Chris Cooper's Blog, page 134

How to Run Specialty Courses Every Day of the Year

By Brooks DiFiore, Certified Two-Brain Fitness Business Mentor

I’ve never been a fan of continuing to run a specialty class as a regular offering.

In my experience, ongoing weightlifting programs and the like often become overlooked or taken for granted, leading to a deterioration in value that can leave clients, coaches and gym owners frustrated.

But that doesn’t mean your coaches can’t help clients and build your business with specialty training outside special programming blocks.

Below, I’m going to show you how to help your coaches build more sustainable careers by pursuing areas of passion and prioritizing clients’ desires. With this approach, coaches and clients win, and your dedicated blocks of specialty programming will be well-attended, valuable offerings.

The Hybrid Plan

We’ve been offering specialty courses since opening Arsenal Strength in 2015. Our first was Winter Strength Camp, a six-week powerlifting course. We still run Strength Camp today, but we’ve also expanded to beginner/advanced gymnastics, Olympic weightlifting, endurance and a few others. 

One of the most common questions we hear during our after-action review is this: “Can we turn this into an ongoing class?” 

Generally, this question comes up for two reasons:

The trainer loves coaching in that specific area of fitness (which is fantastic). A few people in the group say they would attend regularly if the program were ongoing. 

Both are high-class problems. I want my gym to be filled with coaches who are eager to pursue their passions and clients who want to improve their fitness. But, as mentioned above, specialty courses can lose some of their appeal when they become part of your regular menu.

To capitalize on interest but preserve course value, we sat down in 2019 to rework our specialty course offerings. We wanted to make it easier for clients and coaches to continue working one on one past the initial four to six weeks. What we came up with was a simple hybrid model for specialty courses using a tiered combination of classes and personal training. 

Here is an example of how we structure a four-week hybrid specialty course with two classes per week. The price is set at $20 per class and $50 per 30-minute PT session.

Tier 1: Four-week course + 1 30-minute skills session—$210
Tier 2: Four-week course + 2 30-minute skills sessions—$260
Tier 3: Four-week course + 4 30-minute skills sessions—$360

Below is the breakdown we generally see for tier selection for courses capped at 10:

Tier 1: 7 clients 
Tier 2: 2 clients
Tier 3: 1 client

Total Revenue: $2,350

A few things to note:

Consider giving your clients the option to make two payments—one when they reserve their spots and a second halfway through. Personal training sessions purchased with the specialty course must be used before the course ends. Encourage clients to use at least one of their sessions within the first week. Doing so will give them a specific focus for the remainder of the course and might lead to an upgrade in membership if they are on your Tier 1 option. Sit down with your clients for a post-course goal review. A few will still want more and have the desire to continue working one on one. 

With this process in place, you’ll be able to market specialty courses that don’t lose their luster due to overexposure. When those courses are running and packed with interested clients, you can use the personal sessions and post-course reviews to let athletes know they can work on specialty skills at any time with a coach. All they have to do is book sessions.

Everyone benefits. The business generates more revenue, and the coaches earn more. The clients get what they want and make fast progress due to personal attention.

If you follow this plan, you’ll sell out specialty programs quickly and offer a new year-round service: specialty coaching.

Bonus: Two-Brain Programming provides quarterly done-for-you specialty course programs complete with marketing materials. Head to twobrainprogramming.com to sign up for a 30-day free trial to download our four-week Gymnastics Open Prep Course.

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Nutrition Challenges Are Dead. Kickstarts Are the Answer

By Lindsey VanSchoyck, Certified Two-Brain Fitness Business Specialist

Challenges don’t change lives.

In a previous post, I told you how our gyms went from $56,000 in nutrition coaching revenue in 2019 to over $115,000 in the first 10 months of 2020 alone. The change we made was simple: We started coaching habits instead of macros. And we made nutrition coaching a long-term strategy.

The “Challenge” Mindset

How many times have you started a “challenge” of some sort and had great success only to fall right back into your old habits and routines after it ended? This challenge could have been fitness, nutrition, mindset or anything else. You think, “I can do this for 28 days easily!” And you do. You rock it for 28 days straight, but when the challenge is over, you completely stop doing the prescribed activities and return to old behaviors.

Challenges have distinct start and end dates. And while they’re great for getting people to experiment with new habits and routines, they’re not great for setting participants up for long-term success. This is a huge problem.

For example, gyms running nutrition programs and nutrition challenges often find their members sign up for a 28-day challenge, see great results and then quit nutrition coaching to fall right back into their old habits. They make progress during the challenge, but at the end date they go back to their cookies and soda. 

We stopped running nutrition challenges last year because we don’t want our members doing something great for 28 days and then stopping. Now we run “nutrition kickstarts.” The word “kickstart” has a different meaning than “challenge”: It’s the beginning of a journey. A kickstart is the first step in a process that will improve fitness, nutrition and health. 

We used to run nutrition challenges twice a year. Our members had great results but never stuck with nutrition coaching. They completed the challenge and then waited to jump into the next one six months later. Challenges were a good revenue boost for our gym but ultimately weren’t good for our ongoing nutrition program or our clients. Less than 10 percent of challenge participants stuck with nutrition-coaching services long term.

Since we changed a simple word—dropping “challenge” for “kickstart”—we have a 75 percent conversion rate to ongoing nutrition services. Our clients stay, on average, for a year to work with our expert coaches. By reframing things as a kickstart, clients no longer see beginning and end dates but an intro to a longer nutrition journey.

So stop running nutrition challenges and start running nutrition kickstarts! And don’t be afraid to prescribe ongoing nutrition services to your clients. Be up front and honest with them: The four- or six-week program is just a launch point for a long journey with you as their nutrition and fitness coach.

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Gym Owners Handbook: What You’ll Learn

Andrew (00:02):

It’s another episode of Two-Brain Radio. Chris Cooper’s fifth book, Gym Owners Handbook, is now available on Amazon. Your fitness business can be built according to a recipe. And this is the recipe book. Click the link in the show notes to get it. Here’s Coop with the introduction to Gym Owners Handbook.

Chris (00:19):

We know that getting clients results isn’t enough to make a great business or a great career, but it is the foundation. If you’re not getting your clients results, none of the other stuff matters. Your marketing plan, your operations plan, your retention plan, your systems, how much you care about the clients. You need to get them results. What does it take to get a client results? Long-term behavior change, short-term habit change. It means learning skills like motivational interviewing, peer-to-peer programming. It means focusing on things like adherence and retention instead of novelty. And I built twobraincoaching.com with my partner, Josh Martin, to teach coaches how to do this. More than ever before it is critical to get results for your clients. You need to charge a premium fee. You need to provide high value to warrant that fee. And what is most valuable to the client? What do they care about the most? The results on the goal that they choose. Twobraincoaching.com has programs set up to help your clients achieve those goals. We will train you and your coaches to deliver personal training, group training, online training, nutrition coaching, and coming soon, mindset coaching, in a way that’s simple for you to adopt, it’s legal everywhere. And it’s super effective. These courses were built by experts with years of experience getting clients results. Twobraincoaching.com is a labor of love for me, and I know you’re going to love it too.

Chris (01:47):

Your business has two parts, your operations and your audience. Operations refers to the service you provide. Audience refers to the people who trade their money for your service. Now, each is a multiplier of the other. If your service is excellent, you will build a broader audience, and the bigger your audience, the more of your service you will sell.

Chris (02:08):

On the other hand, if your service isn’t as great as you think, your audience will shrink. And if no one’s heard about you, then you don’t have a business. In this book, I’m going to tell you how to maximize both sides of your business. First, we’re going to talk about delivering real excellence and measuring that excellence to ensure future growth. Then I’m going to tell you how to build an audience, the right kind, not just a bunch of cold leads from advertising. What’s the benefit to you? Well, most gyms have to replace their clients every seven months. That means they’re spending a lot of time marketing, chasing, cold calling and doing the hard stuff they didn’t really sign up for. And most gyms are also charging too little or selling the wrong things to the clients that they do get. So that leads them down a spiral of high churn and declining profit. I want you to have the opposite result. I want you to need less marketing over time, not more, attract better and better clients who value your service more and more over time, regularly audit your processes and pricing and earn more in less time, create meaningful career opportunities for your staff, create wealth, the freedom of time and money for yourself. But you can’t improve anything without measuring it first. So let’s talk about measuring success. This is a tactical book. I’m going to share specific actions that you must take to grow your business. I know these tactics work because I’ve measured them on thousands of gyms and you’ll need to measure how they’re working for you as you do them. I’ll dig into these metrics that matter in great depth later in the book. But for now the high level metrics that you should be tracking are called ARM and LEG. ARM is the average revenue per member per month, or what the average client pays you and a measure of how much your audience values your service. LEG is the length of engagement or how long the average client keeps paying you and a measure of how consistent your operations are.

Chris (04:10):

When you put them together, you get a third metric, lifetime value, LTV. The total value you receive from every client. It’s also a reflection of the value they receive from you. Improving both sides of your business, ARM and LEG, is great for you, but more importantly, it is great for your client. So now that you’ve created a measuring stick, let’s imagine where we want your business to take you. How to achieve any goal. The next step to making your business successful is to define what success means to you. Then we have to map the journey from your current point to that success point. Fitness coaches are great at this exercise, but few apply it to their fitness business. So let’s walk through it together. Defining success. What is the ultimate goal of entrepreneurship? In the past, I’ve used both financial and subjective definitions, but the ultimate goal is freedom.

Chris (05:05):

The opportunity to build the lifestyle we want on the timetable that we have. It’s the opposite of trading time for money, which is what most of our parents did with their careers. I define entrepreneurial success as the freedom of money and time. In the fitness industry, that means a fitness business that pays you more money than you need and requires less than all of the time that you have available. That means a gym or a studio that will run without your presence and still pay you. It’s the holy grail. While most of us got into this career because we love coaching others, we ultimately cannot be successful if our business is dependent on our constant presence. Measure your starting point. To own a gym that pays you, whether you’re coaching or not, you have to have a solid business. You’ll need your staff to follow a clear vision, to rise to the opportunities that you present to them.

Chris (05:57):

And to fall back on transparent, simple systems. You’ll need an audience that’s willing to pay you what you’re worth, stick around long enough to get results and grow over time. You’ll need a balance of stellar operations and a trusting audience. It’s hard to get a clear picture of your strengths and weaknesses in your business, however. So before we start, we need to break down that big picture into smaller snapshots of each area in your business. Some business experts call this getting into the weeds or digging into the dirt. The first step is to measure your starting point. Now we use a tool called the Two-Brain Business road test in our mentorship program. But if you want to do it yourself, simply look for opportunities to improve your business as you read this book. They won’t be hard to find. I’ve broken the big picture of success in the fitness industry, down into small, actionable steps.

