Mike (00:02):
A second wave of COVID-related lockdowns is sweeping the world and coaches are relying on the internet to keep helping clients. One great option: nutrition coaching. Registered dietician and gym owner Jen Broxterman is here to tell us how online nutrition services can help your clients and your business.
Chris (00:17):
Hi guys, Chris Cooper here. Two-Brain Radio is brought to you by Forever Fierce. Reach out to them to sell more apparel or retail items. Matt Albrizio and his team will save you time with templates. They’ll provide ideas and tell you what’s selling best. And they’ll supply marketing material and preorder sheets. If you want to get serious about apparel and retail, visit foreverfierce.com.
Mike (00:38):
This is another episode of Two-Brain Radio. I’m your host, Mike Warkentin. And my guest today is Jen Broxterman. She’s a registered dietician, the owner of CrossFit London and Ontario, Canada, and the founder of Nutrition RX. As if that’s not enough. She’s, co-developed the nutrition coaching course for Two-Brain Coaching. This course will help someone become a world-class nutrition coach, and it allows certificate holders to coach online. This is critical during the pandemic. All right, Jen Broxterman, welcome to Two-Brain Radio. Thanks for making time for us today.
Jen (01:07):
Thanks for having me.
Mike (01:08):
It’s always a pleasure. I know you’ve been on here a few times and we want to talk about something that’s super important, especially during the COVID crisis, I’m going to get right to it. Many gyms are completely shut down. Once again, as of the date of recording, a ton of jurisdictions are contemplating a second wave of shutdowns for fitness facilities, and that includes a lot of nutrition, places that offer nutrition.
Mike (01:27):
The COVID crisis continues to show that fitness entrepreneurs need online services to survive lockdowns and restrictions. When you were creating the Two-Brain coaching course, why was it important to allow coaches to operate online? Like, did you foresee something like this, like a pandemic or was online coaching with nutrition, just know, quote unquote, a great idea that had to happen.
Jen (01:46):
It’s probably a little bit more of B, I don’t know if anyone foresaw the extent of the pandemic of where we find the world today, but what I was noticing in our own private practice within our Nutrition RX CrossFit London gym is we were really developing expertise that people from other cities within a two, three, four, five hour range, were wanting to try to see us in our physical office. And so we started to research, you know, what are the insurance requirements?
Jen (02:13):
What are the logistics to coach online? And we actually realized it wasn’t too hard to start to offer an online component to our business. And then that allowed for clients that lived in far away parts of the province, or I actually had clients that got relocated with their work or school, or they went on a placement somewhere. So it just kind of was this really convenient idea, born out of servicing our clients so much better. And then along comes 2020 and this worldwide pandemic. And it actually has been the lifesaver of our business because we made a fully pivot to online coaching back in March. And that’s kept us afloat this entire time. We didn’t miss a single day of work with the shutdown because we just pivoted completely online. So it was a little bit born out of like client customer service, like help first, how can we help them? And that it became our lifeblood to keep us going through the pandemic.
Mike (03:06):
Yeah. And it’s really interesting what you mentioned there, because I’ve talked to a lot of coaches about online training now, and some of them developed this before the pandemic and realized that it was a really neat thing. Like Josh Grinnell, for example, he was one of our Two-Brain specialty mentors, is an online coaching expert. And this happened before the pandemic and what he realized, one of the stories that he told, I thought this was so cool was gyms, and I know you’ve had this, you struggle where members just move away. It’s not a retention thing that you can fix, right? They just got a different job or they moved to a different part of the country. And you’re like, man, I lost that member. But with online coaching, you can actually keep that member in a lot of cases because some of them obviously want to go to a new physical location. Others don’t have that option, don’t want to. So online services, whether it’s nutrition or fitness really offers you a way to serve a client who wants your services, but maybe physically can’t get there.
Jen (03:53):
Absolutely. And you have to remember too so much of what we do in the service industry is we build close relationships with our clients, with our members. So I worked, for instance, I do a lot of eating disorder recovery, and it takes years to invest in someone’s recovery from something like a mental health illness, like an eating disorder. And so for them it’s so emotionally exhaustive to meet a new healthcare practitioner, get to retell their story, you know, make those connections all over again. And for them, it’s just so much easier to say, I’d love to keep working with you, but now I have to live in this city, not close by. Can we just switch over to a different format? And technology has now made that so easy to do that kind of the global boundaries are basically taken away outside of double checking that your insurance allows you to do that.
