by Chris | Oct 17, 2019 | Behavioral, Best Practices, Blog, farmer, founder, FREE, Leadership, Mentoring, RSS, Running A Business, tinker, wealth
In this series, I’ve been telling you how to solve any problem by breaking it down. Fitness coaches are good at this process, but business owners sometimes forget how to do it. And the overwhelming number of business books, ideas, podcasts and videos makes the path to wealth unclear.
But if you’re a fitness coach, you’re good at filtering out pseudoscience and crazy workout ideas to give your clients a clear path. I’m a business mentor, and I’m good at filtering out bad ideas and overwhelm to give my clients a clear path.
It’s taken us years and tens of thousands of one-on-one phone calls with entrepreneurs to do it, but we’ve mapped the path to wealth. Real wealth.
I wrote about the process of mapping the path here:
Mapping the Path to Wealth
First, we defined Point B: Wealth.
I wrote “What Is Wealth?” to give us clarity.
What Is Wealth?
Second, we assessed thousands of gym owners to determine Point A.
From 2012 to 2019, I personally took over 1,000 free calls and 3,000 paid calls with gym owners. As our team expanded, we took more: We now book over 275 calls per week with gym owners. And we do them all one-on-one with a mentor for an hour at a time.
Then we worked backward to map the path. As I showed you in this video, we asked, “What’s the halfway point to wealth?”
The halfway point to Wealth is Functional Retirement. Basically, it’s the point where your business pays for your lifestyle but doesn’t require you to be there. You have security with your money and freedom with your time.
Functional Retirement
Then we chopped up the journey even further. We asked, “What’s halfway to halfway?” and “What’s halfway between Functional Retirement and Legacy, fixing-the-world status?”
Well, halfway between Startup and Functional Retirement is the Breakeven Point, where your business pays for itself (but doesn’t really pay you yet).
And halfway between Functional Retirement and Legacy is Financial Independence, where your wealth grows on its own. Your money has babies. You get paid in your sleep.
The spaces between each of those achievements (Breakeven, Functional Retirement, Financial Independence and Legacy) are the phases of the Entrepreneurial Journey.
I named those four phases Founder Phase, Farmer Phase, Tinker Phase and Thief Phase.
Founder Phase: from 0 to Breakeven
Farmer Phase: from Breakeven to Functional Retirement
Tinker Phase: from Functional Retirement to Financial Independence
Thief Phase: from Financial Independence to Legacy.
(That last one means that your wealth creates opportunities for others after you’re gone.)
So the map looks like this:
Next, we have to break down all the steps necessary to get from one phase to another.
I wrote “Founder, Farmer, Tinker, Thief” to share those steps with everyone.
In our mentorship practice, we break those steps down into their smallest irreducible parts. That’s my superpower. There are actually 10 steps from the start of Founder Phase to the end of Farmer Phase—multiplied by 42 categories. Seriously—there are 420 things you have to do to achieve Functional Retirement. So now the map looks like this:
Then we built our service to move entrepreneurs from Startup to Wealth as expediently as possible.
Our Incubator program is a 12-week sprint from your starting point. We move fast. And then the Growth Stage program takes over to maintain momentum, continue development, reward victories and keep your eyes on the prize.
Our mentors help entrepreneurs move from one step to the next, with personal guidance and access to MasterClasses. Sometimes mentors can help gym owners skip a step or two. Sometimes we have to spend a few months on a single step. And the net result is that gym owners can often become wealthy in three years (it took me 12!).
You haven’t heard about a map to wealth anywhere else. There isn’t one.
No one else has done it.
Other Articles in This Series
How to Achieve Any Goal
How to Solve Any Problem in Fitness
How to Solve Any Problem in Business
by Chris | Oct 16, 2019 | Behavioral, Best Practices, Blog, farmer, founder, FREE, RSS, Running A Business
In this series, I’ve been writing about something fitness trainers know but business owners forget: how to solve problems.
Here’s the background video.
Good business mentors know how to help entrepreneurs reach their goals.
They start with the goal. Let’s call that “Point B.”
Then they measure the starting point. Let’s call that “Point A.”
Slowly, they map the path backward from Point B to Point A.
After they’ve mapped the process, the mentor prescribes the fastest path to the founder. Like this:
“Well, Alice, here are the steps you’ll need to take to reach your goal. To get there quickly, you’ll need to do a bit of math and then educate your staff on the change. I’ll give you until Friday to finish that work. Here’s a template to use. Next week, we’ll roll this change out to your clients. How does that sound?”