Chris (06:48):

First, I broke your business into two halves, operations and audience. And then I broke those two halves into three sections each. I call these six sections the six areas of excellence. We can break down the two sides of your business into six categories of business excellence. They are under operations, teach the vision, improve your operations, upgrade your team. On the audience side of your business, we can keep clients longer, we can sell better and we can get more leads. So you can see if you’re looking at the two sides of your business, under operations, you can improve your business by upgrading your team, teaching the vision or improving your operations. You can grow your audience by keeping your clients longer by selling better, or by getting more leads into your pipeline. Here’s what those mean. Teach the vision is to give your clients and staff a clear picture of where you’re all going together.

Chris (07:41):

Improving operations means delivering excellence with consistency. Upgrading your team means creating career opportunities and keeping your coaches coaching. Keeping your clients longer means retain people long enough to change their lives and build a stable revenue base for yourself. Sell better means show people the best path with confidence and earn enough from a few clients instead of chasing an infinite number forever. Get more leads means save more lives, replace the clients you lose and scale up. So which one of these six areas of excellence should you work on first? How do you prioritize? When a problem seems too big, it helps to break it down even further. We can take the six areas of excellence and divide them into the tasks that will form your business roadmap. What to do first? The gym business roadmap. Now we can further break down each of the six areas of excellence into specific actions that a gym owner must take to be successful. Each strategy that you employ to improve any of the six areas of excellence has multiple steps.

Chris (08:48):

Chris Cooper here, have you got a website designer, a marketer, a landing page software, a calendar, a CRM, and a form builder, communication platform and connecting software? You can get rid of all of it by switching to Gym Lead Machine. I use this platform along with 60% of the Two-Brain mentorship team. The average gym owner saves over 300 bucks a month with Gym Lead Machine and they’ll waive the thousand dollars set-up fee for Two-Brain Radio listeners. Switching is easy and you can go live in a week, visit gymleadmachine.com to watch a demo and book a sales call. .

Chris (09:22):

So in this book, I’ve separated each of the six areas into their own sections with specific tactics to help you. Our team of mentors at Two-Brain Business uses a tool called the Two-Brain Roadmap to identify and prescribe the exact actions a gym owner must take at the best time for them. Without a roadmap, the work can be overwhelming. For example, to upgrade your team, you must clearly define the roles and the jobs they perform in those roles have clear agreements with one another about expectations and duties, create opportunities for your staff to grow on your platform, pay them more as they create more value.

Chris (09:59):

And you have to do all of these things. Many books and courses and speeches and podcasts exist to help you. These are requirements, but they’re still not actionable directives. How do you do them? My job as a fitness business mentor is to say, do exactly this thing by next Tuesday. So we have to go further and break each of these actions down into steps and at Two-Brain Business we do that in our roadmap. I’m going to do it for you in this book. For example, if you want to upgrade your team and create opportunities for them to grow on your platform, there are 10 specific steps that you can follow. Number one, identify opportunities for your staff to create more value for your clients. Second, choose one of these intrapreneurial opportunities by identifying the best fit for your business and your clients. Third, hold quarterly career roadmap meetings with your staff to put the best person in their best seat.

Chris (10:55):

Fourth, launch one intrapreneurial opportunity and measure the outcome. Fifth, decide whether to continue that same opportunity or choose another. Sixth, build an annual plan for each staff person that includes these opportunities and the education required to build them. Seven, revisit your staff’s career goals each time they level up. Eight, allow your staff to launch their own opportunities without your oversight. Nine, create enough value to sustain the staff person full time if they want to be full-time and 10, appoint one successful staff member to manage the rest and help them achieve their goals. Now, those steps are all big ones. And that’s only one tiny part of the six areas of excellence. Each of the six areas of excellence contains a few requirements and each of those requirements has at least 10 steps. That’s over 450 specific things to do to build a successful gym, pretty overwhelming.

Chris (11:49):

So I mapped the process into a visual called the Two-Brain Roadmap. And you can see a few pictures if you go to twobrainbusiness.com/handbook. The Two-Brain roadmap exists to break all of that work down into specific actions at the right time. In our mentorship program, we can use the roadmap to tell you which actions take priority and where you should focus. That’s the purpose of mentorship. The roadmap answers all of the how questions. When: the phases of entrepreneurship. Imagine we drew a timeline of an entrepreneur’s growth and maturation process. On the left end, we’d write the date they started their business and on the right end would be the day they achieve wealth. The freedom of finances and time. As they move from left to right along the timeline, every successful entrepreneur passes through four distinct phases, but most entrepreneurs get stuck somewhere in the middle.

Chris (12:45):

And that’s why they’re not successful. I wrote my book, Founder, Farmer, Tinker, Thief, to break the journey to wealth into those four phases. The first phase is called Founder phase. You’re a sole proprietor coaching clients yourself. You might be working at another gym as a subcontractor, or you might own a private studio, but you’re delivering most of your service. Next comes the Farmer phase. You have staff delivering some or all of your service, freeing you up to grow your audience. You’re managing people and money and delivery and marketing. Most gym owners are in this stage and many never get out of it. The third phase is tinker phase. You have staff running all of the six areas of excellence for you, and you’re focused on building your wealth. You’re diversifying your income, duplicating your business and buying cashflow assets. And the fourth phase is called the thief phase.

Chris (13:36):

You’re leveraging your platform to create a legacy for your family and your community. I like to think about Robin Hood when I think about thief phase. But your entrepreneurial priorities will change over time. Some strategies will work when you’re just starting out, founder phase. But now when you’re successful. Conversely, as my mentor told me, entrepreneurs in the founder phase shouldn’t waste money on advertising until they have the systems in place to scale their business. Of course, these changing needs add another layer of complexity. But at the beginning of this book, I promised simplicity. So far, I’ve delivered anything but simplicity. Instead, I’ve told you that there are over 400 specific things you need to do to grow your gym. I said that you couldn’t do them all at once. And that you could take a test to figure out what to do first. However, I’m going to tell you how to do each of them now. I’m going to walk you through each step in order. If you do the work consistently, you will grow your gym, but if you fail to execute, you’ll shrink. Because after all knowledge doesn’t make you successful. Action does.

Andrew (14:38):

That was Chris Cooper on Two-Brain Radio. To get Gym Owners Handbook and start growing your business today, click the link in the show notes.

 

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By the Numbers: ARM

What if every member at your gym paid you $205 per month?

How would that average revenue per member (ARM) affect your profitability?

Would that solidify your business?

Would it allow you to focus more on the clients you have instead of spending time trolling for more?

Would it allow you to keep your business open longer?

The data says yes.

Target No. 1: $205

The top 10 percent percent of gyms in our State of the Industry data set earn at least $205 per member per month. The average Two-Brain gym is close ($176 per month—but most microgyms are a long way away (less than $100 per member per month).

That means most microgyms need twice as many members to make the same revenue as the top gyms. But with twice as many members, they also need a lot more space and staff, and other expenses increase as well.

In other words, it takes most microgym owners 250 clients to make the same income as a Two-Brain gym with 100 clients.

Worse, gyms with over 150 clients are almost always the gyms with the worst retention rates, especially during periods of lockdown. It’s an extremely fragile model.

In this series, we’re going to tell you how to increase your ARM. The leaderboard above shows you what the top gyms in Two-Brain scored in ARM in December 2020, and I’m going to show you how they got there.

But you need to know this: They all started where you are right now. All of them had underpriced services, and all of them doubted their clients would pay more if they created more value. All of them, happily, have now seen the reality: If you create more value, you’ll make a greater impact for everyone.

You’re going to hear about additional services and high-value hybrid coaching models in this series. But if you’re ready to do the math, start with this:

70 percent of your revenue should come from group training.20 percent of your revenue should come from personalized services (personal training or nutrition coaching).10 percent of your revenue should come from everything else—retail, events and online coaching (though the latter is quickly growing!).

Take the $205 per month average and spread it across the bell curve of clients in your business. Then ask, “What service can I sell that is worth $205 per month?”

$205 ARM isn’t the right target for everyone. But it’s probably the first target for most gyms. In this series, I’m going to tell you how to build a service worth $205 per month—and more!

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Microgym Myths: More Clients = Better Business

150 clients are enough to build a microgym that pays you $100,000 per year.

But not everyone knows this.

Two years ago, I was speaking in Montreal, Quebec. It was a split seminar: another speaker took Saturday’s presentation, and I followed on Sunday.
 
The first speaker was a gym owner with several locations. His model: volume. Very different from my value-based model. I was eager for the seminar because I thought we’d cover both options really well.
 
During the first day, one attendee volunteered that he wanted to earn $100,000 per year (net). He shared his rates (which were low but not grievously so). The speaker did some quick math and told him, “You need 374 members. Go get them.”
 
In his high-volume model, it would take 374 members to earn $100,000 per year. 

374 recurring memberships is a tough number to reach. Where will they all fit? How many bars will you need? How will you coach that many people?

A handful of gyms have reached large numbers like this, but next to none have a decent profit margin (33 percent or above). I’ve written about all these problems at length. But some gym owners are making $100,000 per year with this model. Many went out of business during COVID lockdowns, when retention made all the difference. A few outliers made it.

What Makes It a Myth?

The simple number “374” hides a deadly trap. What the speaker meant was that the owner needed to get and keep 374 members, averaging that number forever, to make a good living as a gym owner.
 
We track retention data through surveys, monthly accountability calls and our Gym Dashboard. I first wrote about retention data in the CrossFit Journal in 2009. This is the number we watch most closely in gyms because, in the service industry, client acquisition is very costly.
 
Let’s say you have a 95 percent monthly retention rate. If you have a small gym of 50 members, the rate will probably be slightly higher. But as your gym grows, you’ll have a weaker connection to each member. That’s one reason retention rates tend to drop in larger gyms. 95 percent monthly retention in gyms over 300 members is very, very rare. People quit because they don’t like it, they quit because they don’t like you, they quit because they move. But the real reason they quit is because the gym can’t maintain a 1:1 relationship with every client.
 
Even at a 95 percent retention rate, a gym with 374 members would have to gain 19 members per month just to stay even. That’s more than one new member every two days all year, including holidays and weekends.

Where will you get those people?
 
