Professional Fitness Coaching – what is it and why does it matter?
Well, we can get to that in a minute – I want to start with a question for you to ponder while you’re reading through this blog. Who will have a bigger impact on your life; your fitness coach, your accountant, your doctor or your investment manager?
Let’s address the elephant in the room – the fitness industry has really screwed itself over. You can get a pretty cheap certification over a weekend and start coaching people on Monday. In fact, you could open your own gym and get insurance based on this! Let’s be clear, that is not the path to becoming a professional fitness coach.
I’ve worked as a coach in 3 different continents in many different gyms. I’ve seen lots of different models, what works well and what doesn’t. There’s no one size fits all but there’s definitely some best practices that the majority of people will benefit from.
When I opened Defy in 2018, I knew I wanted to create an environment that enabled us to hire, develop and employ professional coaches. The majority of gyms I’ve come across utilize a lot of part time coaches. I didn’t want this. I wanted to build a team of professionals. People who are all in and fully dedicated to the fitness industry.
Let me tell you – that is hard!
It’s also very hard to become a professional fitness coach if your coaching a few classes a week before you go to your ‘real job’. – unfortunately this is something that is very common in the industry.
So why does this even matter? Let’s be real, once you get away from the large chain big box gyms, fitness isn’t cheap. As a consumer, you should be getting high quality coaching for your money. I often refer to Defy as a coaching facility rather than a gym, because coaching is our service. Our equipment is nice but it’s not fancy and you can find it anywhere. Coaching is what we do!
The team of professional coaches we have at Defy is truly what sets us apart. Full timers, fully invested in the success of our members. This allows us to collaborate and develop each others skills. We can invest in education to learn new methods and bring it to the table. We can have professional development programs. We can fully focus on the task at hand; To Help People Get Better At Life.
In order for us, as coaches, to have a long lasting effect on your life, we need to build long term relationships with you and we need to coach you for a long time. Everyone benefits from having a coach in their corner. Whether it’s purely for advice, technique and form corrections or that external motivation factor. We all need some of that which is why all of our members have their own coach they see at least once per month if they are in group classes and at least once per week if they are a personal training member.
Group classes are great, the atmosphere, the friendships etc but progress comes from being coached – in any area of life. We keep our groups as small as possible so that our coaches can be effective. In classes of 20+ people, a ‘coach’ becomes a cheerleader at best and often just a shepherd trying to make sure everyone is where they should be.
Even our group classes have their limitations in the amount of time we can spend with each person, giving effective coaching – that’s why our model includes personal training for everyone.
Back to my earlier question – Who will have a bigger impact on your life; your fitness coach, your accountant, your doctor or your investment manager?
Yes, I’m biased but I truly believe that your fitness coach will hands down have the biggest impact on your life. For most people I see this translate into their kids’ and other family members’ lives too. Even the coaches I have had over the years have had huge impacts on my own life. Health is wealth.
You might be the person who can walk into any gym, doesn’t matter who is ‘coaching’ and get a great workout; that’s awesome, I’m one of those people too. But, there’s a limit to your progress (and mine) when riding solo without someone with the knowledge to take you further.
My promise to the members of Defy is that we will always hire and develop professional coaches. This is the fundamental principle that a quality coaching service is built upon!