Then they overcome barriers, such as misunderstandings and fear. Like this:
“No problem. If you can’t figure out the math, we’ll work through it together. And here are some more resources to help you understand why we do it this way.”
Or like this:
“I faced the same scary problem in my gym. Here’s what happened. Now, let’s break the process into tiny steps to make it less terrifying.”
Then mentors motivate gym owners by reminding them of their Bright Spots, showing them their improved revenue and lifestyle, and calling them out when they don’t do the real work.
Then they track progress and adjust the plan—because no plan survives first contact with the enemy. And the enemy (your previous mistakes, your mindset and your staff’s biases) are pretty strong. So Two-Brain gym owners meet with a mentor every week or month to adjust their plans.
If this sounds like what I described yesterday, you’re right. Being a business mentor is a lot like being a fitness coach.
We track gym owners’ progress—from Founder to Farmer to Tinker to Thief—on the Two-Brain Scorecard.
But no one loses sight of the goal. The mentor can’t afford to because the gym owner never stops thinking about it. Gym owners don’t raise rates or learn Facebook marketing for the sake of paying the landlord or Zuckerberg; they do it because they want to achieve their real goal. And they’re willing to trade short-term pain to get there—if they trust their mentors.
In the fitness world, methods are simple. We know how to help people lose weight. The hard part is mapping the path and keeping people on it long enough to win.
But in the business world, methods are tougher. Ideas are everywhere, but proof is scarce. We’re the only ones in the fitness business with comprehensive data (because it costs millions to collect).
Mapping the path to wealth was tough. But we’ve done it.
Click here to see the map.
Other Articles in This Series
How to Achieve Any Goal
How to Solve Any Problem in Fitness
The Two-Brain Wealth Map
by Chris | Oct 12, 2019 | Best Practices, Blog, Coaching, FREE, Leadership, Programming, RSS, Running A Business
In this series, I’ve been writing about how to find, prepare and train coaches for your gym.
The training process for coaches doesn’t end. Despite what your certificate says, your duty as a coach is to find methods that will help your clients reach their goals.
Because every client has different goals, we’ll never run out of methods to explore.
Earlier in this series, I wrote that a coach’s education should be method agnostic. That means coaches should know how to coach before they’re taught what to coach.
A good coach can coach anything.
The Concept, Not the Details
I remember working with my first client. He was a college soccer player and high-school 800-m runner. I had sold my services on my education: a four-year degree, three international certifications (including the NSCA CSCS) and a bunch of seminars. I’d spent five years preparing to train this kid.
And all I could think before our session was: “But what do I actually do?”
Nearly 20 years later, I was asked to coach a kids’ hockey team. I knew nothing about hockey, but I knew a lot about coaching kids. The hockey organization didn’t have much choice: I had free time (thanks to running a great business) and seemed to care about the kids who showed up to play. They really had no one else. So I laced up.
Five years after that, I’m still coaching hockey. While other teams are folding, ours has a waiting list. Our little team of misfits has a full bench. Our kids don’t quit playing hockey. And I still know less about hockey than any other coach in the league, and less than most of the parents. Because I know how to coach.
The Coach’s Progression
Now I coach business owners. Actually, I coach the coaches of business owners. Some are gym owners, some aren’t. I can coach them effectively because I know how to coach. And I co-founded Two-Brain Coaching with Josh Martin to help others learn, too.
Good coaches start by learning principles, not methods. Read Josh’s article on the subject here:
Methods vs. Principles
Good coaches keep a beginner’s mindset. Read another of Josh’s articles here:
Beginner’s Mind
Then the coach determines the best method to help his or her clients. For many of us, that was CrossFit. But great coaches first learn to deliver constantly varied functional movement at high intensity to one client at a time. Their mentors control the variables of their education. And one variable that adds infinite complexity is training a group. So we teach coaches to deliver simple (yet functional) training 1:1 first. That usually happens in the gym’s on-ramp program.
After that, the coach must become skilled at leadership and group control. He or she must extend coaching from 1:1 to 1:1:8 (meaning 8 people still get a 1:1 experience in a group setting).
Then the coach must learn another variable: how to program for a single client’s individual needs.
Fourth, the coach must learn how to program for a group’s collective needs using data and progress reports. No more “hard for the sake of hard” workouts.
