Chris Cooper's Blog, page 8

Your Programming Probably Sucks if You Don’t Do This

You started a gym because you love fitness. Me, too.

But 99 percent of your clients won’t start gyms, and a significant number of them don’t love fitness at all.

These people show up, work hard and smile, but they’re not at the gym because they love the burn or can’t stop talking about the fitness method you love.

In any gym, a large number of clients are there simply to trade effort for reward, just as they trade work for income.

This is a major realization for a gym owner, and it should change the way you run your business. Because if you don’t know the exact rewards clients want, you can’t create optimal programming for them.

And you can’t make them happy enough to keep putting in effort.

I made a huge mistake for years: I thought people came to my gym because they loved CrossFit and wanted bigger deadlifts and better Fran times.

In the early days, that’s exactly what my early adopters wanted, and my programming did the trick.

But after a year or two, the people who came to my door didn’t care about the Games, Helen, Cindy or snatches.

They just wanted to solve specific fitness problems, and they were wondering if this new method might be the answer.

I missed that for years, and my one-size-fits-all general fitness plan produced less-than-optimal progress for many people.

My retention reflected this error.

Assumptions and Unasked Questions

“Why would anyone not want to tear their hands and lie quivering on the floor after Fran?”

“Why would clients cherry-pick met-cons and skip strength work?”

“Why do some clients despise Olympic weightlifting and gymnastics?”

When I review these questions now, I feel like an idiot. But that was my mentality back in the day. I made assumptions about why people came to my gym: They wanted to do what I wanted to do. Except many didn’t.

In 2025, it’s clear to me that a few people love fitness and many people utterly hate the idea of regular movement—government fitness stats and the obesity epidemic are proof.

In between are the many people who aren’t passionate about fitness but view it as a tool to accomplish their goals.

“I’ll do this stuff I don’t enjoy so I can lose 10 lb. before the wedding on Sept. 20. But I’m 100 percent not going to do clean and jerks. Ever. If I’m not doing a lot of cardio, I will feel like I’m failing.”

“I’d rather watch TV, but I’ll do strength work because I want nice arms. I think heavy deadlifts are stupid.”

“I want a pizza, but I’ll stick to my coach’s plan because abs. I will not trade hand tears and bloody shins for abs.”

That’s what’s going on inside many of your clients. But you’ll never know if you don’t ask about their goals and preferences, and your programming will miss the mark.

I’ll skip past the part about how Goal Review Sessions improve your gym’s financial metrics to focus on people and results:

You just can’t help clients if you don’t know what they want to accomplish and what they’ll do to accomplish that goal. Without that info, you are fumbling in the dark.

Like I did when I tried to trick people into running 5 km because I thought they needed to. They probably did, but they didn’t want to. I could have adjusted my plan to use preferred workouts to accomplish their goals, not my goals for them.

Maybe you currently see goal reviews as a pain-in-the-ass sales tactic, but I’ll challenge that:

How can you tell a client what to do in your gym if you don’t know their exact goal and what they’ll do to accomplish it?

You can’t.

So if you really want to help clients get results fast and retain these members for years, you must start doing Goal Review Sessions—all details are here.

And you must keep using the sessions because goals and preferences change over time.

If you stay connected to your clients, you’ll be able to keep solving their problems.

And that’s why you opened a gym in the first place, right?

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Client Success and Big Revenue: Goal Reviews for the Win

To watch this episode on YouTube, click here.

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Goal Review Primer: Aligning Progress With Preferences

Every client in your gym wants to achieve something.

Some have general goals, such as feeling better or improving their fitness. Some have specific goals, such as losing 20 lb. or finishing a 100-km bike ride faster than last year.

Two-Brain gyms follow the Prescriptive Model, which starts by helping the client get clarity on their exact goals. This is the first step to getting results for the client.

You should ask all new clients about their goals as part of your intake process. But even if you haven’t asked current clients about goals before, you can start doing Goal Review Sessions in your gym now—and you should.

