The OPEX Coaching Certificate Program (CCP ™) gives you knowledge, implementation tools, hands-on experience, and direct support from OPEX so that you set yourself apart as a professional fitness coach. Throughout CCP, you’ll build a deeper knowledge of coaching tactics, but you’ll also learn systems and frameworks that will help you determine how you’ll improve ALL of your client’s results. The OPEX CCP Course puts you inside the mind of James FitzGerald which will speed up your path to coaching mastery.
If you would like to learn more, Apply Now and speak with an OPEX advisor about how you can level-up your coaching career today.
Apply NowThe OPEX CCP is a 12-month educational experience that will transform your coaching career. With an investment of 2-3 hours a week, you will go through the digital course material on your own time, which includes videos, notes, and workbooks. As important as the course material is, getting the opportunity to have all of your questions answered is a key benefit of how CCP is delivered. You'll go through CCP with the support of a peer cohort group, where you'll have a monthly call with James FitzGerald and other CCP instructors in order to supplement your knowledge and enhance your coaching implementation tactics with your clients.
In addition, you'll have the option to attend live, hands-on courses held around the world - many of which are in sunny Scottsdale, Arizona at OPEX HQ. All of this sets you up to pass quizzes along the way to solidify your knowledge base and complete your Final Project. During the Final Project, you'll practice what you've learned with your own clients using the OPEX System of Coaching. Then, you'll turn it in to James FitzGerald who will provide feedback to support you in earning a passing grade. When you pass the Final Project, you'll earn the distinction of being an OPEX Professional Coach!
If you do not align what you believe in to the marketing and service offerings that you put out to the public, you will never create sustainable growth in your coaching business. OPEX CCP teaches you the Five M’s model of Meaning, Market, Model, Management, and Money to lay the framework for how they can build your sought after career as a high-end coach.
Building relationships with clients is paramount to your professional coach’s success. OPEX CCP teaches coaches frameworks to understand goals, priorities, masculine vs feminine essence, developing trust, and building outstanding awareness to help build strong, long-term relationships and retention with clients.
Without a strong understanding of where your clients sit physically, you can NEVER create a quality nutrition, lifestyle, or fitness program design that will benefit them for decades to come. OPEX CCP teaches you the BMW Assessment model of Body, Move, and Work to help you recognize where the most focus needs to be placed into your client’s program today and into the future.
Coaches who can analyze their client’s assessment and consultation data and then design a quality fitness program for them will always be sought after in the market. OPEX CCP teaches you the most important principles of strength training and energy systems training so that they may plan and progress your client’s training in the best possible way.
Coaches cannot stop acting like professionals when their clients leave the gym. Nutrition and lifestyle both play a key part in a client’s long term progression. OPEX CCP teaches you how to onboard a client, understand their current nutrition behaviors, plan a client’s long-term HEALTHY progression with nutrition, and ensure that clients are enjoying the BLG’s - Basic Lifestyle Guidelines - daily.
On top of the digital course material, you’ll have the opportunity to attend live courses to receive hands-on training from James FitzGerald and the other OPEX CCP instructors. That hands-on experience not only puts you in the same room with world-class instructors, it allows you to collaborate with your peers from around the world. All OPEX CCP coaches have full access to attend:
Consultation, Assessment, Program Design, and Nourishment are offered as live courses every year for you to enjoy as part of your program. While they are not required, they provide an outstanding supplement to your education.
This three day course experience showcases touch points from all of the CCP Courses - including the Business of Coaching - where you will work through case studies and hands-on examples so that you can go back to your gym with stronger, more tangible experience. But, the Immersion Course also sets you up to finish and pass your Final Project. You won’t want to miss it!
Only available to CCP Coaches, this is a monthly webinar where James Fitzgerald and other CCP instructors present on timely and relevant coaching topics. These discussions will enhance your knowledge base and they will give you a leg up on the newest coaching trends in the market. Even after you finish the CCP Program, you will maintain access to the Knowledge Series!