And there’s more after that. But at each stage, coaches must learn more than exercise technique. Improving a coach’s snatch from a 7 to an 8 will yield far less for their clients than improving their leadership from a 4 to a 7.
Mentorship and Development
Like their clients, coaches must have a coach. Lead coaches or mentors must identify a coach’s weakest link and prescribe a path to improving it.
As a numbers guy, I was always drawn to graphs and force curves and research. But a good mentor told me this: “No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care.” So I worked on my smiling and greeting. And as those improved, people listened more carefully to my message and improved more quickly.
Continuing education for coaches, therefore, must include the whole coach’s toolkit. Both the left-brain skills (technique, data analytics and research) and the right-brain skills (empathy, charisma and support) must be strong or the coach will limit his or her potential to help clients.
If you have a head coach at your gym, he or she should look at staff evaluation forms and ask, “What’s the greatest opportunity to improve this coach?”
And coaches should look at their client progressions and ask, “What’s the greatest opportunity to help each client reach his or her goals faster?” Then they should acquire those skills. That could mean nutrition or yoga. It could also mean taking a Dale Carnegie course.
Who pays for continuing ed for coaches? What’s your budget? Who are the best providers?
Download our free Intrapreneurialism 101 Guide here.
Other Articles in This Series
Training Coaches: How to Find New Coaches
Training Coaches: Internships
Training Coaches: Scope of Practice
Training Coaches: Building Careers
by Chris | Oct 11, 2019 | Best Practices, Blog, Coaching, FREE, Leadership, partners, retention, RSS, staff
We are fitness coaches.
CrossFit’s “Sickness-Wellness-Fitness” model highlights our opportunity to help humanity.
But it also shows us the limits of our practice: As a client moves to the left, from fitness to sickness, our expertise is diminished. We are not doctors. We are not physical therapists. We are not dietitians. And we don’t want to be.
Of course, we still care a lot. We desperately want to help people with Type 2 diabetes. We want to cure the lame, heal the injured, bring sight to the blind. Of course we do!
But the best way to help is to partner with true experts, not to replace them.
The Missing Piece of the Model
The real “far left” of the Sickness-Wellness-Fitness Continuum is death. But the relationship between fitness, sickness and death isn’t linear. Very fit people still die. Very fit people still get injured. And “well” people still get sick.
Greg Glassman, who created the Sickness-Wellness-Fitness continuum, said this:
“Physicians are lifeguards. Trainers are swim coaches. When you need a lifeguard, you need a lifeguard, not a swim coach. But, if you need a lifeguard, you probably needed a swim coach and didn’t get one.”
We, the swim coaches of health, applaud that message.
But that doesn’t mean lifeguards are bad.
And it really doesn’t mean we’re the lifeguards.
A Bad Image for a Good Reason
You’ve heard this one, right?
“CrossFit has been a huge gift to my surgical practice.”
It’s an urban legend, but it sums up the reason many coaches don’t trust therapists or doctors. The current medical model is full of problems: treating symptoms instead of causes, overmedicating, treating people only when they’re really sick.
I spoke to a local entrepreneur and physiotherapist about the problem on our podcast:
Episode 168: Exercise Over Opioids
On the flip side, many doctors, therapists and health-care professionals don’t like trainers. And I really don’t blame them.
Imagine your client told you, “My tooth hurts.” You sat him or her on an incline bench, pulled out a little pocket mirror and flashlight, and found a cavity. Then you said, “I can fix this; you don’t need a dentist!” You rigged up a little drill you bought online, mixed up some MortaRx and filled the cavity.
How would you expect local dentists to react?
Why would we expect physical therapists, massage therapists or dietitians to be any different?
And are we any different when a family doctor tells our patients to eat less fat or just walk more often?
When a client gets injured, we want to take action. We don’t want to wait. We don’t want to expose the client to negative messages about exercise or diet. We don’t want the client to lapse back into the cycles that made him or her unhealthy. And we don’t want to lose the client.
Our relationship with registered health-care practitioners is fractured. No one trusts anyone else.
But we all need each other. And our clients need us to work together.
Why You Shouldn’t Do Therapy in Your Gym
A client complains:
“My shoulder hurts when I do this.”
Being people of action—exercisers! entrepreneurs!—we take matters into our own hands. We watch some videos on Instagram, light a scented candle and proceed with the Laying on of Hands.
I’ve done it a thousand times—and definitely shouldn’t have. Here’s why.