Getting clear on clients’ goals will:

Improve your retention. A clear goal and a plan to reach it will keep each client around longer.Improve your average revenue per member (ARM). Some clients are buying the wrong service for their goals.Fulfill you as a coach because results in your gym will become measurable. When you say “we make people more fit!” that won’t just be a slogan or a guess.

If you’re using the Prescriptive Model in your gym, booking Goal Review Sessions is easy. You simply text a client “it’s time for your goal review!” and then attach a booking link. But if you’re just starting with goal reviews, you’ll need to explain their value.

Here’s a script to help you book goal reviews by chat:

Goal Reviews: Step by Step

Here’s how to do a goal review, step by step:

1. Measure the thing the client cares about. If it’s body composition, measure their body composition. If they want to make their bike go faster, have them bring in their Garmin data (or just look at their rides on Strava).  We use an InBody scan with about 70 percent of our clients.

2. Ask, “Are you completely happy with your results so far?”

3. If they say “yes!” then ask to share their story. Pull out your camera and interview them.

4. If they say “kinda,” they’re asking you how to get results faster. Tell them (it probably means coming more often, adding nutrition coaching or doing more focused training 1:1).

5. If they say “no, I’m not happy with my results,” it means they’re buying the wrong thing. Tell them what you’d do in their shoes. Often, this happens when clients sign up for your lowest-priced option when they join and they need more from you to make swifter progress.

Two things to remember:

1. This is not an upsell. Though about 30 percent of people wind up paying more after a Goal Review Session, it’s because they were buying the wrong thing in the first place. Goals change, and as you build trust, clients might want more from you. Or maybe they’re in your group class and need one-on-one training. Sometimes, a goal review reveals that a client should downgrade their membership. You can build trust and often prevent a hold request or cancellation if you say, “This is your busiest time of year. I recommend we maintain your fitness for the next few months instead of pushing really hard. Let’s do two workouts per week and then meet again in two months. Sound good?” The key is getting in front of problems and opportunities and telling a client what will help them best.

2. Many people who do one-on-one sessions in any gym don’t need to do personal training. They want to do personal training. They’re not doing rehab; they want a flexible schedule or privacy, or they want to make progress as quickly as possible with a customized program. Even though you might love training in a group, remember that you’re not the same as your average client. They might want more attention, more privacy, more schedule flexibility or all three.

In your annual plan, goal reviews should be scheduled two to four times a year. Because both goals and preferences change over time, you can get ahead of problems—and increase speed to progress—through regular Goal Review Sessions.

If you don’t have goal reviews on your calendar, you can start using them right now to prevent or fix the “summer slump” that affects many gyms. Some of your clients are in danger of fading away to the patio, and if you find out about their goals and recommend a plan, you’ll keep them on track this summer. Other clients will jump at the chance for more attention, and that ARM bump can help a lot in a season that’s traditionally rough on gym owners.

Goal reviews are all about aligning client progress with client preferences. Tell them what to do and offer to help in the way they want it.

That’s real fitness leadership.

The post Goal Review Primer: Aligning Progress With Preferences appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

How to Add $10,000 in Personal-Training Revenue Fast

“If you have a group-training gym, why would you start offering personal training?”

Well, you can easily add $10,000 or more to your revenue without hunting down a single new client.

I’ll tell you exactly how to do that in a free training session on July 8 at noon Eastern in our Gym Owners United group.

I’ll even give you a free guide so you have the resources you need to add PT revenue fast.

Don’t miss this session!

Faster Is Better

I got the “why add PT?” question a lot back in the day.

Here is my answer as a gym owner and business mentor, in two parts:

1. Some clients want to accomplish their goals as fast as possible. To help those clients, I need to offer the service that produces the greatest speed.

2. PT is a high-value service, and selling it allows me to earn more and pay coaches more.

We have the numbers:

About 10 percent of your clients want PT—more attention, swifter progress toward goals.Adding PT can increase gym revenue by about 30 percent.Staff delivering service in appropriately priced high-value programs can earn $40-$80 per hour, which beats average group-class rates of $32.50.Rolling out a PT program the right way and offering more to current members costs $0 in advertising.