The blog content gives you insight into additional coaching topics, white papers, and “X-Select” - Exercise Selection - blogs and videos. All of the topics are designed to enhance your coaching ability with all of your clients.
Whether you have questions or you want to engage with your fellow CCP Coaches, the forum provides you a platform to discuss all relevant coaching topics. Not only do James Fitzgerald and OPEX Instructors answer your questions, you will enjoy conversation with other high-level, like-minded coaches around you. Whether you're a new coach or looking to master coaching, the OPEX system will challenge you to expand yourself to the next level and create a fulfilling, lasting career.
Jim Crowell
The Business of coaching
Jim Crowell loves doing two things over all else….Building businesses and mentoring coaches and business owners to enjoy inspiring, fulfilling, and successful careers. He attended Penn State University where he double majored in Finance and Economics. After graduation, Jim moved into the fast paced environment of a commodities trading hedge fund first in Columbus, OH and then in Austin, TX. After five years in the financial arena, Jim couldn’t ignore his heart anymore; he left finance in pursuit of fitness.
For the next four years he founded and successfully scaled multiple fitness facilities in Pittsburgh. He built his reputation around three main principles: hard work, progress, and fulfillment. Those ideas lead him to earn a Business Designation with honors from The Harvard Business School, as well as his MBA through the Kenan-Flagler Business School at The University of North Carolina (UNC) while concurrently working full time.
After his tenure in Pittsburgh, Jim was honored to join OPEX in sunny Scottsdale, AZ. His unique background helps him understand that every coach and business situation is different and needs to be treated with mindful strategy and relentless execution.
Sharon Prete
Consultation
Sharon is a human behavior specialist and CCP coach. She is the director of Integral Corporate Wellness a Calgary, Alberta based firm that specializes in assisting corporations to design and implement wellness programs in order to create a healthy and energetic workforce, which creates a culture of engaged, invested and productive employees. Sharon spent ten years coaching gymnastics and swimming athletes from beginner to competitive and loved the art of teaching movements and athlete development.
While in university, her undergraduate work in software engineering expanded her perspective of systematic and holistic thinking. After a career in Internet development, she returned to her two true loves: health and coaching both as a Demartini Method facilitator and OPEX CCP Coach. Here she was able to combine strategic systematic thinking, her studies in human behavior and her love for fitness coaching.
Sharon is a Trained Demartini Method Facilitator with the Demartini Institute in Houston, Texas– a private research, education and service institution dedicated to the development of human awareness and potential. She is an advanced student who has spent the last seven years mastering the universal principles of human behavior and development. She is also grateful to have been in the last graduating class of Bernie Novokowsky’s renowned Higher Order Thinking program. As a mentor, Bernie challenged her apply her knowledge in highly efficient and effective ways that upgraded her coaching skills, business practice and understanding of universal laws.
Sharon is the co-conductor of the CCP Life Coach module, expanding the awareness coaches have of themselves and their clients in order to increase their level of coaching mastery. Sharon’s dedication to the study and integration of human behavior, health and wellness, and universal law has created the unique and dynamic perspective she brings to the OPEX family.
Michael Bann
Assessment
In January of 2014, James Fitzgerald personally reached out to Michael to become his head onsite coach at OPEX Fitness. Before working at OPEX, Michael held multiple positions in the strength and conditioning industry such as the head strength coach for a law enforcement academy, as well as an instructor for strength and conditioning at Northern Arizona University while studying exercise science. He eventually transferred to Arizona State University to study kinesiology in their top 10 nationally ranked program. While attending ASU, he became the only undergraduate instructor for anatomy and physiology cadaver labs. Currently, Michael is pursuing his graduate degree in kinesiology and will graduate in 2018.
Michael has an unwavering passion for continually diving deeper and deeper into the most complicated topics that pertain to fitness, ranging from functional anatomy to functional medicine. Because of this drive for higher order understanding, he has traveled extensively to increase his education beyond that of what academia teaches as the “truth”. The education he has taken on top of his academic studies range from courses like Functional Diagnostic Nutrition (FDN), Postural Restoration Institute (PRI), Dynamic Neuromuscular Stabilization (DNS), Select Functional Movement Assessment (SFMA), Functional Movement Screen (FMS), and Certified Functional Strength Coach (CFSC) to name a few. He has completed an apprenticeship with Altis, as well all three of EXOS’s Performance Mentorships on top of mentorships with leading experts in various fields.