Well, you could run a six-week challenge and market it on Facebook. Let’s say the challenge grabs you 30 new people. Retention data from these challenges shows that fewer than 24 percent of people in the challenge become members, and fewer than 10 percent are still members three months later. So if you run a challenge, you might keep seven people—or about a third of the total number you need. You’d have to run six-week challenges for 90 people every month to convert enough people—and you probably won’t keep many, which accelerates your need for recruitment.
 
If your business is doing well, you should need to recruit fewer and fewer people over time—not more and more. A business model built on 300-plus members will have you constantly chasing marketing ideas.

What’s the Real Answer?

Build your model on 150 clients. Set your rates, choose your location and hire based on 150.

Deliver a high-value service. Read about value here or sign up for mentorship to build out your service.

Retain people long enough to change their lives.

Don’t discount. Every time you give someone 20 percent off, you have to recruit another client to make up that gap (because you can’t recruit one-fifth of a client). That means more space, more equipment, more coaches, more costs and more risk—and higher turnover, poorer retention and a downward spiral.

What Should You Do?

Start tracking the metrics that actually matter: average revenue per member per month (ARM), profit and retention.
 
Remember: The goal is never to serve the most clients. The goal is always to serve clients the most. Being successful means being profitable and sustainable. Don’t fall into the trap of bad math.

Other Media in This Series

“Microgym Myths”
“Microgym Myths: The Market Chases Excellence”
“Microgym Myths: If You Build It…”

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Microgym Myths: If You Build It…

Your gym is an empty vessel waiting to be filled.

But no one will fill it except for you.

The bigger that vessel, the harder it is to fill.

“If you build it, they will come” is a myth.

And it’s a killer.

What Makes It a Myth?

The if-you-build-it myth is sticky because we want to believe that our job is simply to build a great gym and sell a great service. We want to believe people are out there looking for us and we can avoid the uncomfortable work of marketing and sales.

We also believe this myth because people we admire tell us it’s true. Every certification and course says, “Get this course and you’ll be a better trainer.” Some overtly say, “To make more money, you need to be a better coach.”

Equipment salespeople tell us we need more space. Marketing consultants tell us we need more clients. But the person who’s really fooling you is you. As gym owners, we want to believe that 150 people just like us are actively seeking the paradise we’ve built.

They’re not.

Our clients aren’t just like us. And they’re not out there waiting for us to open our “barbell nirvana.”

What’s the Real Answer?

Start with the income you want to earn. Learn how to do the Perfect Day exercise here or sign up for mentorship to be guided through it step by step.

Calculate the price you’ll need to charge. See the math here or work through it with a mentor.

Recruit the number of clients you need to earn that amount. Listen to our podcast on marketing or be guided through the process 1:1 with a marketing mentor.

Choose a space that will accommodate those clients. Read exactly how to do that here or sign up with a mentor to get some backup.

Do it in stages if you can. Download our editable business plan for gym owners here or for personal trainers here—or sign up for mentorship and plan your year in advance.

What Should You Do?

Chances are you didn’t start your gym with these numbers in mind. That means you have to work toward this model from where you are now.

That’s what mentors do: They help you identify the changes you need to make and prioritize those changes. They guide you to the material and education you need and then walk beside you as you change.

Start by calculating the numbers above.

Audit your space and equipment. Do you really need all of it? Do you need more?

Change your mindset about programming: Read “Benefits-Based and Features-Based Programming.”

Build a gym for your clients, not for yourself—and not for the marketers or equipment companies.

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Microgym Myths: The Market Chases Excellence

The market does not chase excellence. The market chases value.

This myth comes from CrossFit’s founder, Greg Glassman. Watch his video here:

That’s a great video. What makes it a myth?

Excellent delivery of coaching is necessary, but insufficient, to have a good business. To have a great business, you have to provide an excellent service. That’s true. But it’s not enough. Because if no one finds your excellent service, you’re dead.

The myth’s biggest flaw is the assumption that “if you have a great operation, the audience will take care of itself.” In other words, if you get people results, they’ll tell their friends, and their friends will sign up and everyone will stick around long term and you’ll live happier ever after. But those things aren’t true. That’s why this myth is so deadly: Your clients aren’t salespeople. They won’t actively seek out people to refer to your service.

The market appreciates excellence. The market rewards value.

I used to think that taking more training courses would make me more successful. I almost enrolled in a master’s degree program because I had no idea how to make more money in fitness. That was the wrong path, too.

What’s the real answer?

Your business really has two sides: your operations and your audience. You should deliver your operations with excellence. You should also build an audience that pays you. The bridge between your excellent operations and your large audience? The thing that makes people experience your operations and get results? It’s value.

I wrote about this in depth in my new book, “Gym Owners Handbook.”

Value is in the eye of the beholder. If you have the best workouts and a potential client says, “That’s not for me,” then you won’t survive.

If you have the best coaching but your clients think they can get the same value elsewhere, then you won’t survive.

If your clients pay too little for the value you provide, you won’t survive.

Excellent services aren’t enough. Even results aren’t enough. You must build an audience of people willing to pay what you’re worth.

What Should You Do?

Increase your value. Learn how to do it in “Gym Owners Handbook.” Or sign up for mentorship and work through it with someone who’s done it before.

Ask your clients for referrals. It’s pretty easy: Read how to do it or sign up for mentorship and be guided through the process.

Build affinity in your audience. Publish a lot. Read how to do it or sign up for mentorship and be held accountable for doing it.

Grow your audience. Advertise. Read how to do it or sign up for mentorship and build a funnel with help.

Finally, sell the thing people want to the people who want it. That sounds simple, but most fitness marketing is targeted to “people like us.” As fitness pros, we are not average. But we still post WODs on our Instagram accounts, show stories of crazy workouts and blog about improving our deadlift instead of telling people how to walk a mile without running out of breath.

If they don’t find you, you can’t help them. It doesn’t matter how much you know.

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Two-Brain Coaching First Degree: Good to Great

Josh (00:01):

Welcome to Two-Brain Radio. My name is Josh Martin. And today I have the pleasure of speaking to Mike Watson, who is a coaching mentor on our team over at twobraincoaching.

Chris (00:13):

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Josh (00:45):

Mike, welcome to the show.

Mike (00:47):

Thanks Josh.

Josh (00:48):

How you doing, man?

Mike (00:49):

I’m good. Yourself.

Josh (00:50):

Good. This is your first time on the Two-Brain podcast, right?

Mike (00:54):

First time. Yeah.

Josh (00:55):

Awesome man. So I think, you know, what would be a great thing to do, a good place to start is just for you to let us know what your journey in fitness has been like, you know, where did you first find fitness? What’s that been like? And then where are you today with it?

Mike (01:14):

Yeah, for sure. I’m in Sault St. Marie, Ontario. So I’m working at Chris Cooper’s gym, Catalyst Fitness. I mean, I was always an athlete that was OK. I was kind of the OK-est athlete at every sport I played. But I loved being active. I love playing sports, but never good enough to take that anywhere, even though I had dreams maybe of doing that. So I wanted to parlay that into a career. Originally I thought I was going to go into physiotherapy and kind of got sidetracked along the way. Did a four year exercise science degree at the University of Windsor and kind of got hooked up with a guy there who had a small kind of personal training studio, is still—the guy I worked with at the time is still very prominent in the bodybuilding community, which at the time wasn’t necessarily our focus or, you know, where I wanted to go with things. Left there.

Mike (02:10):

Worked as an athletic director at a large summer camp in the States for a couple of years, traveled for a couple of years. And then as most people from Sault St. Marie do, I ended up back in the Sault and kind of hanging out and looking for something to do and met Chris. So we both worked together at a small personal training place as well. That was kind of half cafe, half personal training studio. And we got along really well, started powerlifting with Chris, Chris left after a year to start his own place. And I got offered a bit more money to stick around the old place, which I gladly took. But I was finding I was going, you know, a couple blocks down the road to work out with Chris on my lunch breaks, because that’s where I was learning, you know, about lifting and about coaching and everything else.

Mike (03:01):

And so eventually the relationship at the old gym kind of fell apart and I let them know that I was leaving and immediately went over to Chris’s gym. And we, I mean, this is dating ourselves, but he put a phone book down in front of me and said, OK, we’re calling your clients. You start today. And the rest of that’s kind of in history, I’ve been with him since then in various capacities. I worked for Chris full time as a personal trainer for 10 years. And then kind of have been with Catalyst in different capacities since then.

Josh (03:36):

Awesome. And so what do you remember like around the year it was that you left that PT studio and started working for Chris?

Mike (03:44):

Every time it comes up, I think we say a different amount of years, but it was about 17, 18 years ago.

Josh (03:51):

Holy smokes. Yeah. I mean, like you said, the phone book, that’s gotta be like late nineties, early two thousands, so right around there. That’s incredible, man. Yeah.

Mike (04:01):

Definitely early two thousands. I graduated in 2001. So it would have been around 2001, 2003 ish. That range. Yeah.

Josh (04:10):

Yeah. And so you’ve been, you know, at Catalyst for, you know, a number of years now, and then, you know, we got introduced to one another and now you are a part of our mentor team on the Two-Brain Coaching front. So we’re going to get into this in a minute in terms of like, what role that you play, but like, how has that been for you because you’re going really from training clients, you know, in the gym to now you’re training, other coaches. Yeah.

Mike (04:40):

It’s been a fun transition. And honestly the calls and having the mentor calls with coaches from all over the world is literally the best part of my day. It’s super, super exciting. I really thought it was gonna be more of a shift in the way that I think, but I think, I mean, if I want to pat myself on the back and I don’t really like to do that a whole lot, but I think I’ve taken a leadership role in Catalyst over the last decade or so, where if we have new coaches come in, I’m definitely invested and involved in their development. So it hasn’t been a huge, huge shift except that I’m doing it now more. And, you know, and I’m getting to talk to new coaches almost every single day, which is really exciting.

Josh (05:26):

Yeah. And something that you touched on just briefly, there is these coaches are coming from all over the world. I mean, it’s one thing to train up a new coach, like in your physical space, but the opportunity to do that with coaches from all over is pretty remarkable.

Mike (05:41):

Yeah. It’s pretty cool. I mean, this morning alone, I talked to somebody in England, one in Belgium and one in Georgia. So taste of the world this morning. Lots of days are like that. And it’s really cool to see the similarities that everybody’s dealing with going back to March when a lot of the world’s shut down to see how everybody is dealing with it, and just really persevering through the challenges that we’ve got, you know, operating a gym on a regular basis and making a career as a personal trainer, but also having to deal with, you know, the other challenges that are there. And it’s really cool cause it’s, I mean, the overall mentality and the overall attitude is super positive. So that part is really nice to see.

