MASTERING FITNESS COACHING: PART 2 - CAN I TAKE VACATIONS AS A FITNESS COACH?
When you signed up to be a coach, we’re guessing you were pretty excited about the lifestyle—being in the gym all day, inspiring your clients, and talking about your passion: fitness!
However, no matter how much you love your job, everyone needs the ability to take time off and go on a vacation (without having to worry about paying their bills).
The problem with a lot of coaching jobs? If you aren’t physically there to coach a class or train your PT clients, you likely won’t be paid.
That’s where the individual design model, taught in the OPEX Coaching Certificate Program (CCP), is a little different.
An OPEX coach working in an individual design gym is paid a percentage of revenue for each of their clients, as well as potentially making an additional hourly wage for floor shifts.
Determining Your Salary as a Fitness Coach
Let’s look at an example of a coach with 35 individual design clients (experienced coaches can typically handle 50-80), each of whom pay the gym $300 a month.
35 clients x $300 per month = $10,500. If the coach earns 45 percent of that revenue, the coach takes home $4,725 a month.
Further, six hours of on-floor shifts at $25 an hour = an additional $600 a month
= $5,325 a month, or $63,900 annual take home.
Now let’s consider the hours the coach must work:
On-floor shifts: 6 hours per week
Programming hours: (approximately) 8 hours a week (depending on their experience and efficiency)
30-minute lifestyle consult hours: 17 hours a month (4.5 hours a week)
Possible assessment hours with new clients: 2 hours a week
Administrative hours/communicating with clients: (approximately) 8 hours a week
= 28.5 hours per week total
can you take paid time off as a fitness coach?
Not only are the hours explained above more manageable than in the dollars-per-hour group class or personal training model, but the energy draining coaching days are now a thing of the past. You have more freedom when it comes to your schedule, as well as variety in the type of work you're doing.
And to return to our initial question, if you go on vacation, you can continue to earn a percentage of revenue off your book of clients. Some individual design coaches even take upwards of 6 weeks off every year!
As well as making paid time off a reality, individual design coaching is the best way to build an online coaching business. Read how coach Robin Steyvers manages his remote clients while traveling the world in this article.
How can I take vacation as a fitness coach?
If there’s one thing we’re confident about, it’s that coaching can be a fulfilling and balanced career path. You just need the right model to make it happen.
The numbers provided in this article are based on the experience of OPEX Coaching Certificate Program (CCP) graduates using the OPEX Method of individual design coaching.
Wherever you currently sit in building a sustainable career, CCP provides a path for growth and the systems you need to get there, something which is unfortunately lacking in many other fitness models.
Share in the success of our network of professional fitness coaches by taking your next step towards career growth by joining CCP. Click the button below to download the CCP Curriculum Guide to learn more.
This article is the second installment in a 4-part series on mastering your fitness coaching skills:
Part 2: Can I Take Vacations As A Fitness Coach?