Mike (04:41):
Yeah. And we’re going to get to that question in just a sec, but I’m gonna ask you one more that’s I think, you know, even more important is that do clients get the results they want with online nutrition coaching, as opposed to in-person services. Like, is there any drop off in quality and value when you make that move? What have you found with your clients?
Jen (04:58):
That is such a great question. The actual answer is no, I think there’s no drop off in quality and absolutely. Yes. The results are the same. I was always really hesitant to, I basically used online coaching as like, Oh, if you can’t come in person, then we’ll use this as second best. And what’s interesting is I’ve had to go through a major mindset shift through the pandemic because I always, I guess it was my bias,if I’m being really honest, coming into the pandemic, I always thought in-person coaching was a higher-quality option for the client. What I’ve now seen that my 100% of my practice has gone online is that people are just as engaged if not more. So we actually have an easier time with scheduling because now it’s just, they have to take the 45 minutes to an hour out of their day to book the appointments and they don’t have to commute.
Jen (05:50):
They don’t have to factor in driving time. They don’t have to factor in as extensive childcare coverage. So if anything, it’s made it more convenient for our clients to stick on a regular schedule for these appointments. And I think for that reason, they’re actually seeing better results, right? Have a client, Oh, I can’t get childcare. I can’t get to your office. I’m going to have to cancel and push it back a couple of weeks. And that was more disruptive to the results than flipping over to a video based counseling format. So I am so pleasantly surprised through this forced experiment with COVID that I’m really seeing the results shine through just as much as before. The only downside is I don’t get to hug people in person to celebrate those results. I think that’s the only thing I’m bummed out about.
Mike (06:33):
Yeah. And you know, Josh Grinnell, he said the exact same thing. And he actually said, if you do it properly, online coaching becomes a higher-value service because you’re offering way more touch points. You’re offering way more accountability. You’re offering way more one-on-one personal interaction. And I thought about that and that really made sense to me because when you think about how often you talk to a member in a class, you’re obviously giving them a different kind of coaching because you can like poke them in the back. I mean, at least pre COVID. Make their chest come up and push their knees out in the squat and do all those things. But you didn’t talk to them like for an hour or every day and you know, all the time. Right. And if they weren’t there, you didn’t see them. But with our online program and we’ve moved online with fitness and nutrition as well, we’re constantly talking to our members was like, Hey, you didn’t work out today.
Mike (07:15):
Or it’s three o’clock you missed your morning workout. What’s going on. We’re talking to them way more than we did. And it absolutely is a higher value service. And the thing that we’ve heard from all the members, like there are some, obviously who want to stay at a physical location. We’ve heard from so many of our online clients that there were many, many times when they would have skipped a workout because they couldn’t afford 90 minutes to travel workout for an hour and travel homee. Now they only work out. Then we cut off their travel time. And in some cases we program specific workouts for the time available. It might be 10 minutes. Like we’ve got some, you know, people are dealing with the pandemic, healthcare workers. They only have 15 minutes, right. Programs, something for them. And so in the nutrition end of it, I think you’ve probably seeing the exact same thing. And the only thing that we figured out, and I’m going to ask for your solution to this. The only thing that we figured out that we can’t offer is say an in-body scan, or we can’t do body measurements. How do you work around that with your online clients?
Jen (08:06):
Great question. So we still are actually offering the inbody or the body composition scans at our facility for those in person. But we talk a lot about non-scale non body composition victories. So we actually kind of go through a checklist like energy. How are your clothes fitting? Is your digestive health better? I talk to people about their poops and poop quality. We talk about, you know, just like how fast are their nails growing? Does their skin look better? And ultimately if you’re, I always kind of say like the outcome chases the good habits. So if you’re getting the client to focus on the good habits, whether or not you have a machine to validate yes, muscles’ being built, yes. Fat is being lost. It’s a little bit like just ignoring your bank account balance, but going to your job, doing a good job at your work, getting a paycheck week after week, whether or not you’re actually logging into your bank balance.
Jen (08:59):
If you’re living within your means your wealth is growing. So the same thing is always true with your body is your body is keeping score of, I call it health votes. If you continue to vote for your health, drink water, get enough sleep, eat your veggies, make good choices with your nutrition, going to prioritize physical activity and walks and weightlifting and you know, short, high intensity stuff, whether or not the number validates it, the change is happening on the inside. You’re just not logging into your bank balance to see exactly what that daily dollar amount is. And that’s kind of true for people that don’t have access to that techie, you know, inbody bod pod machine scanning system. Don’t worry about it. It’s happening. It’s just, you’re not going to see the number right in your face to validate it.