Josh (06:27):

Awesome man. So what I’d like to do is just talk about the course itself to give people an idea of, you know, who it’s for, what the goal of the course is. And just for those of you guys that are listening right now, wondering what the heck we’re talking about, Mike’s role at to Two-Brain Coaching, is he mentors new and veteran coaches in what is now called our first degree course, but really the idea of the course is that it is to help somebody coach one on one.

Mike (06:59):

You got it. So I think, I mean, I think overall the course really, really works well for new coaches. And I think if we looked at, I don’t know if we’ve ever broken it down in terms of numbers or percentages, but I would say, you know, 90% of the coaches who are coming through the course over the last year have been new coaches who have got an opportunity either because a gym owner has realized they need some more help, or they lost some staff. I kind of joke that, you know, a lot of opportunities are coming because the coaches, either the coach or the owner got pregnant and now they need somebody to fill in because there’s an opening. But a lot of new coaches coming through, I’ve had a lot of, you know, a couple of veteran coaches come through as well.

Mike (07:41):

I mean, I just finished up our third call with a guy in Georgia who’s a level three CrossFit coach. And he kind of went through the course to see what his coaches would get out of it. And I’ll be honest. It was the best three conversations I’ve had in a long time with a coach. It was really kind of high level stuff. So we can adapt the course content to where the coach is in terms of their journey. You know, really some of them have never coached anybody at all. Some of them have come in with it seems like we have a lot of coaches who come from say a gymnastics background who now have an opportunity. But a lot of these coaches are being recruited from in house. So they’re coming, they’re a member of the gym and they have a personality that shines through and the gym owner says, we need you as part of our community.

Mike (08:28):

So in terms of a coaching course, we start off looking at the soft skills, right? The people skills that we overlook, I think, as coaches. And certainly when I know Coop/s admitted to this and I look back on it with a bit of embarrassment as well, when we started coaching 17, 18 years ago at Catalyst, we really prided ourselves on being the smartest people in town,and really kind of over-explaining things in terms of physiology and biomechanics and lifting technique and things like that. And we were just boring the heck out of people, right. You know, we had clients who were just saying like, I don’t care. Let’s just, can we just work out? I don’t care how smart you are. And that kind of is reflected in the course in that’s not really how much we show people.

Mike (09:14):

It’s not that we show people how much we know, it’s how much we show them we care. Right. So we go through the three modules, the first one is the social aspect of fitness. The second one is psychological, and then we get to look at some biological stuff. So some energy systems, breaking down movement, some beginner programming gets talked about so that when that coach goes out and starts working with some clients, they have some really solid templates with which to start programming for a client. But it really takes that technical aspect out as an importance and adds in the people skills that I think really are the things that are needed as a successful coach for any sort of length of time.

Josh (09:55):

You know, something that I’d love to hear your thoughts on is because as a gym owner myself, but then I also know that we’re going to have a lot of other gym owners that listen to this. One of the things that I can’t help but think of is I always wonder, like, is it enough? Like, are we giving them enough to feel what I like to call as confidence in your competence? Are we giving them enough or is it too much? Like, what have you found, you know, to be that sweet spot, you know, with this course.

Mike (10:29):

I mean, I kind of want to throw the question back on you and say, is there any coaching or exercise certification that you’ve taken that’s completely prepared you to be a personal trainer? And I think the answer is a resounding no. But I think there are some really good things that coaches will take out of our course, that’ll help them to come out of the course and be productive as a personal trainer and as an employee for a gym owner. So we really stress the importance of creating your own opportunities, finding your voice. And we provide some opportunity within the course for not only coaches to shadow people in their gym, but also we have some unique kind of homework assignments where they’ll do some video coaching and send it to me and we’ll review it together. So it’s really finding that confidence. And I really have them teach me a lot of the content of the course, especially the technical stuff in the biological module, because if you can teach something to somebody, chances are, you know it pretty well, right?

Josh (11:26):

So you’re telling me, I don’t want to, you know, overshadow the importance of what you just said with the biological step in teaching, but I do want to back up and highlight something that you said is you’re actually having these coaches create content as they’re going through this course. Wow.

Mike (11:45):

Yeah, we talk a lot about for module one, we talk a lot about content creation, but also the video. One of the video assignments that I have them do in module one came out of the pandemic where, you know, we have coaches who are required to shadow as they go through this program. Back in March, March to June, nobody’s gym was open. There was nothing to shadow. The shadowing is, you know, pretty nonexistent. So that assignment came out of that, but it also kind of allows them to use that same content to create their own social media posts, or get the confidence to do that, you know, by being thrown into the deep end, in terms of video editing skills and, you know, being confident with themselves on camera and sounding, you know, hearing what their voice sounds like. And if that’s a written content, then we encourage that written content as well.

Josh (12:37):

I can say this definitively. So you mentioned back to me earlier is like, well, what certification have you ever taken that has truly prepared you? I don’t know, except for this one, obviously, but I can tell you that there has not been anything that I’ve ever taken that has prompted me to actually create content that is going to be valuable for the gym that I’m working at or for my business as a coach. So to me, and again, this sounds very self-serving, but like I’m looking at this from a gym owner perspective that is worth its weight in gold, 10 times over whatever the course costs, having a coach comfortable creating content, establishing their authority, taking initiative, like these are all the pain points that we hear from other gym owners. Oh, I wish my coach was more of a self-starter. They just won’t ever create content. And here you are saying like, look, from module one in this course, we’re having your coaches do this.

Mike (13:38):

Yeah. I’ve said it a thousand times to coaches, but the sentiment I give them is that there isn’t a coach or sorry, a gym owner in the world that won’t lose their mind with excitement if you come to them and say, can I publish this article on our website? Or can I post this on our social media? Because that’s what they want you to come out of this course being able to do. I talked to the CrossFit level three coach there today, and we were talking, you know, we’re both around the same age. So we were talking about content creation when I started and when he started. There was no social media, you know, I’m 42. I’m not ancient. But at the time I started coaching with Chris, there was very little in terms of social media. And I kind of told him this story, that my wife Eden, who works for Two-Brain Business as well.

Mike (14:25):

So a lot of people may know her. She kind of, it’s kind of a running joke that whenever we go anywhere in town, I know somebody who’s there. And the reason I know somebody who’s there is because when Chris and I were trying to build business, especially personal training business for me, I went to talk to every single business and group that would allow me to walk in the door and spend 15 minutes of their time working it out in front of a crowd, like a stand-up comedian. Right. And so now when, you know, it’s almost flipped now where the social media stuff should be the easy stuff to create, but you can’t lose sight of the fact that you really still do need to get out. And even in a COVID world, look people in the eye and shake hands and develop those personal relationships. And that’s a real focus of our course is developing those relationships with people so that when you do bring on a personal training client, you have the skills to understand what makes them tick and what their, you know, their hidden intrinsic motivations are so that we can work towards really achieving a goal instead of, you know, kind of arbitrarily moving towards something, because it seems fun. Yeah.

Josh (15:34):

You know, we’re talking a lot about this personal training or what we refer to as one-on-one coaching. Why do you think that’s so important in a kind of small micro gym?

Mike (15:45):

Yeah. I mean, if you can flash some dollar signs up on the screen, I think that’s first and foremost, right. It’s a great revenue source. You know, you can only run so many CrossFit classes per day in a CrossFit gym. You know, there are time gaps, some gyms will do open gym, which is not a great revenue generator. You know, we all, I think have experimented—

Josh (16:08):

We’ve all made that mistake.

Mike (16:11):

And we know that, you know, that’s not where our relationships get built and that’s not what pays the bills is having that open gym, but PT does exactly that. It brings people into the gym. I mean, if I look at my longest standing personal training clients or the ones that are always kind of coming back, you know, over the last 20 years, most of them have never set foot in a CrossFit class. Right. Either because they don’t think, you know, they’re not drawn to CrossFit or they have other, you know, rehab goals or different goals that don’t fit into that model. So you’re bringing people into a gym and establishing them as a client outside of your normal, you know, your normal catch all from your, you know, your advertising. So you bring new people in. And I mean, if you’re a fan of affinity marketing, bringing people in and really developing a relationship with them and, you know, having them trust you as a coach leads to those, you know, all sorts of other avenues of recruitment that way.

Mike (17:11):

Yeah. You know, and it really does in terms of a revenue source, it really can save a business. You know, when Chris and I started Catalyst, or when he started Catalyst and I joined on, we kind of have this weird early history where we wanted to be downtown. And the only place to be downtown that was affordable was upstairs. So we had, we started out above a balloon shop, and we scared the hell out of them. We moved above a women’s clothing store. Again, they feared for their lives every time they came to work. And that was around the time we found CrossFit. And so when we found CrossFit, we realized we can’t be on a second floor dropping barbells, going crazy flopping around more than we already were. And so we got a place in the industrial park, but we kept this place downtown because it was a central location.

Mike (18:00):

And it worked well for PT. And I mean, you’d have to double check with Coop, but I know we’ve had conversations about it before where our downtown location that was, you know, 100% PT was kind of paying the bills for the new CrossFit facility until it got up and running. And we got our membership base kind of centralized there.

Josh (18:20):

That’s just mind blowing, that it was carring it, you know, cause you got figure like that the being downtown is not cheap, you know? And so it’s like, OK, not only are you downtown, expenses are higher, but it’s also carrying this other facility that what a lot of gyms are these days is just really heavy into group and very minimal PT.

Mike (18:44):

Yeah. I think if you look at it too, if you want to keep—I mean, we all want to keep our good staff. Because you know, when you get somebody who’s a great coach, you want to keep them. And if you want to have a coach who wants to make a career of fitness, you know, coaching four or five CrossFit groups a day kind of doesn’t pay the bills. You know, and it doesn’t keep that person engaged and around because it’s, you know, it may not be what their overall interest is, but it allows them to go out and work with clients who, you know, maybe they have a passion for powerlifting or a passion for Olympic lifting, or they have a passion for rehab, and helping people get better or lose weight. It helps them to work with that niche population and really establish themselves as an expert in that area. Yeah. So that’s one of the things I talked to. Call one for us is really like, it’s a first date kind of call where we get to know as much about that coach as possible. And one of the questions I really ask them is w what are you passionate about? Cause whatever you’re passionate about is going to be the thing that shines through, it’s going to be the thing you want to do research on. It’s going to be the thing that you enjoy. You know, it’s going to be the thing that you enjoy coaching for a long period of time.