You Really Don’t Know What You’re Doing
I’m a critic of most educational institutions. I’m a skeptic of credentialing and an opponent of most licensure in health care.
But let’s face it: DPTs, massage therapists and even dietitians know something you don’t. They’ve practiced diagnosing and treating injuries. Their education isn’t all fluff. Your duty to the client is to guide him or her to the best care. It’s hubris to think that you’ll always be the one to provide it.
You’re Not Insured to Treat Injuries
What if you misdiagnose? What if you miss something? What if you make the problem worse? Will the client miss work because of it or suffer because of it? Will he or she sue you because of it? And then what?
You Have to Protect Your Clients, Coaches and Gym From Liability
I remember watching a coach take a client of the opposite sex through a workout. At the start of the workout, the client complained of neck pain. The coach had the client roll the area with a lacrosse ball, but it didn’t help. The coach guided the client through six neck stretches, but the tightness persisted.
Then the client said, “Let me show you exactly where it hurts,” took the trainer’s hand, guided it to the right spot and said, “Yeah, right there.”
You’ve seen the end of that movie, right?
The client probably had no ill intent. The trainer certainly didn’t. But you just never know.
These are exactly the situations that cause problems down the line: complaints about unwanted touching, claims of harassment—there’s no limit to where these things can go. And when they do, people lose their reputations and their businesses.
We live in a litigious society. If you give people a reason to sue you, they eventually will.
Partnerships > Replacement
As I said earlier, I’m guilty of trying to be a therapist. I probably went way beyond my scope of practice in the early days because I was scared. I thought the regulated health-care providers would tell my clients to stop training with me.
But in reality, when I started sending clients to local therapists, I built a foundation of trust that eventually got me far more clients than I referred.
I created a referral form for my clients. When I sent them to see a physiotherapist, massage therapist or dietitian, they took the form with them. In almost every case, I got a call back from the practitioner to talk about the client. And when that happened, I always got the client back.
Here’s the kicker: No other trainers in town were doing this. So when a physiotherapist told a client, “You need to lose 30 pounds to take weight off your knee,” they didn’t trust anyone else to help them. I started getting referral forms back. That’s right: A tiny bit of trust got me a lot of referrals.
In fact, when I started taking sandwiches and coffee to local chiropractic offices, my gym membership grew faster than ever before. That’s how I met Andre Riopel (interviewed in the podcast episode above). And we’ve made hundreds of thousands of dollars off that relationship to date. I’d like to say it’s because Andre thinks I’m smart. But the reality is that he probably doesn’t trust anyone else.
Josh Martin, co-founder of Two-Brain Coaching, works with EXOS specialists when his clients need rehab. And they send athletes to him when that’s appropriate. Each partner knows the opportunities—and limits—of each practice.
The Best Solution
I could say that “the best way to make sure your clients don’t need rehab is to just stop hurting people.” But we all know that’s glib: Many new clients are on the borderline of “sickness,” and if we accept them into our care, we have to take them as they are. They might have existing problems we can’t see. Or they might be overdue for an overuse injury—or predisposed to one.
The best solution, in any case, is to build a network of trusted health-care professionals. Then prove that you are a professional by referring your clients to them, instead of trying to do their jobs.
Other Articles in This Series
Training Coaches: How to Find New Coaches
Training Coaches: Internships
Training Coaches: Continuing Education
Training Coaches: Building Careers
by Chris | Oct 9, 2019 | Best Practices, Blog, FREE, partners, Running A Business, starting a new gym
As Two-Brain gyms become more successful, they’re often approached to “buy out” another local gym owner. Or, after building replicable processes, they see the opportunity to expand to a second location.
As the gap between profitable gyms and unprofitable gyms widens, these opportunities will become more common.
So which is better: to start a new gym from scratch under your profitable brand or to buy an existing gym—and its revenues and problems?
Setting the Baseline
Let’s start with the cost to start a gym and compare the benefits and challenges of buying an existing gym against that anchor point.
You can start a new gym for under $30,000, including $5,000 for mentorship (to make sure it works), $20,000 for equipment (that’s more than enough), and $5,000 for space upgrades.
(You can get our free Ultimate Business Plan template here.)
But there are some cases where it makes sense to buy an established gym. Just make sure you answer the questions below first.
Questions to Answer Before Buying
Why do you want to own a second gym?