Mike (09:43):
I see. So you still have metrics of sorts and you still have measurements. You still have goals that you can accomplish and you can still show progress, but it might not be that physical scan on the machine. That’s perfect. That’s great advice for people that are out there who are saying, ah, this is a huge part of my service. There are ways around that. So important. I realized this when we took our business online, the first call we made when we were considering this was to, Two-Brain, our Two-Brain mentor. The second call was to our insurance agent and we needed to make sure that we were covering all bases to work online. So some nutrition coaching programs allow you to work online. Some don’t. What do people need to know and why?
Jen (10:18):
Yeah, that’s a great question. I think when you’re, whenever you’re looking for certification to allow you to coach online, there’s a couple of things you have to consider. One is definitely a privacy confidentiality issue. So you have to make sure that you are delivering the information in a way that people can’t hack into the video room. You know, that no one else is necessarily getting to listen in. So you just, from a medical privacy standpoint, that’s something to consider. Another
Mike (10:44):
Dieticians, obviously, as you know, professional care providers have some increased requirements around that, correct. Yeah.
Jen (10:53):
Right. So that, I’ll give you a really concrete example. I do not use zoom as my platform when I do my medical appointments with my nutrition clients, but there’s a free service that is HIPAA approved for healthcare providers. And it’s called doxy, D O X, Y. And you can basically create your own medical meeting room. And then it has little like waiting rooms that your clients can go into at their time. Very user-friendly they just like click a link. They don’t need an app. It’s encrypted both directions. So it just ensures a little bit more privacy for discussing medical concerns.
Mike (11:27):
No zoom bombs.
New Speaker (11:27):
Yeah, exactly. No Zoom bombs. People can’t pop into the room and I don’t know, moon you and run out. It’s like none of that. So it’s just a little bit more secure. And really even if you’re not a registered dietician, it’s a great platform it’s called doxy. Again, it is a HIPAA compliant, medically secure video conferencing service designed for doctors and other healthcare professionals.
Mike (11:54):
I interrupted there, but I wanted to make sure that people understand that registered dieticians do have different requirements than quote unquote nutritionists.
Jen (12:01):
Exactly. So we just have a little bit higher standard because we are an accredited healthcare professional designation that we have to meet the criteria of our local jurisdiction. So like I’m subject to audit by the college of dieticians of Ontario that I’m upholding, you know, my charts are all locked that, client confidentiality, nothing’s shared outside the meeting, that when we have meetings or in a secure place that can’t be, you know, online hackers, you have to, I have to prove that I’ve done due diligence to protect my clients against their medical information being hacked. So those are just some of the requirements on my shoulders as a registered dietician. Then we get to the idea of insurance and what can’t you do, or even just the certification that you might’ve taken might have clauses written into the contract. So I can only speak for Two-Brain because I’ve worked closely with the lawyers and the insurance agents for the course we designed.
Jen (12:56):
And so we designed a course that could be done by someone that held a nutrition coach nutritionist, personal training title. So they don’t necessarily need to be a registered dietician, but to do that, we had to make sure it was, we looked at all the states and all the different places in the world that had legislation around nutrition coaching. And so what we had to remove from the course was this idea of comprehensive meal planning and macro calculations, because depending on geography, many parts of the world will not allow that type of nutrition coaching outside of say a registered dietician. So we did our, you know, did our checks and balances on that. It was all habit based, behavior change, motivational interviewing, which is completely fine. Then the next level was to take it to the insurance companies and say, look at our content, look at our videos.
Jen (13:44):
Do you think this is enough to make our certified coaches that are coming out insurable? And so same thing like with affiliate guard, I know a lot of the CrossFit gyms use affiliate guard, they gave us, their all clear. The lawyers gave us their all clear. So we felt really confident about releasing the certification to gyms in a pandemic. And then basically we wanted to make sure there was no restrictions. So we teach the material so that it can be coached either in-person face-to-face or virtually through it through an online platform or a hybrid where maybe most of the nutrition appointments, you know, are technically in the virtual platform, but maybe the clients come in for an InBody scan once a month with their coach face-to-face. So we basically wanted to give maximum flexibility because that we knew the conditions were going to continue to change to the pandemic. And we didn’t want to lock our new grads into a box of, you can only be online. You can only be in person, or you can do a hybrid. We basically allowed it to be open with insurance agents and lawyers doing our checks and balances if that was OK. Now I can’t
Jen (14:52):
Speak to every certification in the world, but there are some certifications that are designed and have written clauses to only be delivered in person or potentially only be delivered online. So it is important that whatever it is you’re taking, you do read the fine print.