Chris (20:01):

Hi, this is Chris Cooper, and I founded Two-Brain Business to make gyms profitable. Over the last years, as we’ve compiled more and more data, more and more tools, gotten better and better at mentorship, we’ve really made a lot of gyms, hundreds around the world, thousands over the years, profitable, doing better. What hasn’t kept pace is the quality of coaching in a lot of gyms worldwide. There are great programs out there that will introduce you to a method like bootcamp, kettlebells, Olympic lifting, powerlifting, CrossFit, running, whatever that is. And so we can make coaches who know the subject matter, but that doesn’t make them a great coach. To be a great coach, you have to be able to change somebody’s habits. You have to be able to change their behavior and to do that requires deep understanding of their motivations to do that means amazing adherence by the client. And it means amazing retention because as gym owners, we know it’s harder and harder and more expensive than ever to get a new client. Retention is more important than ever. Referrals are more important than ever. Peer to peer marketing, word of mouth is more important than it’s ever been. How do you get those things? Through client results. So I founded Two-Brain Coaching with Josh Martin to get coaches the skills they actually need to make a career in fitness instead of just familiarity with a methodology. Twobraincoaching.com has courses to help you start a career with personal training, to scale up with group training, both in person and online, and to diversify with nutrition, coaching, and mindset coaching. We have the best programs in the industry that will prepare you and your coaches to deliver any method that you love now or you might love 10 years from now. Twobraincoaching is really a project of love for me. And if you visit twobraincoaching.com, you’ll get a ton of free resources, just like we produce every day on twobrainbusiness.com.

Josh (21:59):

I never realized this until you and I had had conversations like, you know, recapping how the calls were going. And I never realized that the real improvement in adding mentorship was really about your ability as a mentor to personalize the course, not just for the coach, but also for the gym that they are, you know, a part of because, you know, by and large, all the people that you have worked with up to this point are a part of, you know, a bigger thing, a gym facility. And so I think that’s really missed, you know, a lot of times, because, you know, there are a lot of great certifications out there, whether it’s, you know, online based, you can’t really do much in person now, you know, some of them have, you know, big groups of coaches on calls at one time, but there’s nothing that beats this one-on-one cause you can’t personalize for a group of 150 coaches, but you can with one, you know, and I think that that is something that is just so valuable in what you were doing.

Josh (23:10):

Yeah. It’s something where we trying, I mean, it allows us to have that one-on-one conversation with a coach. I mean, we’ve all been a new employee in a business or at you know, at a gym where maybe we don’t feel like we have the authority or the seniority to ask certain questions without looking silly. Right. And it allows those coaches to do that in a manner where, you know, I’m checking in with their gym owner to give them the plan for the next couple of weeks, but it’s an opportunity for them to ask or to talk about things they’re seeing in their gym that they’re not sure how to deal with, and maybe they don’t want to bring up to their owner or their boss, because they feel like it’ll be misconstrued. So it’s a real open conversation where, you know, it really can go a lot of different ways within the framework of the course. So yeah, no call has been a hundred percent the same, that’s for sure.

Josh (24:10):

So I’ve got a question. I know that the typical pathway for a coach, you know, with Two-Brain Coaching is they take this one-on-one coaching course, and then they’re funneled, you know, to a couple of different areas, you know, based upon like the conversations that you guys are having, they may go on to do group coaching. They may go to online coaching, nutrition, mindset. We’ve got that now with Colm’s brand new course, but I got to imagine that there are some coaches that are like, I love one-on-one and I want to stay with this. So you’ve been a one-on-one coach, you know, let’s just call it personal trainer for more than a decade. Now I can see, you know, sometimes coaches maybe getting burnt out. How have you combated that?

Mike (25:00):

I mean, I think we’ve all, I’ve seen my burnout period a couple of times. And I think looking back on it now, the things that have gotten me throuh, are, you know, not doing the same thing all the time, finding the things that I really enjoy and sticking with those. I know you had Brad, Brad Overstreet was on a while back, one of our colleagues, and I remember listening to his podcast. And one of the things that resonated with me from Brad’s conversation was that he works with the people that he gets joy from. Right? Yeah. And those are the clients that I work with now. You know, if I have a new client who comes in or a friend who comes to me and says, they’re looking for some personal training, if I don’t think it’s a fit for me.

Mike (25:48):

I just won’t do it. I’ll pass them off to the person I think is going to, you know, handle them the best and provide them with the best service. But, you know, I’ve realized that doing the things that I find fun are the best way to keep myself happy in the business. I’ve had a couple, you know, shifts in focus as well. Obviously we started as a hundred percent PT for the first six years. And you know, it can be daunting to go through the cycles of busy and not busy and, you know, finding out and figuring out how to sort yourself out so that not only can you be successful, but you know, that you have that work-life balance as well. So I’ve taken on other projects, I’ve taught at the college here for a couple of years. I’ve taken a spin at actually having a full-time job and doing coaching as a side gig. I’ve got a great opportunity now, which I absolutely love, with Two-Brain Coaching and taking on some responsibility to do some work with the new Two-Brain programming course. So, it’s doing really the more I get into it, the more that I gravitate towards the things I just really like doing.

Josh (26:58):

Yeah. You hit on two things that I do want to circle back to. You taught a college course. What did you teach?

Mike (27:10):

I have a community college here that has a course certificate program where historically it’s been geared towards getting coaches or getting students, some of them will go on and do physiotherapy at the university. Not many of them, but most of them will kind of go in and do it as a gateway to get into like a local big box gym. So it’s really focused around not our group type of coaching, but more around the like aerobics and those types of group classes. So I taught one course called the business of fitness, and then I taught two other ones that were basically beginner PT type sessions, where we were teaching them basic movement. I rewrote the course curriculum because I just didn’t believe in it. Because it was the course curriculum is really centered around Good Life Fitness in Ontario is kind of our big box gym.

Josh (28:07):

I’ve heard of that.

Mike (28:07):

So, yeah, so it was really designed to get the students, you know, through the course and into, you know, some sort of job or career in either the fitness side of things or also kind of health promotion working with local, you know, cancer societies or things like that. So, yeah, it was fun. The business course was interesting because it was like I said, you know, Good Life focused. So it almost seemed like it was built around David Patchell-Evans, who’s the kind of the CEO of Good Life, he’s written several business books. Which, I mean, I’ve never written a book, so I’m not going to disparage anybody’s book, but I found I really quickly gravitated towards or shifted towards teaching Coop’s “Don’t Buy Ads” type stuff. And so I’d bring up his articles and we’d have conversations about them. You know, the students had to put together a business plan for some sort of fitness business and a lot of them really were interested in starting some sort of PT. So it was interesting. It was fun for a couple of years.

Josh (29:16):

That is so cool. I, you know, all the conversations we’ve had, I never knew that you taught at the college level. That’s pretty amazing, man. OK. And this other thing, Oh, go ahead.

Mike (29:25):

I was just going to say one step along the way. Yeah.

Josh (29:28):

So the other thing that you touched on is some work that you’re doing with Two-Brain Programming. What is that?

Mike (29:34):

So, I mean, this is something that comes out of, I think, you know, everything, you’re doing the SEMM model at your gym. We’re incorporating the SEMM model at our gym at Catalyst and the SEMM model, essentially for anybody who’s not aware of it is, the acronym is sleep, eat, move, manage. So the idea behind the SEMM model is that we are having conversations, asking questions and providing education around those four pillars of health and fitness so that we can improve our clients’ overall health and wellness, as opposed to just, you know, counting reps and working on thruster technique. So I do a lot of this talking with the coaches who come through the Two-Brain Coaching side of things in that if you’re, especially if you’re working one-on-one with a client and you’re not asking questions and tracking their amount and quality of sleep, if you’re not looking at the quality and amount of their nutrition, you’re not focusing on good quality of movement and you’re not really tracking and providing education around stress management, then we’re really not providing a full-on health and fitness program.

Mike (30:46):

And so one of the things I’m doing with Brooks DiFiore with the new Two-Brain Programming course is writing daily briefs for coaches to have those conversations with their clients about those four pillars of the SEMM model. So one of the things I really stress in the coaches notes is that these conversations are weird if you don’t have them on a regular basis, right. If all of a sudden, I shut off the lights in your gym, Josh, and ask everybody to lay down and play some music, people are going to get uncomfortable, right? Yeah.

Josh (31:20):

It’s not going to be very well received,

Mike (31:24):

But if we’re having those conversations all the time, then that becomes normal. Right? And I know at Catalyst, one of our coaches and partial gym owners Miranda has gotten into the habit of doing that every Friday. And it was weird the first couple of times, but now it’s something that I think, you know, her athletes who come to those groups really look forward to that spending 10 minutes of me time, and relaxing and meditating or shutting their brains off or whatever it is. So not only do they leave the gym feeling better from where they came in from a physical standpoint, you know, they’ve got that 10 minutes of mental clarity as well. So the SEMM model, my involvement in the Two-Brain Programming side of things is to program the daily SEMM briefings for the coaches to talk to their clients about.

Josh (32:13):

Yeah. So crucial. One of the things that I talk to my staff about as we, you know, coach that way currently is if all we’re doing is movement, you could probably get good results, but I have no interest in just getting good. I want great. I want the best. And in that case, if it’s just movement, you’re only 25% of the way there, you know, why not go for a hundred? So, and you’re exactly right, it’s a tough transition if that’s not what you’re used to having conversations about, you know.

Mike (32:46):

Right. Sorry to, I almost cut you off there, but I think with the eat and the movement, I think a lot of gyms feel like they do those things well, but I think there are other conversations that we can have about, you know, aspects of nutrition, and, you know, having a good quality nutrition program, but also having all of our coaches having that conversation. So it’s not just nutrition coach has to come in and intervene. And at the same time, you know, we program good warm-ups and program good movement for people, but talking to people about the importance of quality movement, especially, you know, I don’t know what your gym’s like Josh, but our gym is not a high, you know, nobody’s going to the CrossFit Games in our gym.

Josh (33:33):

Yeah, not my gym either. Yeah.