Let’s be real: Group fitness is great, but it’s a general solution for a general problem. To solve specific problems at speed—“I want to lose 20 lb. before the wedding”—you need another option.

When clients are winning and accomplishing goals fast, your business is going to win, too.

In fact, personal training saved my gym. When I had two, my CrossFit box was kept alive by my PT gym. Eventually, I learned how to blend them together to build one great gym that creates great careers for coaches and produces amazing results for clients.

I’ll show you how to do the exact same thing on July 8th at noon Eastern in our Gym Owners United group. Join the group right now, and let’s work together live to improve your business.

And if you want the option that will produce the swiftest results for your business, let’s talk about working together one on one: Book a call.

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Free Training: Generate $10K in PT Without Adding a Single Member

To watch this episode on YouTube, click here.

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How to Boost Your Gym Revenue by $200,000

How do you add $200,000 to your gross revenue?

Start by adding $260 a week.

That’s what Erik Zeyher did at Warlock Athletics in New York.

He added one semi-private training session a week, sold it out in 45 minutes with a Facebook post and then slowly grew the program into a revenue stream that contributes $200,000 to his total annual take.

You can do the same thing.

Thinking about adding six figures to your gross can be intimidating—especially if your gym is only grossing $150,000 or $200,000 right now.

But it can be done.

About two years ago, Erik wanted to solve problems for clients, pay his coaches more and generate more revenue. So he cautiously offered a single semi-private time slot to his existing members as a test of a new service.

In a semi-private program, clients get personalized plans and a coach leads two to six people through their workouts at the same time. The program is priced below PT but above group fitness. The demands on the coach are high.

Erik set his rates at about $65 per person for one session, and he launched a trial program with a simple post to his members. He filled the slot in under an hour.

Over the next years, he slowly expanded his slots. He had to make sure he didn’t overwhelm his coaches or his space, and he had to set clear expectations and policies to ensure clients didn’t turn the growing program into a choose-your-own-adventure rebooking and slot-trading nightmare.

He used new revenue to slowly acquire a little extra gear to perfect the space and make programming and logistics easier.

As of June 2025, the program will gross $15,000 in a slow month and over $20,000 in better months.

Overall, it pumps $200,000 into his gross.

Erik’s coaches earn excellent wages that dwarf industry-standard group-class rates.

And his clients are getting spectacular results (yes, he has training data that proves this).

Mentorship FTW

Erik set this program up with the help of Two-Brain mentors Anastasia Bennett and Daniel Purington, who ensured that he didn’t miss any steps.

You can’t just wave your hands and drop a $200,000 program into your gym.

Try to do that and you’ll make big mistakes. Here are a few very common errors gym owners make with semi-private training:

They try to sell to the public before current members.They struggle to sell the program because they don’t have the required consultative sales process in place.They fail to explain how the program solves problems for clients because they don’t publish content often enough.They attempt to use semi-private training to fill dead hours in the gym.They add too many slots too quickly.They put the wrong coaches in place.They over-program or make mistakes buying new equipment they don’t need.They don’t set up their training space properly.

Those errors are enough to sink a program and prompt someone to say, “Semi-private training doesn’t work in my gym.”

The reality: It will work if you follow the right steps.

Erik Zeyher and Warlock Athletics are the proof.

If you’re a current Two-Brain client and you’re interested in semi-private training, talk to your mentor and make an action plan.

If you don’t work with Two-Brain yet, a mentor can help you set up and sell the services that will allow you to live the life you want. To hear more about that, book a call here.

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Revenue Secrets: Gamification and Annual Planning for Massive Months

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How to Generate 31 Percent More Revenue Fast

In a gym, mistakes compound.

A great example: Setting your rates too low can cost you thousands of dollars a month for years.

But good decisions compound, too. If you do any investing, you know that already.

Here’s what a few good decisions can do to your gross monthly revenue.

From $24,000 Months to $31,500 Months

Let’s say you only offer group coaching right now.

You charge $150 a month and have 160 group clients for $24,000 in monthly revenue. (You should charge much more than $150, but I’m using that rate here because it’s common.)