Mike (15:05):
So I think the best practices here, the first one is to check your local regulations, right? You’ve got to check with your government to see what’s actually allowed in terms of registered dieticians and nutritionists, right? The second thing would be to talk to your insurance agents, or maybe 2 B will be a separate one, but say 2 A would be to check with your insurance agents, whoever insures your your business, figure out what you need there. And the third one would be whatever credentials you either hold or are thinking about taking and make sure they allow you to do what you want to do. Would that be accurate?
Jen (15:35):
Totally accurate. That’s a great summary.
Mike (15:37):
All right, we’re going to continue right after this.
Chris (15:41):
We know that getting clients results isn’t enough to make a great business or a great career, but it is the foundation. If you’re not getting your clients results, none of the other stuff matters. Your marketing plan, your operations plan, your retention plan, your systems, how much you care about the clients. You need to get them results. What does it take to get a client results? Long-term behavior change, short-term habit change. It means learning skills like motivational interviewing, peer-to-peer programming. It means focusing on things like adherence and retention instead of novelty. And I built twobraincoaching.com with my partner, Josh Martin, to teach coaches how to do this. More than ever before it is critical to get results for your clients. You need to charge a premium fee. You need to provide high value to warrant that fee. And what is most valuable to the client? What do they care about the most? The results on the goal that they choose. Twobraincoaching.com has programs set up to help your clients achieve those goals. We will train you and your coaches to deliver personal training, group training, online training, nutrition coaching, and coming soon, mindset coaching, in a way that’s simple for you to adopt, it’s legal everywhere. And it’s super effective. These courses were built by experts with years of experience getting clients results. Twobraincoaching.com is a labor of love for me, and I know you’re going to love it too.
Mike (17:08):
And we are back with Jen Broxterman. We’re talking nutrition coaching online. So let’s talk Jen about specific successes related to the current climate of lockdowns and restrictions. What have you seen as gym owners and coaches take your course and start offering nutrition services online to clients?
Jen (17:24):
Oh, I’ve got such a fun success story to share. Absolutely. One of our gyms took this in July, kind of like in the middle of her local lockdown. And what we did is we basically started with, she was very overwhelmed and we wanted to start with something that was like, a done for you solution. So basically with the help of the media team, we put together a four week nutrition challenge that any TBB Two-Brain Business gym owner has access to. And anyone inside the nutrition course, we placed this challenge in there as well. It was very simplistic for members because we knew similar to your point earlier about the medical teams being very stressed out and not having a lot of time, we really simplified down the nutrition into four basic strategies, mostly centered around vegetables, protein, planning ahead a little bit with some home cooked meals. And then obviously looking at alcohol and water and sugary beverages and take just a really simple four week challenge. And she basically launched this with her members and sold it for just over like 150, 175 a person, added a couple of InBody scans to that, and basically had an amazing result. She said of all the challenges she’s ever run, she thought it wouldn’t do well because it was so simple.
Jen (18:44):
She had the best InBody results, the best member retention, the best like Google review feedback. And what we did is we worked on adding a pitch to the end of the challenge to then transition into virtual one-on-one nutrition coaching. She had a 75% close rate of her challenge to get people into long-term contracts virtually on a subscription to continue to receive personalized nutrition coating. It was such a success story. So she’s made thousands upon thousands upon thousands of dollars from this very easy, simple four week challenge. She just leveraged technology. So we worked with a program called coach catalyst where she just basically slipped the weekly habits into the coach catalyst. So it just pushes out to the members. OK. Today you’re working on, you know, maybe vegetables twice a day. Put in your green check mark, if you did it once, put in your second green check mark, if you did it a second time.
Jen (19:40):
So the gyms that don’t even want to use the tech. We also in the course just gave them a nice, colorful principle PDF that you can just distribute to their members and they can hang it on their refrigerator and literally check their compliance. We call it voting for your best sel., Put your vote for your best self on the scoreboard. And at the end of the month, you can see how consistent you basically got to. And I think the beauty was, it was just so simple and people are so stressed right now. I mean, when we’re talking about people day drinking, endlessly snacking in the pantry, stress eating at night, worried about job security. They don’t have time to log into my fitnesspal and love day after day after day, week after week, how much food they’re eating, but you know, what I could do when I’m really stressed, make a point to try to get some veggies on my lunch plate and give myself a point and do that again for dinner.