Mike (33:36):

So we’re talking to people about, you know, the quality of movement as it pertains to, you know, you and I are sitting in desk chairs, how do we set up that office space so that, you know, you’re not having to warm up 15 minutes longer because you sat in that desk for eight hours a day. You’re not having to go to the chiropractor. You know, how important is full range of motion in a squat or a deadlift or a thruster towards your lifelong, you know, quality of movement, quality of health, right? Because as we age, we don’t get better at having strength and flexibility in our hips or knees and our ankles. But having the lack of that flexibility as you get older is especially here in, you know, in Canada where it’s winter right now, having that lack of flexibility, it makes us more prone to falling. And as people get older, if you know, a broken hip has kind of a major turning point. So, you know, talking to people about how, especially younger clients about how that quality of movement now is going to impact them as they get older. Yeah. At 42, I definitely have to warm up a lot more than I did 15 years ago.

Josh (34:41):

Yeah. And you know, the interesting thing about that, that you already said so beautifully, it’s like, if we can work on your lifestyle, i.e., what you’re doing when you’re not in the gym, you probably don’t have to spend all that much time, like getting around your lifestyle when you come into the gym.

Mike (35:01):

Exactly. Yeah. I mean, having worked in the gym for as long as I have, one of the great examples from the programming in January is just tracking caffeine intake and caffeine cutoff times. And I have gotten through more days than I care to add up by, you know, taking in caffeine and Coop bought us an espresso machine recently, that’s been key. But it’s a reciprocal relationship between, you know, we’re tracking sleep but we’re also tracking caffeine. Are you having poor sleep because your caffeine intake is going to late into the day or because it’s too much for day. And are you then having to you know, to supplement with caffeine the next day, because your sleep suffered. So we’re looking at the relationship between all of the pillars to make sure that we’re giving you the best possible, not only the best possible performance in the gym, which is important, but also the best possible performance when you leave the gym and you spend your other 23 hours of the day outside the gym being healthy and happy.

Josh (36:03):

Yeah. You know, you said it that none of us are striving to go to the CrossFit Games. So, you know, you don’t want your life to be consumed by fitness. It’s like you want fitness to serve your life. So if I’m a gym owner and I’m listening to this and I’m like, OK, I’m in a bind. I know that I need to get a new one-on-one coach up to speed. This sounds great. How long is it going to take somebody to get through this course?

Mike (36:34):

It really depends on the individual homework assignments that we have. I generally recommend three to four weeks. So a week per module, it allows for some shadowing time, it allows for some work on homework. It allows for them to do some quality thinking about the module I had. I wouldn’t rush anybody through faster than that, and I have discouraged it, because those situations certainly have come up. But I mean, if you send me a coach today, I could hand them back to you ready to roll in a month’s time.

Josh (37:11):

Awesome. Great, man. Well, this has been awesome, very eyeopening for me on a couple of different levels, just in working with you, learning new things about you, that I didn’t know. I’m just so blessed to have you on the Two-Brain Coaching team. So thank you for that.

Mike (37:28):

No problem. I feel the same way.

Josh (37:30):

If people want to get in touch with you, maybe ask you some more questions, offline, what’s the best way they can do that.

Mike (37:36):

At mike@twobraincoaching.com.

Josh (37:37):

Awesome.

Mike (37:37):

And twobraincoaching.com is also our blog, with tons of articles from all of us in the Two-Brain Coaching staff. But yeah, the email address, shoot me an email and we can always jump on a quick zoom call and chat. There is an option in my booking calendar to have just a little 15 minutes, you know, chat if a coach or an owner wants to find out if the program is in fact a good fit for them. Then that’s certainly an option as well.

Josh (38:06):

Oh, that would be perfect. Yeah. So if any of you guys are out there and listening, mike@twobraincoaching.com, you can reach him via email. If you want to jump on a call with him to find out if that would be right for if you’re an owner or a coach, you can do that. Or you can just check out any of the free resources that we have at twobraincoaching.com. Mike, I know we’re recording this just before the new year, so have a happy new year and we’ll talk soon.

Mike (38:33):

All right. This was fun. Thank you.

Josh (38:34):

Take care.

Mike (38:36):

All right, you too

Andrew (38:40):

We have resources to help you grow your coaching business or gym, and they’re all free. Click free tools in the show notes to download a host of eBooks and guides by Chris Cooper. Thanks for listening. Please subscribe Two-Brain Radio for more episodes.

 

The post Two-Brain Coaching First Degree: Good to Great appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Microgym Myths

As microgym owners, we’re driven.

Sometimes we’re driven in the wrong direction. We believe things that aren’t true and then spend years going the wrong way. Myths are costly—and sometimes deadly.

Our mission is to make 1 million fitness entrepreneurs profitable. That means our free service helps them get going in the right direction, and our paid service gets them all the way there.

One of my first posts on this blog was called “Top 9 Myths Gym Owners Believe.” It’s fun to look back in time and think, “Remember when that was the prevailing wisdom?”

Most of the myths in that old post are dead now. But the sticky ones have a way of hanging around. And sometimes long-dead beliefs pop up again.

I want gym owners to work hard on 2021 problems, not try to solve 2015 problems all over again. So in this series, I’m going to address three of the biggest myths in the microgym industry in 2021:

1. “The market chases excellence.”

2. “If you build it, they will come.”

3. “‘More clients’ is the answer.”

One of these is true but insufficient.

One is so false that it can kill your gym.

And one just won’t go away.

Which is which? I’ll tell you this week. I’ll also give you some real answers.

But right now I want to hear from you: What are the biggest myths that you see in the industry? Are they new myths or sticky old stories that just won’t go away? Email me at chris@twobrainbusiness.com.

The post Microgym Myths appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Two-Brain Programming: How to Save Time and Money

Mike (00:00):

Need more time to grow your business? Have you thought about offloading your programming? Big news: Two-Brain now offers two tracks for in-person and remote clients. Brooks DiFiore is here to talk about Two-Brain Programming right after this.

Chris (00:13):

We’ll get back to the show right after this. Two-Brain Radio is brought to you by Forever Fierce. Reach out to them to sell more apparel or retail items. Matt Albrizio and his team will save you time with templates. They’ll provide ideas and tell you what’s selling best. And they’ll supply marketing material and preorder sheets. If you want to get serious about apparel and retail, visit foreverfierce.com.

Mike (00:37):

This is Two-Brain Radio. I’m your host, Mike Warkentin. I programmed every single workout at my gym for years, and it wasn’t until I offloaded the task that I was able to focus on growing my business, instead of just sustaining it. I wish I’d learned that lesson sooner. To help you, Brooks DiFiore is here to explain how Two-Brain Programming can free up your time, provide a great client experience and help your coaches develop and advance their careers. All right, Brooks, welcome to the show. How are you doing today?

Brooks (01:03):

I’m doing well, Mike. Thanks for having me.

Mike (01:05):

Thank you for making the time to talk to us. We’re going to get right into it and we’ll get to the what in just a second, but first, we always talk about vision and why. I wonder what the vision for Two-Brain Programming is and what problems is it going to solve for gym owners?

Brooks (01:18):

I think even before the first lockdowns hit in March of last year, Two-Brain Coaching was really trying to push, helping gyms and coaches understand how to communicate the why of every single workout to their clients. And not just the why of the stimulus of the workout, but how that’s going to pertain to somebody’s individual goals, right? Whether they’re trying to lose weight, they’re trying to increase their general fitness or they’re trying to get stronger. How do we customize a group class to fit the needs of everyone in there? And then when everyone went into lockdown, I think that that need really showed through, right? We know that the gyms that had the best retention were the ones who were able to customize a group workout for an individual, right, just by spending about two minutes per day tying that workout to their why and building a personal relationship.

Brooks (02:12):

And what we found was that there was a gap between the understanding of how to do that and a coach’s knowledge. So we wanted to build a system that would basically give coaches a done for you framework with every workout. So we take one group workout and we say, here is how you tie it in for a weight loss client. Here is how you tie it in for a general fitness client. Here’s how you tie it in for a client who wants to increase strength. The brief is written for you. 90% of the work is done. All you have to do is go in, make small edits to tie it even further to their particular goals. And just worry about building that personal relationship with them.

Mike (02:49):

Now it’s a bit of a mind bender, you know, for coaches that have been sort of brought up in the old school tradition of like my workout is the absolute thing. And it’s the workout that creates the stimulus that drives the effects and all this other stuff. It’s a bit of a mind bend to think now it’s not so much about the exact workout. It’s about the relationship-building, the presentation and all the things that go into coaching beyond squat deeper, right? Like it’s incredible how COVID has really highlighted that it’s not any more about standing next to someone and telling them to squat deeper. It’s about accountability. It’s about motivation. It’s about relating workouts to their goals. Like have you guys seen that just in blinding clarity now when COVID happened?

Brooks (03:30):

Yeah. And I think what you’re talking about is like client-focused coaching versus workout focused coaching, right? So workout-focused coaching is basically saying if the goal of a workout is X, the client needs to do Y. Client-focused coaching really says that the if the client’s goal is X, then the client needs to do Y right. So it puts the workout secondary to that client’s goals.

Mike (03:51):

Right. So let’s dig into the what a little bit more now. So I know Two-Brain Programming has three different avatars, and briefs and two tracks, just tell me how the system works so listeners can just get a sense of what exactly you’re providing for them.

Brooks (04:05):

Yeah. So each day has two tracks, the in person and a remote. The in-person is built for everything you would see in a gym, right? Rig, barbells, bikes, rowers. The remote track is built for people who have minimal equipment at home. And so we built it with only a dumbbell and a kettlebell, and it can be easily modified to fit somebody who just has a band or maybe no equipment.

Mike (04:26):

Milk jug, right?

Brooks (04:26):

Yeah, exactly. Right. Like things that they would just normally find lying around their house, they haven’t used in 10 years.

Mike (04:35):

Excellent. So those are the two tracks and that’s going to be really important as gyms get into and out of lockdowns, which we were talking about just before the show, how it seems to be, no one knows what’s going to happen. So those two tracks will allow you to pivot very quickly between delivery inside your gym and delivery to a client who’s at home with almost no equipment or with some basic equipment. Talk to me about the avatar briefs. I’m really interested in this because this sounds like a time-saving feature and something that really helps people understand client goals and then relate workouts to them.

Brooks (05:07):

Yeah, it’s a huge time-saver. So we should talk about how to really utilize them in a remote setting. And then how do you utilize them in a class setting. So, for my gym, I’m in Pittsburgh, we’ve been shut down for about two or three weeks. And this is exactly what we did the first time around. So my head coach, he’s responsible for all of the programming within Two-Brain Programming. He writes the programming. I write the avatar briefs. When we go into True Coach to deliver our online programming, or the remote program, we plug it into True Coach. And then we take all three avatar briefs and we put them into that day’s workout. And then all the coach has to do is they go in, they copy and paste the workout from the general program track to the client’s track. They eliminate the two avatar briefs that are not relevant to that client. They go in, they customize it and customize the workout for the equipment that the client may have at home. So it makes you able to manage the amount of clients you are handling in minutes rather than hours.