If I hear: “I just want to help more people. My first gym doesn’t take any of my time,” then we proceed with the purchase.
But usually, I hear this: “It’s a great opportunity. There are no other gyms in the area. My members could choose where to visit. It’s almost profitable. I know I could fix it.”
That last one is in bold because I hear it a lot.
The problem is that it takes three times the effort and three times the time to fix a problem than to avoid the problem. Here’s a case in point: Two-Brain mentor Kaleda Connell built a profitable gym and reached functional retirement in three years. It took me 10. She started from scratch; I had to fix my early mistakes.
Click to listen to Kaleda’s story.
And if you’re opening a second location to make more money, you should be sure that you’re maximizing revenue at your first location. Because a second location doesn’t double your workload; it quadruples it.
Is There a Third Option?
Here are the questions I ask next:
- Is there a chance you could get the gym’s members even if you didn’t buy the gym?
- Is there an easier way to increase your income in your current gym in less time than you’d require to fix the other gym?
- Are clients in the other gym accustomed to lower rates? Do they match your target demographic?
- Why is the other gym failing? Are you buying the problems that are killing it?
- Does a higher membership count move you closer to your “perfect day”?
- What liabilities are you also buying? (For example, a lease.)
After thinking it through, many owners decide not to buy out another owner. Here are some reasons I’ve heard recently:
“It would take me months to fix that gym. If I calculate the value of my time, it would be a lot easier to just increase my sales by $2,000 per month at my current location.”
“I’m pretty close to my perfect day already. I can’t imagine dealing with all the discounts and student memberships that killed the other gym.”
“I know I could fix the culture over there, but it would cause me a lot of stress in the meantime.”
“They want a lot more than their valuation. No thanks.”
“I realized it was just my ego saying, ‘I want to be the guy who owns two gyms.’”
Many decide they don’t want to buy the other person’s problems. But they do want to help. So sometimes they offer the other owner a job or pay for the client list or even buy the equipment.
There are ways to help that don’t involve sacrificing your perfect day (or your income!) to save someone else. But kudos for wanting to!
What’s the Other Gym Actually Worth?
If you’re sure you want to own two gyms and you’ve examined the less expensive, easier options, the next step is to anchor the conversation with numbers. You can use our valuation tool:
Rigquipment Finance DCF Worksheet for TwoBrainBusiness.com
Forget intangibles like “community” or location. How profitable is the gym? How long has it been open? How much of my time will this second location require?
If the gym has been open for 10 years and the owner earns $30,000 per year, take a hard pass—you can make more than that in your first year if you start from scratch with a mentor. And you won’t have to go through the work and pain of trying to change the gym.
After all, there’s a reason the owner is selling—and it’s not because he or she wants to “pursue other opportunities.” No one sells a profitable gym that runs itself.
Do I Have to Buy It NOW?
If you do want to buy out another, we’ve been through it many times. The path is clear. Just make sure your own house is in tip-top shape because you’ll have to focus your full attention on the second gym for a few months.
Clients who have been through the Incubator are generally successful when they buy out another gym—unless they decide they’re doing just fine with one.
After all, no one needs a second gym when the first one pays well.
You can download the two free guides “How to Buy a Gym” and “How to Sell a Gym” here:
Free Tools
If you have questions, don’t leap before you talk to us for free. Click here to do so.
by Chris | Oct 9, 2019 | Behavioral, Best Practices, Blog, Coaching, farmer, founder, FREE, RSS, staff, starting a new gym
It’s tough to hand your baby over to a new caregiver, isn’t it?
But when you own a business, you have to stop being a technician and start being an owner. So you replace yourself in lower-value roles—and, eventually, you replace yourself as a coach.
I’ll outline our process below. The process of training coaches has been one of my most costly mistakes in my 12 years as a gym owner.
Mistakes to Avoid
First, here are some hiring mistakes I made:
- Hiring people who “look good on paper.”
- Hiring for education instead of personality.
- Going straight to a salary instead of the optimal 4/9ths Model.
- Believing shadowing was a useful teaching method.
Here are some really common mistakes we see in other gyms:
- Undefined processes (“shadow me until I think you’re ready”).
- No continuing education plan after hire.
- Long internships for no reason (“they’ll call you doctor”).
- Relying too heavily on shadowing instead of instruction—read more here: “Is Shadowing Overrated?”
