Apart from the challenges of not making enough money and not having the flexibility to take paid time off (last week, we sent you an email on why this doesn’t have to be the case!), another major reason coaches hit a wall and burn out is because they’re trying to do it all!

To get the best results from bodyweight training you need to vary the exercises in your program. Thankfully, there are numerous ways you can load the leg muscles using your bodyweight alone. This blog will focus on 10 different variations of bodyweight leg exercises and cover three movement patterns: lunge, squat, and bend. 

Tennil’s morning session is another speed strength session with an emphasis on knee flexion endurance. The reason why so many of Tennil’s sessions include work on her knee flexion endurance is because this aspect of her fitness has been identified as her primary limiter to her performance.

Do you ever find yourself trying to reinvent the wheel every time you complete a cycle of training with your client? Or once you have reached a few weeks of progression, does it feel like you do not have an action plan to where to go next? If you answered yes to either of these questions, you are not alone. The solution to these problems is having a long-term plan in place.

In this month’s Knowledge Series webinar James FitzGerald discusses the concept of training age, how you can determine your client’s training age, and how it will affect your programs. 

At OPEX Fitness our mission is to educate coaches. This monthly knowledge series is part of that mission and is just a sample of the support we offer OPEX Coaching Certificate Program (CCP) Coaches during and after our program. Take the first step to joining our community with this course.

Quitting your day job and launching your career as a professional coach may sound easy. But, for most new coaches actually finding clients to work with is harder than it seems. With more than 20 years of experience in the coaching industry, we (OPEX Fitness) have learned what works, and what doesn’t. Here are ten steps we use to help coaches get their first clients and your next few as well.

What’s the difference between these successes and failures? Strong relationships with their clients. If you’ve ever coached in person you know the importance of coach-client connection. But how do you build and maintain these same quality relationships through a remote medium?

If you spend enough time coaching functional fitness you are bound to come across a client with shoulder issues. This injury is commonly caused by too much overhead pressing with poor form and without prerequisite shoulder stability.

Do you find yourself creating the same training splits for clients over and over? Always using the weekdays to train and weekends to rest? It’s easy to fall into a training split rut, or conversely, to waste time trying to reinvent the wheel for every client.

Fitness Coaching is unique, unlike other industries, the customer relationship does not end after the marketed good or service is sold. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Successful coaching businesses are dependent on the long term health of the relationship with the client. The ability to build these long term client relationships is the differentiator between professional coaches and group class instructors.

And so creates a situation where the gym owner is the only one checking in with clients who suddenly go MIA, the only one actively seeking new clients, the only one taking clients for coffee or lunch, and the only one going to a client’s Christmas concert or having clients over for dinner.

I have programmed thousands and thousands of workouts for athletes over the past twenty years. Despite all this experience, I have made mistakes. Sometimes I see my mistake immediately upon writing and reviewing the program, other times the mistake has taken years to discover. It was only when I became a coach of coaches rather than a coach of athletes that I finally was given a different perspective that allowed me to not only learn what caused my mistakes but how to fix them.

Each year we get asked “how do I become a fitness coach?” thousands of times. Thankfully, it’s simpler than you might think and you can have a new career in an industry you love in as little as six months. Here is how to become a fitness coach and what the career path looks like.

Opening a gym is exciting. The thought of working in an environment you love and being your own boss is motivation enough to sign whatever documents you need to get that loan and open up your own gym. 

The SkiErg is a great piece of equipment found in most gyms that is specifically useful for training the aerobic system. The SkiErg also appears in numerous functional fitness workout routines. But, clients commonly experience difficulties in using the SkiErg.

Writing effective and creative exercise programs is a craft. You develop this craft by sculpting your skillset and technique through hours of practice. To refine it even further, you experiment with variation in your prescriptions. Getting caught in a rut of writing the same programs can be easy to fall in to but can halt your positive growth. The key to keeping your craft fresh and inspired is to introduce new variations to the way you write programs.

“The coaching profession in general, and I mean fitness coaching, life coaching, business coaching, is a bit of an unfair profession, in that people with the means to gain access to it are the ones who receive great coaching and mentorship,” he said.

Pull-ups are tough, there is no way around it. This basic demonstration of athleticism requires a high level of relative strength which can be challenging to develop for some clients. Nevertheless, with the right plan, your clients can build the strength needed to do a pull-up.