Mike (06:10):

So what are the three avatars that you’ve got?

Brooks (06:12):

So we have a avatar for a weight loss client, an avatar for a client who wants to increase their strength and then a avatar or a brief, for a client who is just looking to increase their fitness.

Mike (06:24):

And that’s going to cover a huge swath of clients. Like you might have the client, who’s like, I want to run a marathon on January 24th. Right? So there’s like someone maybe that falls slightly outside of that, but there’s still relationships to general fitness and increased strength that will help with that. But you’ve covered so many different people. Let me ask you the question that I know a few critics are going to ask right off the bat and say, is this cheating? And tell me about the customization process that allows each client to get a personalized or customized version of this workout.

Brooks (06:54):

So it’s not cheating, right? Because you touched on something there it’s like you do have clients who would want you to run a marathon. Usually running a marathon is tied to increasing general fitness or maybe losing weight, or maybe you have a marathon runner who was a strong runner, but they’re not great at taking hills, right? So they need to increase their lower body strength so they can take those hills better. Well, now that you can take the avatar briefs, and like, what these really are, is they’re writing prompts, right? They’re there for you to look, understand what you’re trying to communicate to the client. And then if you have a client who’s trying to run a marathon and lose weight, how do I tie in that marathon aspect to it?

Mike (07:31):

Right. So have you heard the old story? This actually happened to me? It probably happened to you too. Where I remember seeing back before I was a coach, in a traditional gym, a bunch of bodybuilding clients, they all had the same bodybuilding coach and they started comparing their programs and they were all the same and their diet plans were all the same. And they all got really mad at the same time because they realized he was literally just changing the name at the top of the form. This is very far from that, correct?

Chris (07:58):

Chris Cooper here to talk about Incite Tax. The people at Incite Tax know you’re working long hours to improve health for the world, but it can still be hard to turn a profit. You just can’t focus on your mission without money in your account. So Incite founder John Briggs wrote “Profit First for Mirogyms” and created a system that increases your cashflow so you can be home for dinner with a thriving fitness business. Bookkeeping, profit first, cash flow consulting, taxes, whatever your financial needs, Incite can help. Join their free five-day challenge at profitfirstformicrogyms/five days to get a snapshot of the financial health of your gym. That’s profitfirstformicrogyms/five days.

Brooks (08:38):

It is very far from that, and that’s not what we want. We don’t want you just to copy and paste these and leave it at that. We want you to copy and paste these, we want you to go in and customize them to fit that person. And then we want you to actually reach out to that person and discuss the workout with them, right? So the time that you would be spending writing a workout and writing this brief should now be spent actually making a personal connection with that client

Mike (09:05):

To do that, you have to know the client, right? You can’t make a personal connection and relate, you know, Fran to a certain client’s goals, unless you know that client’s goals and you know what’s going to motivate him or her. And, you know some of the obstacles may be to that client completing that workout on time. Right. So you really have to develop that relationship and that’s where the coaching comes in.

Brooks (09:24):

Yeah, absolutely. Right. Even, you know, going in shutdown especially with clients that you’ve worked with in person before, you know, I have a client right now who I know that she has bad knees, right? So anytime that we have some sort of squatting or lunging that comes up, I need to address that. And I need to let her know that I remember that she has issues with her knees, and this is how we’re going to work around this problem. Right.

Mike (09:45):

So it’s very much a customized thing. Almost exactly the same thing as you would do in class where the workout of the day is Fran, but you’re going to go around the room and talk to each client in warm up and say, OK, dude, you’re going to use 65 pounds, my friend over here, you’re going to use banded pull-ups, you’re going to do jumping pull-ups and so on and so forth. And for other clients, you’re completely going to change the workout for them and say, OK, I know you can’t squat today. So we’re going to just do push presses or whatever. So you’re really adjusting it based on your knowledge of that personal client, this is just like a starting point that you can then customize.

Brooks (10:16):

Yeah, absolutely. And Fran’s a really good example of making workouts focused around a client rather than focused on the workout. Right? If we were just in a group setting, we’re focusing on the workout, we would say, you’re going to do Fran as fast as possible, right. Not fun. And maybe that’s appropriate if you’re in some sort of testing phase. Right. But if Fran just happens to pop up in your programming for that week, and you have a client who is looking to get stronger, there’s nothing wrong with saying, hey Fran is usually programmed at 95 pounds. You do this in sub two minutes. Today, we’re going to do this at 135 pounds.

Mike (10:53):

I dunno if I like where you’re going with that, Brooks. That sounds like an appropriate workout for someone. Maybe not me.

Brooks (11:01):

Not me either.

Mike (11:04):

Let’s talk a little bit about the tiers in Two-Brain Programming. What’s the difference between the two and what type of gym owner’s suited to each one?

Brooks (11:11):

Yeah, absolutely. So the first here in Two-Brain Programming, growth clients get for free every single month. And with that, they get a programming overview. So in a Excel format that they can go ahead and edit and make their own. They’ll get both tracks, they’ll get a warm-up, a skill strength. And then both variations of the workout, right in person and remote as well as the three avatar briefs. And that is delivered through their roadmap every single month.

Mike (11:38):

So current Two-Brain growth clients can access this stuff through the roadmap starting now.

Brooks (11:43):

Starting right now. Yep. January. Yeah. January is up there right now. Ready to go. Our intention is to release every month of programming a before it’s scheduled to go live because we want gym owners to have the ability to go in there and make the adjustments that they need to make for their gym.

Mike (12:03):

It really be a cost saving, right? Like if someone is paying for outside programming, you’re offering a service that could very easily replace that. And that’s included in the growth subscription already.

Brooks (12:13):

It is. This was really important to Chris that he offered something to growth clients that could save them time and save them money. You know, especially if they are in a situation where they are shut down. But in talking to a lot of gym owners too, like most programming companies, right. They just release their programming a few days before it’s scheduled to go live for the following week. And what that causes is you as the gym owner to scramble, sit down, make adjustments over the weekends, right. Communicate it to your coaches, and then do the whole thing over again next week. Maybe not even knowing what’s coming the following week.

Mike (12:50):

So growth clients, if you’re a current Two-Brain client in growth, check this out. Whether you currently use a programming service or not, it’s free for you. You might as well check it out. See if you like it, it might save you money. It also might save you time right now, especially if you’re scrambling with restrictions and all sorts of other weird government regulations. Check this out on your roadmap. Now talk to me about tier two. What’s in there.

Brooks (13:14):

So tier two would be more for someone—so if we tie it to like founder, farmer, tinker, thief, I would say that the tier one is going to be a great option for someone who is in that founder phase. Maybe just beginning their journey on that farmer phase, right? They don’t have a—they maybe don’t have a staff yet, or they have a small enough staff that they can just get away with not really having, you know, totally complete session plans with movement adjustments, coaches notes, timelines, all of that. As you start to grow and your staff starts to get bigger and you need to streamline the communication process and make sure that everybody is on the same page, upgrading to tier two is really going to be more appropriate for you because tier two comes with daily session plans, video briefs, coaches development videos, built-in opportunities for coaches to advance their careers. And it also comes with daily SEMM programming. So daily programming on sleep, eat, move, and manage that we’ll get into in a little bit.

Mike (14:10):

Yeah. And you know, I’m excited to talk about that one. So I’m going to hold for a sec, but I’ll look for what’s the cost of tier two. How does that work?

Brooks (14:18):

So it’s $199 a month and you get the avatar briefs, both tracks, the session plans, the video briefs, current Two-Brain growth clients, they get a discount code. That’ll give them $70 off a month. So it’ll take that cost down to $129 a month and they can find that discount code in their roadmap.

Mike (14:38):

I have a bunch of questions. I want to know a lot about the coach development career advancement stuff. But before we get to that, talk to me about SEMM programming. Tell me again, what the acronym stands for and how this is becoming a bigger part of being an excellent coach in 2021.

Brooks (14:53):

Yeah. So SEMM stands for sleep, eat, move, and manage, right? So what we want as coaches, we realize that we need to be providing more than just great workouts to clients. If we’re really going to give them long-term success, we need to be talking to them about how they manage their stress, how they sleep and their nutrition. I think nutrition is a pillar that’s been there for a long time, or maybe not a long time. At least the past couple of years, people have gotten much better at it. Now it’s time for us to really pick up the torch on the other two, and Two-Brain Coaching has done an amazing job putting together resources to help coaches become experts in nutrition coaching. And, like Colm O’Reilly has his stress management course or his mindset course.

Mike (15:37):

Our man in Ireland.

Brooks (15:39):

Yeah. But we need to make sure that we are talking about these first on a daily basis, right? It’s the same way that you would grow your nutrition business, right? You need to be educating your coaches and your clients on it and having conversations with them daily. So what Mike Watson has done is he has put together a entire month of programming that educates coaches and clients on the benefits of sleep, the benefits of nutrition and the benefits of stress management. And then it goes into some movement aspects that might not be addressed in class on a daily basis like posture and specific mobility.

Mike (16:19):

You know, it’s just from a personal perspective, I watched my wife work with clients during lockdown here online. And what we’re noticing is that the stress management component is huge right now. It’s only getting more important. And even for myself, the thing that derails me more than anything else is just a lack of time and the lack of motivation, which is all related to stress, to get into the gym. Right. And so what I see with my wife is the clients more often than not, she’s not talking to clients about, you know, Oh, I want you to push your knees out in the squat. She’s talking to clients, but OK, I know you’re stressed right now. I know your children are not in school right now. You’re juggling all these responsibilities. You just came from the lockdown supermarket that was a disaster. We have 10 minutes and I want you to just go, you know, go to your basement and just, you know, and give her a basic workout prescription, things like that. So this stress management aspect and the stuff that Colm is doing is amazing, is really becoming more important because one of the huge barriers that we’re seeing right now, it’s the absolute crushing stress of the pandemic, right? So are you finding that with your clients that the mindset stuff is becoming more important?

