Forty years ago, almost no one exercised “for fun.”
It wasn’t until Dr. Ken Cooper released The New Aerobics in 1979 that people started doing cardiovascular exercises like running, cycling, swimming, and skiing as recreational activity. And modern-day health and fitness clubs didn’t enter the scene until about thirty years ago. So, if you’re working in health and fitness today, or thinking about making a switch, your job is a thoroughly modern innovation.
Compare that to other established professions like law, medicine, clergy, and chemistry, and it becomes clear the health and fitness industry, as we know it today, is very young. Like toddler young. Barely walking young. Learning first words young.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Most children are full of passion and purpose. Their enthusiasm can be measured in decibels. Their energy sparks action. This makes them great experimenters, great learners, great doers. They’re the future.
They have their faults, though. Most are impulsive and naive. They make mistakes. They don’t think through the consequences of their actions. And they lack the maturity to consider “What do I want most?” instead of “What do I want now?” This makes them first drafts, not final products.
Doesn’t this almost perfectly describe the field of health and fitness today?
We’re passionate, enthusiastic, even on fire for all things food and fitness, health and wholesomeness. Great! We need all that excitement and exuberance. The field is literally creating itself as I write this. Historically, we’re on the ground floor of a new movement and a new profession. It’s changing fast. And it’s our work that’ll shape the future.
Before getting carried away, though, those of us working in the field have to recognize that we’re also inexperienced, impatient, and stubborn. We lack structure and wisdom. We engage in unproductive debates, launch embarrassing products, ignore scientific thinking, and fight for what we think are limited resources.
The good news? This is completely normal.
No one would expect a newly walking one-year-old to complete a ninja warrior course. A four-year-old who just learned about lying to write a dissertation on ethics. Or a six-year-old to do complex math problems after just learning to add. We know they’re young and inexperienced; we give them time, and permission, to develop. With support, coaching, and encouragement, they often do. The same should apply for new industries and professions.
Consider chemistry, one of the most mature sciences. Around three thousand years ago, humans started recording and manipulating metals. From there it took one thousand years for Aristotle to propose, incorrectly, that all things are made of four different elements. (There are currently 118.)
Humans later spent another one thousand years trying to turn cheap metals into gold. (Yes, centuries of alchemy.) Finally, oxygen was identified in the 1700s, breaking open our understanding of electrons, protons, atomic mass, and more. Bottom line: chemistry floundered for 2,700 years of infancy and adolescence before humans made modern breakthroughs.
Yet, with maturity, they made them.
Yes, it can feel frustrating to think that many of our questions won’t be answered for a long time. Still, it’s heartening to know the work we’re doing now will lead to future progress. There’s a lot to be hopeful about.
And that’s what this chapter is about: hope.
It’s about recognizing we’re a young industry, accepting the obstacles that come along with that, and turning those into personal growth and the advancement of the field.
To help us, this chapter covers the six biggest challenges I see in health and fitness today. Instead of shrinking away from them in embarrassment (Uh, nothing to see here, I’ll just go stand over there), or getting defensive about them (No way, that’s not true!), let’s find the opportunities in them. In those opportunities, we find learning, growth, and maturity.
Obesity stats are frightening. Lifestyle diseases are on the rise. And health care is about to bust. On the other hand, health and fitness professionals like us have real solutions for all three problems. There are profound opportunities to build a career out of making a difference.
There’s just one problem: we’ve created a big gap between the people who want to help (what I’ll call group 1) and the people who need that help (group 2).
Meet group 1: you, me, our colleagues. We’re the small army of health and fitness change makers called to help. Of course, I love this group. We’re committed and passionate folks excited to spread the word and change people’s lives.
Yet our problem is that we sometimes confuse our passion for health and fitness with actual skill in helping others improve their own health and fitness.
You see this in sports when a hall of fame athlete tries their hand at coaching without actually developing coaching mastery. Or in business when top salespeople flounder as sales managers.