Michael has personally conducted thousands of assessments and has written equally as many programs. As well, he has analyzed countless lab results for clients all over the world ranging from the professional athlete to the fitness enthusiast wanting to lose weight. He has also consulted with and trained tactical athletes at every level from local law enforcement to America’s various elite special forces. Because of his education, inside and out of academia, plus having logged more than 15,000 hours of coaching, he is the expert consultant for all things fitness and performance related for the doctors at the American Center for Natural Medicine in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Clients come to Michael when they have fought for the next level but keep coming up short. His philosophy towards coaching is relatively simple. He meets his clients where they are at and nudges them forward in their journey. Not only does he dial in every client’s training individually, but he also does so with their nutrition. Because no two clients have the same training age, biological age, injury history, training history, athletic background or even lifestyle, he believes no two clients should ever be coached the same. To accomplish such individualized approach to coaching, Michael draws upon his expertise in endocrinology, nutrition, biomechanics, anatomy, physiology and psychology to develop a perfectly tailored program to push anyone forward in their fitness journey.
When Michael is not doing what he is passionate about at OPEX, either coaching or consulting with clients from around the world, he finds himself enjoying a good beer (stouts for sure), a great book (he tries to read one per week), or attending various conferences on the areas of interest to him.
James Fitzgerald
Program Design
The guy that paints the picture. When he’s not coaching, he’s a full-time husband, father, and fitness athlete. His 20+ years of experience and service as a strength coach/technician, tireless practice on refining energy system work, nourishment and lifestyle balancing techniques, and training of other coaches has made OPEX a sought after method of bringing fitness to a Higher Order.
James has found a desire and passion to understanding fitness through assessment, testing, research, programming and more. He has had many years of experience as an athlete from early childhood into adulthood, from playing top-level soccer, to short and long distance running, to CrossFit where he was crowned “The Fittest on Earth,” winner of the 2007 CrossFit Games.
Sean McGovern
Nourishment
A 22 year veteran of skateboarding, Sean‘s background in sports and movement is deeply rooted in the experience around the result.
“Growing up, the goal was always to get out with the older guys, learn from them and feed off that vibe of progressing to the next level. We always wanted more – to take things further, but we knew there was a progression and we had to surround ourselves with like-minded people that were better than us.” Designing different lines for the next skate-video started his passion for movement, flow and performance – later leading into a short lived career in film editing upon discovering CrossFit in 2007.
Anxious to become part of building a different story, he pursued coaching – interning under Justin Marcis(Windy City Strength & Conditioning). Within the next 7 years he opened, operated and sold his own facility to focus solely on being a strength coach. “My old spot was CrossFit, and the new approach just didn’t fit there; it was obvious with the flux in clientele and the want for metcon after metcon that they weren’t getting. Upon finishing my first CCP course, I knew James Fitzgerald had those missing pieces that I had been looking for in CF – progression and the individual nature of an athlete.”
Completely intrigued with that essence, he finished his CCP courses and dove into Functional Diagnostic Nutrition. This understanding of the biochemical aspect, helped his clients achieve their health and performance goals at a whole new level. Outside of work, Sean pursues both skateboarding and olympic weightlifting recreationally. He is passionate about his wife Becky and their dog, Demo. He loves Jesus and is thankful for every opportunity to work with clients as a strength coach.
Throughout history, virtually all fitness programs have gotten popular and then watched the bottom fall out. A big reason for that is that coaches rarely make a career out of coaching classes.
As a coach, you must continuously improve your ability to help every client you connect with. As you continuously learn and practice the principles of fitness coaching, you will find yourself keeping clients longer, making more money from each client, and enjoying the relationships that you build with your clients far better.
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