"I can't wait for the gym to open so I can get the right coaching from my computer."
If that's you, I can tell. This pandemic was a massive nail on the street that blew out the air tires of our routines and force a detour from the route we had planned for a successful career. Your makeshift online practice is like the donut you install to keep your car rolling long enough to repair and get back on the road with a real tire. When your gym reopens, you may think about putting this online exercise back in the trunk, forget about it until you need it again.
I invite you to think again. The best trainers will keep at least part of their practice onlineNot how a side business or gimmick, but because effective online practice makes you a better coach.
The facts of online coaching
You've heard the big pitch for switching to online or hybrid coaching elsewhere:
- It enables flexible working hours from anywhere in the world, whether at home, in a café or in Fiji.
- This allows you to reach a broader – even global – audience and scale with existing templates and intelligent systems as large as your creativity and industry allow.
And everyone knows the costs:
- Distance work requires a different discipline to combat distraction.
- The primary advertising channels are overwhelmed with FitPros, most of them spit out nonsense, and transmitting your signal through the noise is a full-time job.
- Establishing a personal connection, evaluating and correcting movements in real time is more difficult, and coaching in states, provinces and countries is a unique logistical challenge.
What you probably haven't heard is how online coaching can improve your coaching skills on the platform, in the field, and at the gym.
I have been training online since 2016, programming and offering video reviews of work sets for every lifter I train. As part of a team, we help each other with video evaluations and when working on projects. I've reviewed hundreds of lifters, thousands of workouts, and over ten thousand videos, and these practices have improved my platform coaching skills in ways I never expected.
You are not a wizard, Harry
In the art of clear thinking, Rolf Dobelli shares the effect of a banal truth: "Extreme performances are interspersed with less extreme ones." In other words, when things are bad or average, they get better. When things are great or average, they get worse. This reality, called regression to the mean, deceives trainers every day in every sentence.
Every repetition you observe lies on the lifter's bell curve. Some new lifters happen to have great reps, and even masterful athletes occasionally slip in complex movements.
With the right coaching and focus, this curve shifts to the right and narrow over time – the average improves and the performance becomes more constant until real mistakes disappear. If you train the movement in real time, you will see a bad movement, call it up and the next iteration will look better. Pat yourself on the back – you've fixed it. At least that's how I felt after fixing people through seminars, workshops, CrossFit courses and face-to-face meetings. Online coaching freed me from this delusion.
I am a pretty dense stone, so the lessons took some time. I check the video of a lifter, see a mistake and try to start typing so that the mistake disappears in the third iteration and never returns. Sometimes they were set up incorrectly and I tried to reach through the screen to avoid the inevitable error that often never occurred. Maybe they corrected themselves. Maybe it was coincidental – a below-average repetition for her bell curve – and the next repetition just happened to be better.
Online coaching has taught me to look for trends through repetitions. To develop the lifter's self-confidence on the platform, step out of the way. You leave with the intention of going to the next session and not with a list of clues that need to be implemented long after your body has forgotten the feeling of your last exercises.
Most importantly, it taught me humility. In a class of 20 people, I was able to bark clues and correct mistakes like a manic poodle playing in one go, but the credit for change was not by chance, time and the lifter.
The screen requests results
The environment and friendships of the class as well as the energy and personality of a trainer often determine the experience in the small gym. This experience is part of the value – the most important part for some lifters – but if it does prevail, accurate feedback on your performance will be tarnished.
When I asked a customer if their training worked for them, the inevitable answer was almost always yes. If the customer does not know his past and present performance, clearly defines his goals and routinely takes into account the costs and benefits of training, he is not ready to give me a clear answer.
I wanted to improve my coaching skills. But I asked, "Do you still feel good when you come to the gym?"
Every trainer has to achieve results to be successful. An informed customer can find thousands of diets, programs, and forums to receive form checks online for free. If we show no value and do not establish a personal connection, the customer will leave.
There is no fitness culture online to hide behind. Each day gives your customer the opportunity to log in, view the progress on the screen and decide if the cost is worth it. This accountability refines coaching skills in a way that constant variance and high energy classes cannot.
The internet never forgets
Movement coaching, especially in multi-event sports like CrossFit, suffers from memory gaps. At the beginning of each session, we have two vivid memories of the lifter's movement – how we remember them when they first trained with us and how they are moving. They will inevitably improve through the session as a result of warming up, practicing and (hopefully) our coaching.
At the end of the session, you can honestly say to the frustrated lifter, "I know it's difficult, but you're getting better." But are they? Do you remember the quality of your movement in the past sessions, especially when it is spread over weeks?
Checking videos revealed my amnesia. A lifter felt stuck when it was first pulled up, and I went back and did a montage of their videos to show their real progress in an encouraging way.
Another lifter was frustrated with its clean strength, but I knew it had improved. His first video was certainly a mess, so I looked for newer posts to show the chain of progress. Unfortunately, he was right. His elbows hadn't gotten faster in weeks and it was my responsibility to improve my game to provide tools and exercises to help him solve this problem.
Online videos provide concrete progress indicators that can overcome almost all lifters' doubts as to whether they are improving. It also shows reality very strongly if the movement has not changed.
I have occasionally started filming my personal lifters and making a selection of videos of their movement over time as this feedback that was easy to collect on the web was simply not available during coaching.
Same street, better tires
In Oceanside, California, where I live, state and county officials are already reopening restaurants, public services, and fitness centers. Trainers have to overcome the inevitable hiccups, but many of you are already starting to think about life after the shutdown. The long wait is over – the mechanics have finally fitted the new tire – and you really want to get back on the road to help people get stronger, fitter and happier.
You may have seen online coaching as a way to make ends meet and add value despite the loss. If you are, you may feel ready to throw the video conferencing, online coaching platforms, and email check-ins into your mental box with shutdown problems that I'm just glad I'm done with.
Before you do this, I invite you to consider the following:
- As a trainer, we learn best when we face different perspectives and challenges.
- Solving difficult problems in an unusual way not only shows our coaching spectrum, but also broadens our perspective and deepens our understanding of the strategies that we are already using.
Online coaching did that for me. Even if the interaction and the community of coaching on the platform, teaching a live workshop or leading a CrossFit class are the focus of my work, I will continue to train online whether pandemic or not and I invite you to do the same. You could just be a better trainer for it.