The most common mistake is an internship process that’s long for the sake of being long. This is typically a sign that the owner isn’t quite clear enough on his or her vision or is a little too focused on the “knowledge” piece of coaching.
When you’re training doctors, this is valid—they need more knowledge than bedside manner. But we’re not training doctors, and we get to see our clients every day if our coaches can keep them coming back.
We believe that coaches should be different but follow the same template in a class. If they tick all the boxes—professional appearance, hearty greeting, appropriate warmup, one-on-one attention to every athlete, motivating coaching, smiling/hugs/high fives—then they don’t need to be a carbon copy of the owner.
For that reason, our coach training process isn’t called an “internship” at all.
First Filter: The Advanced Theory Course
Every year, we hold an eight-week specialty class called an Advanced Theory Course. It’s open to six members, and we secretly filter the members by personality only.
Here’s the overall template:
1. Four Weeks—Be Taught, Be Trained
Participants attend four lectures by the owner (or the head coach) and are then assigned homework. They watch video modules, submit assignments and group up on Saturday mornings. They’re taught the CrossFit class template and train together in our regular groups. They track workouts on paper, noting how the class followed the template and whether the coach ticked all the boxes.
2. Four Weeks—Teach and Train Others
In the second stage, ATC students do “book reports”—teaching one main point from their chosen author—to the rest of the ATC group. Then they run a class for other ATC participants only. The goal of this stage is to identify people who are comfortable and fun in front of a group and people who can do their homework, absorb information, and teach it back.
After eight weeks, everyone graduates—back to class.
If we identify a person in the ATC who possesses an optimal personality, shows up on time and can translate knowledge into useful information, we invite him or her to the next phase.
3. Four Weeks—Practice the Art of Coaching
In this stage, the ATC student registers for a CrossFit Level 1 weekend and begins a “six-and-six” transition to coaching. The student will create and lead warm-ups and cool-downs for six groups and assist the main coach in the skill-teaching portion of the class. If those go well, the student will swap roles with the main coach for six more groups and then be evaluated.
New coaches are evaluated on the same criteria as our existing coaches. If they score 7 out of 10 in all requirements, they can start leading on-ramp sessions as soon as they earn the CrossFit Level 1 certificate. If they don’t score a 7 in all categories, they can redo the “six and six” classes—or they can just return to being a student. That’s fine.
The key components of the ATC model are:
- Choosing people who will make clients happy.
- Evaluating and providing feedback at each step.
- Having objectively measurable criteria for advancement (instead of hoping we “rub off” on them through shadowing).
Asking a future part-time coach to succumb to a six-month shadowing process is overkill. It’s inefficient, lacks clear objectives and produces a different result every time.
Remember: Greg Glassman owns the largest brand in the fitness universe, and he’ll let you use it after only two days of training. But the L1 doesn’t filter for character and presence because those are mostly taught by our parents.
Identifying the fun, caring clients in your box is the first step; teaching them to teach is the easy part.
After the Filter
After the ATC, we believe in training coaches in four stages. You can read about them on the Two-Brain Coaching site.
In short:
- Coaches should learn how to work with 1:1 clients first.
- Then coaches should learn how to apply their skills to a group setting.
- Then they should learn how to program for 1:1 clients instead of delivering your programming.
- Then they should learn how to program for groups based on data and results.
Read more here:
The Four Stages of Coach Development
You can listen to Two-Brain Coaching co-founder Josh Martin talk about Degrees of Coaching on Two-Brain Radio.
Great Coaches Are Method Agnostic
The Two-Brain Coaching progression starts with principles and then moves to methods.
My principles include getting the clients results, first and foremost. I really don’t like the dogmatic adherence to any ideology. That’s what first attracted me to CrossFit: The method combined the basics from kettlebell training, weightlifting, gymnastics, running and even parkour, back then.
I want my coaches to learn how to coach first and how to apply a specific method second. So I put coaches at Catalyst through the Two-Brain Coaching First and Second Degree programs before I send them to a CrossFit L1. This makes them insurable, gets them some experience (and a bit of money), and teaches them how to relate to people before they learn how to spot flaws in thruster technique.
I’d also send them to Pilates certifications if I thought them useful. Or yoga. Or whatever new spin class variation appears next week.
I want my coaches to know how to get results, period. And that means training the best people in the best way.
Other Articles in This Series
Training Coaches: How to Find New Coaches
Training Coaches: Scope of Practice
Training Coaches: Continuing Education
Training Coaches: Building Careers
