How to Be An Insanely Good Online Fitness Coach

By Scott Abel

An in-depth guide for fitness professionals looking to take their career (and their clients!) to the next level.

This is not a book about marketing yourself, advertising, managing payments, or anything like that. 

It's just about how to be insanely good at your job. 

It's about how to help your clients achieve their goals, build on them, and become more independent. 

For over 30 years Scott Abel has been helping his clients lose weight, get ready for bodybuilding shows, and balance careers and all sorts of life's stressors with fitness. His clients stay with him on average between five and six years, and yet, counter-intuitively, his focus is on creating client independence. 

This book covers: 

• The four steps for communicating effectively as a coach. 

• Why asking "which certification is best?" is the wrong question to ask if you want to be a better, more successful fitness professional. 

• How to stop being just a trainer, and become a true coach (look at a professional sports team, and look at the role of the coach and the role of trainer--which one do you want to be?) 

• How to use the "triangle of awareness" as a hermeneutic for figuring out what areas to focus on with each client interaction. 

• How to create and keep a useful "client file" when you get a new client. 

• Where to start with brand new clients, and how to set the right precedents and get them started on the right foot. 

• Common coaching mistakes, and the characteristics of great coaches. 

• How to deal with boundaries. 

• How to deal with the non-linear nature of client success and progress, and keep them better committed long-term. 

Pick up How to be An Insanely Good Fitness Coach now and start coaching at a higher level.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scott Abel
• Release date: Jun 24, 2016
• ISBN: 9781533738769

Book preview

About the Author

Scott Abel has been a physique transformation coach for over three decades. He specializes in weight loss, saying lean year round, metabolism, and long term, sustainable solutions for permanent physique transformation. He has published books and video workout programs on his website, but the heart of his career has always been in coaching—and for the past two decades, in online coaching.

He has helped hundreds of clients win elite bodybuilding and figure titles, as well as simply achieve better physiques, balance fitness with busy careers and real life, and much much more. To learn more about his coaching, visit scottabelfitness.com

Your Free Gift(s)

First off: Thank you for getting this book.

As a free gift, you can download the Abel Starter Set, including The Mindset of Achievement and Intro to Metabolic Enhancement Training (MET) (yes, the entire books) completely free.

The Mindset of Achievement is about reaching goals and sustaining them and building on them. If you’ve ever achieved something (e.g. weight loss) only to find you couldn’t sustain the success, this book is for you. It has chapters on habits & routines, motivation, getting out of ruts, fear of failure, mastery and much more. Intro to Metabolic Enhancement Training (MET) explains the methodology behind this unique metabolic training program, and includes two full 4-day programs.

Just go to scottabelfitness.com to get your copies from the homepage.

Table of Contents

About the Author

Free Gift

Preface

Chapter 1. Did Certification Prepare You to Become a Coach?

Chapter 2. Succeeding at High Levels in the Fitness Industry

Chapter 3. The Coach/Client Relationship

Chapter 4. Where to Start With a New Client

Chapter 5. Identifying Mindsets and Personality Types

Chapter 6. Communicating Effectively

Chapter 7. Coaching Intuition

Chapter 8. Purposeful Communication

Chapter 9. Reasonable Expectations in Corrective Situations

Chapter 10. Dealing with Mental and Emotional Roadblocks in Clients

Chapter 11. Client Accountability and Responsibility

Chapter 12. The Characteristics of Great Coaches

Chapter 13. Common Coaching Mistakes

Conclusion

Other Books by Scott Abel

Preface

Because I often coach other fitness professionals who have their own careers and clients to think about, over the years I’ve been bombarded with the question, Which certification should I get? Certainly accreditation can be important. But in my opinion, right now fitness industry accreditation is basically limited in both focus and scope.

When people ask me which certification is best, they are really asking me which certification will help them sustain a career in the industry, or which accreditation will make them a better coach for their clients. Few if any certifications actually focus on the skills and talents necessary to do the job, and to do it well. The question of certification, in other words, misses the more fundamental question for the fitness professional: "What is the nature of the job?"

Fitness accreditation tends to address the what to know to be a professional in the fitness industry. Sometimes it does this very well. Sometimes it doesn’t; at its worst it focuses on inconsequential minutiae. It consistently ignores the fundamental reality of the job: the how to actually do it, and do it well part.