Jen (20:31):
And then like, you know, call that a day and feel like I’m winning in a really difficult time than feeling like I’m always losing because I’m not meeting my coach’s expectations. So she was such a cool success story. We wanted to test out really simplifying things for our end user, our members, our clients, knowing how much stress they’re under and they were losing inches, their body fat was going down. They actually gained some muscle. She actually had those InBody scans to really validate the simplicity, but the effectiveness. And I love the phrase that, you know, beginners complicate, experts simplify, and that’s often the mark of a really good coach is a really good coach, can help to simplify things for the person they’re coaching to make them better. And that’s exactly what we saw come out of this challenge. And then we just worked on building a pitch for her towards the end of the challenge of, Hey, you’re starting to see some success. Would you like to continue this on a little more individualized? And we’ll proceed one-on-one virtually for ongoing help. And again, she closed 75% of the people on the challenge. She’s never closed that high of a rate before.
Mike (21:42):
We’ve got there is like a whole bunch of good stuff. And I’ll just unpack a few things like, and reiterate. It’s like you’ve got client success. Like that’s the most important part you’ve offered a service that has, whether it’s a new service or an adjusted service or whatever you’ve offered a service that clients lost pounds or inches or whatever their goals were. So that’s the first one. Like you have to, your service has to work and that’s incredible that you’ve got this setup. The second thing is that the gym brought in front end revenue, meaning whatever people pay to sign in for the challenge was a huge boost to revenue. And you said this was run during the pandemic, correct?
Jen (22:15):
Totally. Started this September, right. As cases were spiking in her local area and there was threats of going into a deeper lockdown.
Mike (22:23):
Yeah. So then you’ve got probably revenue problems where people are fearful about going out and so forth and losing members. This is a huge boost. The second thing you’ve got is that segue into ongoing services. And again, that’s not like a salesy kind of thing. That’s just like, you’re having success. Do you want to continue having success? And the client says, Oh my God, yes. How do I pay you? Right. That’s so it’s like, it’s really a win for everyone.
Jen (22:47):
Absolutely. Yeah. The gym was winning. Clients were winning. And again, like now she’s got herself set up for the next six months with many, many members on this ongoing, you know, nutrition, touchpoint system of some online meetings, some weekly emails. And that’s just really set her up that if they go into another full on lockdown, she’s like, I have those clients ready to go lined up that they’re not afraid to meet with me for online nutrition counseling, because there’s no safety risks to their health. There is only the upside of taking good care of themselves. And there’s none of the downside if they get locked out, like locked down completely again.
Mike (23:22):
Yeah. So this is an entirely new revenue stream and it’s also insulated from lockdowns and government restrictions because it can be moved 98% online. And again, maybe you lose the InBody scan, but maybe that doesn’t even matter if you’re doing habits based stuff. So this is an incredible service really.
Jen (23:39):
And really, if you do lose the inbody, if someone is really kind of like aesthetically motivated based on their parents, you’ve got tape measures, you’ve got home scales and you’ve got photos for progress. You’ve got everything you need. Absolutely.
Mike (23:53):
I’ll ask you this quick question. Was this experience with this client uncommon, like was something that stood out or is this fairly common for the clients that you’ve seen use this program during the pandemic?
Jen (24:03):
This is definitely the momentum and what we’re starting to see. The feedback we’re getting is that people are so impressed by the simplicity being so effective. I think when I was a new coach, I thought I had to be really flashy. I used to give out really like beautiful, pretty, complicated meal plans and ask people to track calories and login and look at what they were doing. And it almost felt like you’re like all this showand all this wheel spinning is flashy, but the wheels were just spinning in the mud and the clients weren’t really getting themselves out of the mud too much. It was a lot for them to take in, but really hard for them to implement it. And so it’s almost like this beauty of like minimalism, simplicity, where as a coach, again, as I began to simplify and make things easier.
Jen (24:47):
And I almost picture like the rungs of a ladder as a coach, there’s two sticks. And I would just start to fill in the next two, three rungs for the clients and say like, just climb these little three rungs. They would get, you know, achieve and get some success, put in a few more rungs. Let’s get you up a little bit higher. And before they realize it, they’re not standing at the side of a cliff looking up wondering how they’re going to get to the top of the cliff. They’re just climbing the ladder that the coach has placed for them. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven rungs at a time and on and on and up and up they go. So I think that’s what the beauty of this course was, is it taught coaches how to shrink the size of the change, how to make it really attainable.
