, and say their joints feel a lot better," wrote Tom Venuto on Facebook.

But he also offered a warning:

Not long after he started pushing himself to set new records on body-weight exercises, an old injury returned: medial epicondylitis, better known as golfer’s elbow. "And damn it, I don’t even golf!" he said.

He stopped doing the chin-ups that caused the injury, but the damage was done.

The takeaway: No matter the exercise, when you "do too much too soon, or train for ego," you’re setting yourself up for an overuse injury.
3. The home workout motivation challenge

The "too much, too soon" warning applies equally to our clients. Or at least the ones who’re eager to push themselves.

The bigger challenge is at the other end of the spectrum. How do you motivate clients who want to exercise but hate home workouts?

That’s the subject Guillermo Munoz tackles in our latest article at the PTDC.

Check it out here:

--> How to Motivate Clients for Home Workouts

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



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