Brooks (17:25):

It absolutely is becoming more important. Right. And you know, for a lot of us as coaches, we can relate to that cause it’s distressful to all of us, but maybe we don’t have the tools to say, well, this is how you handle this stress. Right? So for, you know, tying things back to the SEMM program that we provide, you’re looking at a day next month, we give coaches an exercise to give to their clients on how to manage stress, right. Basically give them a guided meditation and that they can deliver.

Mike (17:54):

Yeah. And it’s neat because I had a personal experience with this, where I was struggling with some of the stress of all this stuff when we shifted our business online and I didn’t want to work out and I specifically didn’t want to do Fran and some of the high intensity stuff that I just didn’t have the heart for, honestly, because I was devoting everything to changing the business. And my wife just said, just go to the gym, go to the garage and hit some bench press and bicep curls. Cause I know they make you happy. So it was a real shift from what I was normally doing, I just needed to do something. And that helped me manage my stress. So I personally understand how this works and I’m also seeing it as a business owner work with clients. So this SEMM programming is really, really cool. And you mentioned the nutrition component. That’s been the base of the fitness pyramid for so long, but so many people forget about it. And it’s becoming increasingly important now where people are at home, snacking on chips and bon bons and so forth as they’re working from home. So call it a holistic approach to coaching, really is kind of the future of the profession. I think. Do you agree?

Brooks (18:52):

It absolutely is. Right. And in order for it to really become that future, it’s something that we need to be talking to our coaches and our clients about on a daily basis.

Mike (19:01):

So that leads us right into coach development, career advancement opportunities. So normally programming services are just, here’s your workout. Here’s a warm-up. Go. Tell me about how the Two-Brain Programming is helping develop coaches and give them opportunities for career advancement.

Brooks (19:17):

So I think there’s really three areas to tackle here. The first is with the SEMM programming, right? So within our gyms, we have coaches who are experts in maybe a particular type of a movement, right? Gymnastics, weightlifting, whatever that might be. And we want them to pursue those passions, right? We want them to do specialty courses, extra skill work. You know, things will really make them happy and help the clients achieve their goals in whatever that modality might be. Same thing with nutrition, right? We have coaches who’ve picked up the torch on nutrition because it’s something that they’re very passionate about. With SEMM, it opens up the door for more opportunities, right? Because now you can have coaches who, if we’re educating them on the importance of sleep and stress management, you might find yourself with a coach or two who is really passionate about helping people better manage their stress or their mindset, right? So it becomes another pillar of your business that a coach can help build a career off of.

Mike (20:19):

One of the things that I really like about that is that if you have something like that set up, you’re not necessarily tied to a physical location. So if a government shutdown comes into play, you can still do mindset coaching on zoom or online. That sounds amazing.

Brooks (20:33):

Exactly right. It would probably be more valuable in that situation. The next area that we really provide coaches development and career opportunities, right, is through the avatar briefs. If you can have one-on-one conversations, tying the workout directly to that client’s goals, it is going to open up opportunities for you to help those clients even further. Right? So if you have a strength client who isn’t seeing the strength gains that they want, if you’re using the avatar briefs to talk to them daily, and you build that relationship with them, well, maybe they need more accessory work every single week, right? And because you’re having these conversations, you can be the person that is going to provide them with the 30 minute or one hour skill session to complete this accessory work.

Mike (21:20):

So this really fits in with the Two-Brain prescriptive model where you talk to a client and in the prescriptive model, you generally talk to them every three months. You find out about their goals, find out if they’re on track and then alter your prescription to say, OK, you want to get a little bit stronger. We’re going to make some changes here. And I’d recommend that you see me for one additional personal training strength session or whatever the specific thing may be. This really syncs up with prescriptive model. Does it not?

Brooks (21:45):

It does. And we do it because we want our coaches to be having those conversations, like those micro conversations, on a weekly basis, rather than on a quarterly basis. So one of the things that we built into our session plans are we just call them level of challenges. So let’s say that we have a workout, it’s programmed with push-ups. The level of challenge might be to complete it with handstand push-ups. So first thing it does is it helps you identify around the room the people who want a little bit more, right. If you have a class of 10 and you look around and three people are hoping to attempt handstand push-ups, you’re going to identify three opportunities right there. The next thing we provide are common faults and fixes for cues, right? So if you have a client who they’re overextending through their midline on handstand push-ups, you know, as they get fatigued in a workout. We want you to have the knowledge and the ability to go to them, pull them aside after class and say, Hey, handsome push-ups look great until we get tired, but it looks like you just didn’t have the ability to keep your midline stable as you got fatigued. It’s a really quick fix for that. How about we get together for 30 minutes next week and we’ll put a plan together to help fix that issue.

Mike (22:54):

So this creates, and I’ll use the term here, sales opportunities for coaches. But when I say that, I mean that in the Two-Brain tradition of helping first, which means that we’re not pushing services on the client that the client doesn’t want, we’re solving problems. So the client obviously wants to do more handstand push-ups, but the midline is weak. So we’re going to say, Hey, I can fix that for you because I’m a fitness expert. Can I help you with this? And the client says, yes, I would love an additional service. Or, you know, it looks like you’re dragging your butt in the workout today. What’s your nutrition like? Oh man, I had Kraft dinner for three days in a row. It’s delicious. But the coach can then offer some nutrition advice that will help fuel the athlete, properly solving a number of problems. So really this is like these relationships involve opportunities to help, which also generate revenue for the gym and generate revenue for the coach, which we all know one of the greatest problems in the fitness industry is that coaches can’t make a decent living. This allows them to then do that.

Brooks (23:52):

Exactly. And Jeff Burlingame being the help first sales guru that he is, in the start here module on the roadmap for Two-Brain programming, there is a lesson on creating opportunities for coaches and he put together a great video that was built for coaches to help them understand why having these conversations is so important and how to do it in a very non-salesy way.

Mike (24:16):

Yeah, because in the traditional gym sales environment, it’s pretty horrible, right? Like I remember back when I was applying for jobs at globo gyms and so forth, and the sales there is just like, you want the money, right? You just want the money. You don’t care if they show up, you just want them to sign that whatever long commitment and away you go. And it’s kind of a, you know, the used car salesman approach or salesperson approach, to, you know, selling something client isn’t gonna use. This sounds the exact opposite where you’re trying to find ways to help this client accomplish what he or she wants. And as a side benefit, you make some money and the business makes some money. So it really fits into the whole Two-Brain plan. And the final link there is if you set your business up with a four ninths model, which means that you’re paying a coach 44% of services and so forth and sales, your business is going to profit and the coach is going to make a good income. So you guys have really found a way to put this Two-Brain Programming concept inside all the Two-Brain concepts that help gyms become successful.

Brooks (25:18):

That’s been the goal. It’s really been to bridge the gap between everything that we teach it Two-Brain Coaching and Two-Brain Business and put it into something that our coaches are going to be looking at every single day.

Mike (25:31):

I love it. I didn’t ask you to prepare for this. Brush me off here if you don’t have it ready, but can you give us an example? Could you read us an example of a workout? Do you have something in front of you that you could just tell us? So people get a sense of the workouts that you guys are programming.

Brooks (25:45):

So I have one here that, it’s a 15 minute AMRAP. It has 10 snatches at 135 pounds, 95 pounds, followed by a 20 calorie bike and a 200-meter run.

Mike (26:04):

So how, and again, I’m putting you on the spot here, but I know you’re an expert, so I think you’ll be able to do it. No problem. Talk to me about how you might customize that the delivery of that to let’s say a weight loss client. Can you just throw that at me in a general terms?

Brooks (26:18):

Might say like the combination of cardio and weightlifting is a recipe for burning fat, right? I want to see you push yourself on the bike and the run to make the most out of time you’re dedicating to that cardio today. Like, if there’s rest interval in there, keep in mind that the 60 seconds of rest between efforts is going to allow you to bring your heart rate down. So don’t be afraid to push outside of your comfort zone. You know, the snatches are really just going to be a primer for the bike and the run.

Mike (26:45):

You’re on fire so I’m gonna ask you, could you customize that same workout for a strength client so people can see how that same workout can apply to a different avatar.

Brooks (26:52):

Yeah. So if we’re talking to a strength client, we might say that, you know, when we lift in a fatigued state, often one of the first things to go like is our posture, right? Our shoulders pull forward. The upper back starts to round. We can use hang power snatches to build strength in our posterior chain, particularily in our upper back. Right? So maintaining scapular tension during the hang portion of a snatch will help you build muscle and improve your lifts in the future when you’re not fatigued.

Mike (27:18):

So that’s the same workout delivered to two different avatars. And again, if I had given you more information about specifically who these people are in terms of like their goals, their injury status, their stresses and so forth, you could even customize that further by saying, you know, I know that you have a shoulder issue, so we might change the snatches to cleans or even, you know, high pulls or something like that, or whatever doesn’t aggravate the shoulder. So if I gave you more information then you could customize that yet more for each client, correct?

Brooks (27:44):

Exactly. Yes.

Mike (27:46):

How do listeners find out more about this program? So we know Two-Brain growth clients have access to stuff already, and they can certainly contact you guys to go up to tier two if they want, how do interested listeners find out more about this thing?

Brooks (27:59):

Yeah. They can head to Two-Brain programming.com. They can sign up for a 30 day free trial and they can check out the session plans, the avatar briefs, all of the SEMM programming, the coaches development opportunities, movement library in there. We even have a monthly coaching development exercise from Two-Brain Coaching, and they can go to Instagram and give us a follow at Two-Brain Programming.

Mike (28:23):

That’s fantastic. We will get that link in the show notes. And if you’re just want to dip your toe in the water guys, I’d encourage you to just follow that Instagram account and take a look at stuff and definitely poke around the website and see what’s up. All right, Brooks, thank you so much for your time and for telling us about this amazing program. Again, we’ll get that link in the show notes. You guys can check it out. Thank you again. And we’d like to get you back on here in a little while. And have you talk about this some more? Will you come back?

Brooks (28:48):

Absolutely, Mike.

Mike (28:49):

All right. Thank you, sir. Have a great day and we’ll see you next time on Two-Brain Radio.

Mike (28:54):

All right. That was Brooks DiFiore of Two-Brain Programming on Two-Brain Radio. We track everything at Two-Brain and we just published Chris Cooper’s state of the industry guide. This 84 page report is packed with data from over 6,000 gym owners. You can use it to make smart decisions, avoid mistakes, generate more revenue, and see where you stack up in the gym world. It’s 100% free and you can get it TwoBrainbusiness.com/research. That link is in the show notes, click it right now. I’m Mike Warkentin and I’ll see you next time on Two-Brain Radio.

 

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