Jen (25:27):
It’s all based on bright spots and, you know, bright spot coaching where you want to set your client up to win and succeed, not give them this masterful major plan where they feel dumb. They feel silly. They feel embarrassed sometimes when they can’t do everything. And then those kinds of clients often hide from their coaches because they’re afraid to come in for a meeting and say, yeah, you gave me this to work on last month and I didn’t do any of it. And that’s when people cancel or the retention drops off. So I think the most positive feedback I’ve gotten is people said, you know, the average retention was like maybe six months with how their nutrition programs were operating previously. And now they’re seeing eight months, nine months, more than a year. I mean, this course hasn’t been out that long, but I think we’re going to see a really big ARM and LEG change. So average member, you know, like the value of the client and the length of engagement that, that client stays on for nutrition coaching.
Mike (26:23):
And we track that. Of course, we’re going to track that as you know, providers, but we’re also have our clients track this stuff so that they know that the programs are working. And we know what you said mirrors my experience exactly where like, you know, nine or 10 years ago as a gym owner, I knew we needed to do something with nutrition, but I felt grossly unqualified to do so because it wasn’t in my wheelhouse. But what I didn’t realize was that I was further ahead of my clients, no matter what, unless I had a registered dietician in my client base, of course, but I was further ahead and I could have very easily given them healthy habits that would have been very simple. Right. And it would have helped them. Right. Just saying, eat some vegetables, don’t drink soda, just very simple things like that could have worked.
Mike (27:01):
And so you’ve got this system now where you’re teaching clients, especially stressed clients, how to behave. And maybe it’s not 71.2 grams of broccoli for lunch, but it’s like, have some broccoli or have something green on your plate instead of high high-glycemic carbs or something like that. So that mirros my experience. Exactly. And I’ll ask you this now. How long will it take someone who is just say, just like me where, you know, maybe you’re a fitness trainer or you’re, you’re a gym owner. You don’t have a nutrition credential. You’re not a nutritionist. You’re not a registered dietician. How long would it take someone like me to just complete your course and get up to speed and offer services that will help clients with nutrition.
Jen (27:41):
One month. We designed this because with the pandemic in mind, people don’t have six months to a year to almost be in a college level, like program to finally get themselves up and running. So it is 11 hours of 20 self-directed videos to watch on different topics, three personalized one-on-one calls with a registered dietician to basically give individual feedback and coaching and just some support. So you can get your program off the ground. And then I’ve given my life’s work as a dietician, 10 years of every resource I’ve created for my own nutrition clients, just given away for free as part of the program. So you walk out with a plug and play set of handouts, healthy habit books, things you can give to your clients at initial assessments, but you have notes for follow-up appointments, goal sheets, email templates, checking in messages, everything I use to keep my clients highly retained and engaged.
Jen (28:37):
That took me 10 years to polish and make look really nice. You just get all of that in the course. So there’s nothing you have to actually build yourself. You just have to kind of get the knowledge into your brain, check in over those three mentoring calls that your program is getting set up the way it’s going to serve your audience, your members. And then within a one month timeframe, again, it’s 14 hours. So however long 14 hours takes you to schedule in your life. We wanted to get busy, stressed out gym owners ready to go. Or the other option is maybe the gym owner doesn’t want to do the nutrition coaching, but they have a really motivated coach who wants to increase their income and add more value to the gym. I call it like service dog school. So you take this puppy that’s eager and you know, shows promise, and then you give them to a professional handler and puppy service dog school.
Jen (29:25):
And in one month’s time, you come out with a fully trained, ready to go, you know, functional service dogs to serve your members. So then the gym owner can be like, Oh, I don’t even have to do the training. I can just hand them off. They’ll get trained. They’ll go through this. They’ll get certified. They’re insurable, kind of ticks off all those liability boxes. It’s safe to use around any place in the world. We did our due diligence. So the gym owner doesn’t have to, and then basically you’re ready to go within a month’s time.
Mike (29:51):
Wow. So if someone is out there listening right now, and you’re in a situation where you’re facing potentially increased lockdown restrictions related to the pandemic, or you’re just, maybe you need to add some revenue or you want to explore a revenue stream. You could add this entire program. You could get this finished off in one month.