If you’re taking in $24,000 a month, this leaderboard might blow your mind:

Back in the day, I couldn’t get my head around how a gym could gross $10,000 a month, let alone $100,000.

But don’t let these numbers dishearten you. They’re closer than you think.

Check it out:

Instead of just selling group fitness for $150 a month, you use a mentor to do a 10 percent rate increase to $165 per month.

Now you’re at $26,400 per month—which is an extra $28,800 per year, and you earned it without acquiring a single new member.

This rate—$165—is still too low, but we’ll leave it for now.

Now consider this: You start selling PT at $75 an hour. We’ll be very conservative and say you’ll only sell four sessions in the first month, perhaps to a current member. That’s an extra $300 a month, taking your total to $26,700.

You’re a great coach, so your new PT client is getting amazing results. After his first month, you ask him if his friends are interested, and you acquire another one-session-per-week client, so you’re selling eight PT sessions a month, for a total of $600.

That’s $27,000 per month.

Let’s say you add just one more once-a-week-PT client per month. In a year, you’ll have 12 people booking one session a week at $75. If you have 48 sessions a month, that’s $3,600, so your monthly group-plus-PT take is now $30,000.

Wow, right? Your annual revenue has jumped from $288,000 to $360,000.

Let’s take one more step.

What if you acquire just two more PT clients who train twice a week and one who trains thrice per week?

Here’s the math:

12 once-week clients buy 48 sessions a month.2 twice-a-week clients buy 8 sessions a month.1 thrice-a-week client buys 12 sessions a month.That’s 68 sessions at $75 for $5,100 a month.Add your PT revenue to group revenue and you have $31,500 for the month.

Instead of grossing $288,000 for the year with a group program, you’re grossing $378,000 with a group program and just 15 PT clients. That’s $90,000—31.25 percent more revenue.

I’ll stop there, but you can go further.

What if you had 30 PT clients? What if you had two special challenges each year that brought in $15,000 each? What if you added a high-value semi-private program priced above group but below PT? What if your group rates moved closer to $205?

Suddenly, you can see exactly how the gyms on our leaderboard generate so much revenue.

A Final Question

What would 31 percent more revenue do for your family?

Think about that for a minute. Maybe a few minutes.

Now ask yourself if you can find just 15 people who badly need your help to reach their goals in a one-on-one setting.

Can you do that? Of course you can.

This is exactly how Two-Brain mentors help new clients score quick wins. We look at your business, find your greatest opportunities and tell you exactly how to increase revenue fast.

The to-do list for our mentees has a lot of other tasks on it, but they’re much easier to accomplish when you’re earning more cash every month, right?

If you look at our revenue leaderboard and feel intimidated, I hope this exercise turned intimidation into inspiration.

To take the next step and start increasing revenue with an expert’s help, book a call here.

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World-Class Business Models for $100,000 Monthly Revenue

Newsflash: The days of “we just sell group fitness” are over.

That doesn’t mean you can’t sell—and love—group fitness.

But the best gyms in the world all have diverse revenue streams, with some very high-value services on the menu.

This plan pulls up average revenue per member (ARM), revenue per square foot and gross revenue.

And when you combine amazing gross revenue with an appropriate profit margin, you get very successful gyms and millionaire gym owners (we’ve minted about 60 and counting).

Whenever I say stuff like this, I often get accused of being “against group coaching,” but I’m not.

I am against gyms failing, and relying on group coaching alone is a recipe for failure, just like pouring all your cash into one tech stock is a sketchy choice.

We study what’s working in the best gyms in the world and then help our mentorship clients replicate the success of those elite gyms.

In top gyms, the standard revenue streams are generally group, personal training and small-group or semi-private training, but some of our leaders are using other combinations, including special programs and events as part of carefully crafted annual plans. (That last part is key; these gyms aren’t running special events out of desperation.)

The point: You need a flexible model that allows you to give clients options and makes it easy to buy high-value services if they want more attention or special coaching.

With the right model, members have great choices, and you can earn more without trying to guess what everybody wants.