This book addresses the actual nitty gritty of coaching and on‐line coaching in the fitness industry: what it is, what it isn’t, what it should and can be.

I address the differences between a Trainer and a real Coach. These terms are often used interchangeably in the fitness industry, and yet as other industries illustrate, there are huge differences between them. Look at an NHL or NFL team. Who is more integral to the team’s success? The trainer, or the coach? Which one do you want to be?

Coaching is a two‐sided coin. On the one side is domain knowledge. This consists of the what to study, plus information and experience. This is the sole focus on the industry’s accreditation options right now. It’s missing the other side of the coin: the communication, the coaching, all the qualitative stuff that can’t be measured in inches, pounds, or body fat percentages. This is what separates great Coaches from lousy trainers.

If you want to be a truly great coach, that is what you need to focus on. Most trainers and coaches have a decent understanding of the what. I’ve certainly seen my share of trainers and coaches who are lacking basic domain knowledge, but the gap in skill is usually on the qualitative side of the coin. After reading this book, you will have been exposed to a fundamentally different way of looking at the job of the fitness coach or professional.

This will make you a better coach, it will make you more successful with clients, and it will lead to greater longterm success, regardless of what is new or hot or what comes and goes in this industry. (If you last for several decades, you’ll see many, many things come and go—and often come and go again a second time under a new name.) But what you’ll find in this book are the time-tested principles of excellent coaching. They lead to greater client trust, greater client compliance, greater client success, and yes, ultimately greater word-of-mouth.

Chapter 1.

Did Certification Prepare You to Become a Coach?

The fitness industry prioritizes content over context. This is a mistake.

Trainer certification in its many current forms would have you believe that the fitness industry is ultimately information‐based. The industry’s basic set-up is based on the idea that the trainer has a bit of secret knowledge that the client wants, and all the trainer has to do is impart that knowledge in order for the client to succeed and achieve the body of their dreams.

Wrong.

The fitness industry, and coaching in particular, is a relationship‐oriented service industry. It’s not about more and more information. Nine times out of ten, the actual people you are training are lost in too much information, not too little! Often they turn to you to simplify things, to give them the principles that’ll actually get results.

Trainer vs. Coach

Trainer and Coach are vastly different terms. Relative to other disciplines and sports, the fitness industry seems to have forgotten this.

Let’s look at the professional sports world for some distinction. Look at the NFL, the NBA, the NHL, or any major sports league. In world of high-level sports,  trainer and coach very separate entities.

In professional athletics the coach is everything. The trainer is subordinate to the coach. Which one would you want to be? Which one is more integral to the team’s success?

Putting all political correctness aside, the fact is any moron can be certified as a trainer. Any certification that can be achieved with a few hours over the course of a weekend is not worth the paper it is written on. The certification industry (and yes it is its own industry) is about money and profit, not about creating a better, more qualified base of experts. Half the certifications can be done online. I know several qualified trainers who have taken the home exams for someone else, to save them time.

As I always say, certified does not mean qualified!

Success leaves clues. Let’s look at high-level athletics again. Focus just on gymnastics and football wide receivers — the kinds of athletes with great, athletic-looking bodies, if you want. There is no uniformity in training across sports. No magic training formula. What truly links high-level athletes across different sports is a long history of "doing" their selected activity, with a long history of being well‐coached within it. Across the globe athletes with great physiques seldom spend time focusing or ‘studying’ how to achieve them.

A high-level athlete doesn’t spend time poring over books explaining whether to do Drill A or Drill B. He or she lets the coach decide. And the coach decides not based on what their certification textbook says is better, but based on where they think the athlete is at and what the athlete needs to focus on next. A high-level hockey player doesn’t read more and more and more about the physics of a slap shot. He practices it. Then a coach watches him or her, and the coach might say, When you move your stick this way, try this instead. There is subtlety and nuance, for sure, but no over-bombardment of information.

The fitness industry is stuck in the same ideology Warren Buffet warned against when he stated that professional organizations are a conspiracy against the laity. These organizations insist on complicating what is simple, merely so they can create both a source of income and arbitrary criteria to test and evaluate.

As a relationship‐oriented, client‐centred service industry, the fitness industry needs to more clearly and deeply address application rather than merely reinforcing the piling up information. It’s obvious to anyone that only long-term client compliance will lead to goal achievement. You can force that for awhile, but not forever.

I call it the "gap of