For years, we've witnessed that one of the defining factors for treating your gym like a real business instead of a hobby, was making the transition from part-time to full-time coaches on your team. But the right part-timers can be a massive asset to any gym business, when the aspirations, buy-in, and availability of the part-time coach is in alignment with the needs of the business. At its essence, part-timers can provide versatility and stability to a full-time team, serving as a utility player that can allow the rest of the staff to have a more stable schedule. For gym owners and manag ..read more

If you want to improve your 1 rep max in a lift, most experienced lifters understand that you shouldn’t max out every day. Yet when it comes to developing well-rounded fitness, most people attack all of their workouts with the intensity of a 1 rep max every single day. This leads to them hitting walls with their conditioning and aerobic fitness, and plateauing their skills where bad habits become ingrained instead of improved. As coaches, we can all picture those clients who go out hot in every workout only to redline and crash, or still do the same 2-part swing on their toes to bar, or a mass ..read more

What if you could streamline your gym business to only the most important parts? What if you could intentionally downsize your gym in a way that allowed you to pay yourself more than you ever have, while restoring the work/life balance that excited you about owning a gym in the first place? If you've owned your gym for any length of time, you understand that it's extremely common to reach member or revenue milestones with your business, only to realize that there's little to no profit at the end of the month. For years, the common vanity metrics have been total revenue and total number of memb ..read more

On the care-coach-lead youtube channel, we've posted several videos over the last few months discussing universal movement patterns and how they can make you a better technical coach. One example is how we look for a vertical forearm in most pushing and pulling exercises like push ups, dips, handstand push ups, burpees, and bent over rows. Another example is what we call knuckles around the bar, which shows up in many barbell pulling exercises like cleans, snatches, and deadlifts but also in bodyweight exercises like pull ups and toes to bar. By understanding the safety, efficiency, and t ..read more

All scaling is not equal. When a client is in the middle of a workout, rarely are they happy about regressing an exercise to make it safer or to better achieve the stimulus for that day. It's usually not fun to take weight off the bar, switch from a barbell to dumbbells, or come off the pull up bar to perform ring rows. But one of the things that I've learned as a coach is its not the modification that's being delivered that matters, its how and why its delivered that makes it valuable or not. It's the difference between customizing a workout and scaling a workout. Customizing workou ..read more

What if the people who needed your help most were already part of your gym? What if the people who were most willing to invest in themselves were already the ones who know, like, and trust you? What if you had an extra $100k in potential annual revenue for your gym that didn't require you to bring in a single new client? The PT Legends Dave and Scott are back on the podcast to discuss how to upgrade existing members to higher-touch, higher-ticket coaching. For group class facilities that already have a solid membership of people who love us, one of the things we overlook the most is the abilit ..read more

Since the sale of CrossFit Inc. almost 2 years ago, there's been a noticeable increase in the tools, resources, and desire to help CrossFit affiliates succeed from a business perspective. This includes things like: Launching an affiliate network of brands and businesses to leverage the purchasing power of thousands of affiliates and save owners $$$ Creating an affiliate playbook that incorporates staff and business ideas, not just training methodology. Launching CrossFit Affiliate Programming, and recently announcing that this would be programmed separately from CrossFit.com programming Partn ..read more

We have a pretty thorough hiring process at our gym. Every candidate goes through multiple phone calls or in-person interviews, fills out questionnaires, spends time shadowing classes, meeting with our team, and immersing themselves in our community. We have had a few coaches throughout the years that have made it to the final stages of our hiring process, but we ultimately decided it wasn't a fit. In today's episode, we discuss what would keep a coach from getting hired at our facility, and what we look for in someone that is a no-brainer to add to our team ..read more

Last month, my brother Tony and I got invited to attend the FitPro Growth Summit in Nashville, run by Tim Lyons. Tim opened the weekend with a powerful talk about the 19 Pitfalls that Fitness Businesses Need to Avoid if they want to be successful. Some of them that resonated most with us were: Focusing on more, instead of better Lack of balance between front-end revenue and offerings, and back-end revenue and offerings Low pricing, and margins too slim Falsely believing more leads will fix our problems Seeking silver bullets that will magically turn around our business In today's episod ..read more

When I first started coaching, I was attending 2-3 certifications per year to develop my skills and help my clients on a deeper level. Some of those certifications would conclusively make me a better coach, and other certifications sometimes created more client issues, not less. The problem with most certifications I was attending, is that they were strictly focused on the technical aspects of specific modalities; kettlebells, olympic weightlifting, gymnastics, mobility, or pose running. Every certification was focused on what to coach, but very little focus was placed on how to ..read more