Jen (30:12):
Exactly. I’ve actually had a couple of gyms go through it faster because they had that lockdown deadline coming at them like a brick wall really quickly. I think the record is someone’s done it in 10 days. So I mean, it’s an 11 hours of learning content and three hours of personalized coaching. So however long it takes you to do 14 hours. I mean, technically certs can happen over two days on a weekend, but we do want people to spread it out a little bit. So they’ve got some time to practice the content, revisit some of the videos, if they need to get ready for the final exam. And then once they pass that final exam, they get their nutrition coaching certification designation. And they’re like, basically from an insurance liability standpoint, they are ready to offer online in-person hybrid nutrition, coaching, however it serves their facility.
Mike (31:00):
So I’ll ask you this, and this is the question you’ve heard about CrossFit forever. And I’ll give you a chance to respond because someone out there is thinking, wow, that’s not enough time to get someone ready for nutrition coaching. What do you say to that person?
Jen (31:11):
What I would say is that there’s kind of this idea of imposter syndrome. You can learn and learn and learn and be so addicted to learning. And I’m still in the process of learning. You’re never fully ready to get started. This is a great way to do a deep dive into motivational interviewing and the different topics of nutrition, but absolutely. Please continue your learning after this course is over. Take other certifications, read nutrition, textbooks, read some of the pub med journal articles, read blog posts, read opposing views that you don’t agree with with nutrition, never, ever stop learning. And I think this idea of like, Oh, I’m going to get everything I need after this cert, this degree, this credential, I’ve been a professional for 10 years. I have an undergrad in nutrition, a masters in nutrition, my dietetics nutrition, registered dietician title. I still feel like there’s more for me to learn. So you learn, you work with clients, you see how that learning integrates in the real world. And then you go back and you learn some more. So this is a great way to get your feet wet. Especially if you feel your program does miss a nutrition component, but please don’t just take this course and stop learning after this, or you’ve missed the bigger picture of becoming a world-class coach.
Mike (32:23):
Yeah. And that’s good advice for life in general is always keep learning. And then there’s also the aspect of working within your scope of practice, of course. And you’d have to make sure that you do that, but it’s the same as in fitness, where if you are not qualified to diagnose and treat injuries, you should just stick to teaching squats, to healthy people and refer them to your professional network who can do that. So it’s the same with nutrition, where if you’re coached on how to teach people on healthy habits and so forth and whatnot, you do that. If you know, you can’t do other stuff beyond that, you keep learning until you can acquire the credentials that allow you to do so, or refer and so forth and whatnot. So the whole point is know what you know, know what you don’t know and keep learning. Correct.
Jen (32:57):
That’s a great summary.
Mike (32:58):
Let’s help people take action here as we close out. So someone right now listening, thinking, OK, I need either a revenue stream or I need to get online. I need a short term boost in terms of challenges. What are the steps right now for someone to just start getting into this? Like someone who has no nutrition program right now, maybe no nutrition training at all. How does this person take action today?
Jen (33:20):
Well, there’s a couple of things you can do. One is you can, I mean, I’m a little bit biased, but take a look at this particular nutrition credit. It’s designed to get you up and functional within one month time with all the resources, all the knowledge and some personalized coaching to get something off the ground. So that’s a really great option. It’s $1,500. There’s no ongoing subscription fees and you own everything for life, all the videos, all the resources. So we have a couple of gyms that just blasted through the videos very quickly. And then what they’re doing is they’re getting a program off the ground and then kind of coming back to go through the videos the second time and starting to spread the mentoring calls out. But they’ve got it ready to go plug and play in about a month’s time.
Jen (34:03):
Yes. Twobraincoaching.com. Another thing is if you’re within the Two-Brain business family, every Friday, as of right now, Chris Cooper opened up these specialty calls every Friday at 11 Eastern is Lindsay is the nutrition business specialist. So she basically has office hours that you can just drop into. And you can ask her any questions about offering nutrition coaching at your facility. Maybe do you have everything in place that you don’t need to take the course that you can just jump into it. She’s also gone through the course herself, so she can, she’s also pretty educated to answer some questions on it, but that’s just a great one hour time commitment to just pop into a free office hours call with a business specialist in nutrition and just kind of ask her questions and see like, where are the gaps? What do I have to do?
