1. For the last friggin' time, stop wasting your time looking for the best technology - Jonathan Goodman
It’s easy to forget how young the fitness industry is.
While the concept of strength and conditioning goes back thousands of years (Milo of Croton is the patron saint of progressive resistance training), the modern fitness business really begins in 1968, when Dr. Kenneth Cooper published Aerobics.
For the first time, we could promote fitness as more than a vanity project. It was literally life and death. Today, more than a quarter of the world’s adult population has a gym membership.
The personal training profession, distinct from strength and conditioning, probably began a decade later, with Jake Steinfeld in Southern California.
Three decades later, when I launched the PTDC, the problems with personal training were becoming clear. Annual turnover rates in commercial gyms were approaching 50 percent. Even the best trainers
were burning out from working too many hours for too little money with too little control over their schedules, and no obvious way forward.
That’s why, in 2013, I started teaching and promoting online training.
Then and now, it seemed like the obvious solution, especially as the technology caught up to the demand. Online training allows you to set up your business so it works for you, maximizing your effectiveness as a coach because you’ve freed yourself from the parts of the job that don’t require a personal touch.
In a gym, the tools you use to get results might be the most important part of your service, especially if you position yourself as someone who specialize in kettlebells or barbells or body-weight training.
But when you train online, the tools you use for automation are completely irrelevant. They have almost nothing to do with your success as a coach.
Make a list of exactly what you need your software to do. Choose the first product that does it all for a reasonable price. And if it works as expected, don’t waste a minute of your valuable time thinking about it.
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