Here’s what the right model and help from a mentor can produce:

One of our leaders made this board without using semi-private training, and he’s going to be working with our semi-private specialist to create a new program. I can’t wait to see the gym’s next revenue total.

Other gyms posted these numbers with group training and personal training. Some gyms earned their spots with semi-private and group training. Some use all three. Some use very lucrative nutrition challenges or competitions.

Here’s what’s the same for all leaders: In every case, the owner has a great plan that was built with mentor, and the plan is being executing on a schedule, so big revenue dips and low months are rare.

These are incredible but consistent numbers supported by plans, not hopes and dreams.

To give you more insight into these numbers, here are quotes from the gym owners who posted them.

Revenue Streams

“Our revenue comes from traditional, predictable personal training and membership fees. We also run a nutrition challenge and a competition. The competition generates $13,000 twice a year. We’ve been running that for over a decade with 140-150 athletes.”

“Our revenue is 70 percent group, 20 percent small group, 5 percent PT, 5 percent on-ramp.”

“We are a PT studio. Five years ago, we had three part-time coaches. Now we have 11—eight full-time coaches, two part time and one physio. Our revenue comes from one on one, some two on one and some small group (this is the lowest level of revenue).”

“We are looking now to go to the semi-private concept—we have a call with (Two-Brain specialist) Brian Bott booked.”

“We also offer boxing and Thai boxing, always one on one or two on one. People really love it and always have the feeling they can get better at it. It’s no contact, using pads.”

Gamification and Challenges

“We have gamified nutrition. Instead of weight-loss goals, we provide people with more ways to win. We use a points system in an app. We asked, ‘How do we get more engagement with the key drivers outside the gym?’ We track seven daily health points: sleep, water, protein, movement, alcohol, whole foods, timed eating, etc. This makes it more fun: We race to 200 health points, and we have a leaderboard!”

“We run a Mile-a-Day May simple consistency challenge and plan to run something similar once per quarter.”

“We had 140 members in the nutrition challenge for $8,000-$9,000 in April, and we run the challenge twice a year.”

“They get to feel like kids! We’ve gamified heart rate using the Myzone heart-rate monitor, with tracking on screens. We have a leaderboard of people who are most active in a week, and sometimes we do challenges—males vs. females, etc.—all around heart rate.”

Focus on Avatar

“We are privileged to be in an affluent and busy neighborhood. We relentlessly focus on the beginner and the average athlete, delivering ‘shame-free fitness.’ We do not ‘program for the best and scale for the rest.’”

“I stay away from nutrition. I don’t think touching that topic creates a safe space, and I stay in my lane. My revenue does not involve any nutrition or supplements.”

“I keep the groups small: The general capacity limit is 14, with a specialty-class max of eight and a small-group max of six. In the busy hours, there are wait lists on the prime classes, and this creates incentive/scarcity. For the busy times, there is a late-cancel fee that’s used as an accountability tool. I donate all these late-cancel fees, and I’ve gotten lots of compliments on this.”

“We offer great vibes, and we do a lot of team building. I serve lots of business owners, and they like the positive, professional vibes (no males walking around in tank tops).”

Maximizing Revenue Per Square Foot

“We have 208 clients in 400 square meters (4,300 square feet), and we are at the edge of capacity.”

Moving in the Right Direction

We publish these leaderboards and quotes to help you. Even if your gym is doing less than $10,000 a month, you could one day be on these leaderboards. Believe it.

But you might not be able to get there on your own. Mistakes are costly and time is finite. I don’t want you to get frustrated or give up before you get to the right answer.

Good news: You can skip to the good part.

All our leaders used mentorship to post industry-leading stats. They got an outside perspective that helped them get really clear about where they wanted to go and how to get there, step by step.

Our mentors defined the path, and the owners are moving in the right direction with purposeful, consistent effort. They’re not trying something different every month. They’re getting better and better at doing the right things for their businesses. And that work is taking them to the top of our revenue leaderboard.

To get on the same path and move fast, book a call here. If you aren’t ready for that, check into our Gym Owners United group every day for tips and tactics.

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How These Gyms Generate Over $60K in Monthly Revenue

To watch this episode on YouTube, click here.

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