Jen (34:51):
So that’s another really great option. But the third thing is I’d say is just, don’t overthink it and don’t delay getting anything off the ground. Even if it’s not the final, best thing you’re going to settle on, just starts to serve your clients and helps you bring in a little bit of a different source of revenue in a really scary, uncertain time for most gyms. So anything is kind of better than nothing. And knowing that you can refine it and make it better or change things up as you go along, you’re not locked into any one way of coaching for the rest of your life. And in fact, the best coaches kind of dabble and learn from a number of different experts. So I would just say analysis paralysis, just pick something that you think would benefit your members and their success and hopefully your business financially and just get started and be OK it might not be the perfect solution off the bat, but something is better than nothing.
Mike (35:44):
If someone wants to talk about this and just figure out if it’s right for them, can they book a free call on twobraincoaching?
Jen (35:49):
Definitely. The easiest way to do that is just send me an email at nutrition@twobraincoaching.com. I can also give you a booking link, Mike, to put into the notes at the end of the show. And yeah, if you guys just wanted to book a free 30 minute, like let’s talk through it, see if it’s a good fit, ask any questions, individualized to your particular gym or fitness facility. We can totally do that too.
Mike (36:14):
Of course, if you’re interested in the complete mentorship package Two-Brain Business, you can book that call at twobrainbusiness.com and a mentor will tell you exactly how he or she can help you improve your business. And that includes revenue streams. We have online nutrition, we have personal training, we have group fitness and we have all the different things that would help you grow a fitness business that will thrive. So whatever your plan is, book that call to talk to people or just sign up for the course and take a look at it. Where are you guys out right now with, I mean, the date of recording here is November 16th. Jen, where are guys out with restrictions and COVID right now?
Jen (36:51):
So we are just on the edge of Ontario where, uh, parts of our communities have started to go into this red lockdown. So I’ve had colleagues of mine in Toronto and the GTA completely have to shut down their gym for more than a month. We are in a zone that’s not as highly affected by COVID. So we’ve been able to stay open. But we’re quite limited in the number of like class size to members. So we have one coach to nine athletes with a masked coach, and we’re very lucky. We have a huge facility, so we’re very spaced out. But for our nutrition program, we made the personal decision that because nutrition didn’t need to be offered in person, we have 98% of our nutrition clients doing completely virtual coaching. We do our inbody bod pod scans in person, and then we have a couple kind of sensitive eating disorder, clients that really do like the in-person contact.
Jen (37:44):
So we have air purifiers in the office. We have the big plexiglass screen across the desk. We try to do open windows and masked appointments obviously. Or the other thing that’s been super cool with nutrition coaching is we’ve added a fitness component and we do walking health appointments. So some of our clients will meet their dietician at the facility. And then they walk three, four feet apart outdoors with masks on, and we have a beautiful little park walking routes near our gym and my clients when I work from home. So many of my clients, I have a relationship with, we actually book it as a 45 minute phone walk and talk. They walk on their end. I go walking on my end and my clients come back and I’m like, that was the best 45 minutes of my whole week. I really walked through and talked through some of my issues with food. And I just feel better because I got some exercise while we were this nutrition call. So that’s been such a beautiful gift of COVID is as much as I always thought in-person was better. I’m actually finding that I’m able to be so much more either through video or phone coaching. And I love these walk and talk phone, phone appointments. I feel better. I know my clients feel better too. Wow. That’s incredible. That’s how we’re dealing with our local restrictions and creative ways to keep people super engaged.
Mike (38:58):
The reason I ask I’m on the other side of the province from you. So we’re kind of under the same restrictions, more or less. Two provinces to my left, to the last shutdown. I know other provinces are looking at it. I know in the US a bunch of states are reconsidering, what’s going on. And of course, you’ve got the global situation where country by country, things are better or worse depending where you are. If you’re feeling threatened right now, or if you’re worried about what might happen, I would encourage you to take a look at online nutrition coaching. As Jen said, you could get online in a month or less and have a revenue stream going. That’s going to help your clients through this thing, and it’s going to help your business survive. And that’s the most important thing. As Two-Brain Business, we want fitness entrepreneurs to get through what is literally the most, the toughest time in the history of the business. Jen, thank you so much for being here and sharing that with us. I really think you’re going to help some gym owners get through this.
Jen (39:49):
Oh, thank you. I hope so too. We don’t want anyone to go under in this situation and we’re going to help you fight tooth and nail to be super profitable as best you can.
Mike (39:57):
This is Two-Brain Radio and that was Jen Broxterman. And I’m your host, Mike Warkentin. If you want to start offering nutrition services at your gym, you can. Head to Twobraincoaching.com today to find out more about the courses that will make it happen. Thanks for listening to Two-Brain Radio, hammer that subscribe button on your way out so you don’t miss our next great episode.