Indeed, you could exercise like crazy and eat more carrots than a Triple Crown winner. You could earn so many certificates and degrees that you have the entire alphabet after your name. You could achieve a massive personal transformation (like losing one hundred pounds, completing a difficult physical challenge, or reversing a host of lifestyle diseases). You could have a positive attitude, relentless work ethic, and a heart of gold.
But if you don’t yet have the coaching education or psychological tools needed to facilitate lasting change in another person, you’re just not ready to tackle the hard work of coaching clients.
Sadly, for all its focus on anatomy and physiology, sets and reps, macro- and micronutrients, the health and fitness industry often ignores the coaching side of coaching. We look at the body, but ignore the mind.
That has to change.
For better or worse, this was our legacy. We’ve all inherited the same rules and ideas. I was no exception. When I started out, I didn’t know how to help most people get results, especially those who weren’t similar to me. I got frustrated with “difficult clients” or situations that seemed to defy all the rules I depended on. And because I only knew how to help a very small portion of my clients, I worried about the future of my job. I knew I was missing something, but I wasn’t sure what.
Maybe you’re feeling that way right now. If so, you wouldn’t be alone.
In fact, most health and fitness professionals are wondering—at this very moment—why more of their clients and patients aren’t getting life-changing results.
They’re thinking:
“Maybe I need another certification.”
“Maybe I need to go back to school.”
“Maybe I should just fire this client so I don’t have to deal with this.”
“I hope nobody finds out that I don’t really know what I’m doing.”
And because of that, they’re starting to burn out. They’re starting to lose their passion. They’re starting to give up on their dream.
Meet group 2: our potential clients—the millions of people struggling with their weight, their health, and their confidence. They’re unhappy, not only with parts of their bodies and lives, but with all of us in group 1. And they have the right to be.
They’ve put their trust in various coaches and poured money into products that haven’t worked. The exercise books didn’t deliver. The nutrition apps didn’t change them. The professionals didn’t listen. They’re staring down a health crisis.
They’re frustrated and feeling hopeless.
Even worse, part of that is our fault. When they asked beginner-type questions, or felt awkward during their first time exercising, we rolled our eyes. (Newbie!) When they struggled with things they didn’t quite understand, we called them lazy. (You just don’t want it badly enough!) When they transitioned into middle age, we offered them shiny, airbrushed icons. (If you’d have taken care of yourself, you’d look more like this!) And when they looked for help, we told them to change every single thing about themselves and live an entirely different life. (It’s not a diet, it’s a lifestyle!)
But isn’t that just telling people they can’t be themselves? That to eat better, lose weight, or improve their health, they have to become us? In my opinion, that’s the laziest form of coaching. No wonder it doesn’t stick. These folks don’t want to be us. They want to be themselves, only healthier.
And so, we have a gap.
The result? Despite all the attention on health and fitness nowadays, people are still getting fatter, sicker, more sedentary, less mobile, and less functional in their day-to-day lives. They’re still getting “preventable” diseases.
That means the health and fitness industry is still not improving the health, fitness, and/or quality of life for most of the population.*
Even more, our health and fitness centers have become places where already-healthy and fit people go to hang out with other healthy and fit people to do healthy- and fit-people things. That’s fine, of course. If that’s who you want to serve, go for it. Let’s just be explicit about what’s happening: The health and fitness industry is mostly marketing to, and attracting, a very small group of people. While that’s a little sad, it also leads to our biggest opportunity: a “blue ocean” opportunity.
In their book Blue Ocean Strategy, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne argue that successful companies often create “blue oceans” where their products and services are so unique, or cater to a largely unserved group, that there isn’t much competition for what they do.
This is contrasted with the “red oceans,” where companies fight ruthlessly with competitors because they all offer similar products and services to the same people. The analogy is that an ocean full of vicious competition becomes red with blood.
In other words, instead of trying to attract more people “like us” (which is a red ocean because it’s a small group and everyone is trying to serve them), we’d be better off trying to attract people “like them” (which is a blue ocean because it’s a huge group and no one is adequately serving them).
We’ll explore this idea more in Chapter 3.
Everybody has light-bulb moments.
One of my brightest came courtesy of a disgruntled Precision Nutrition client.
Health and fitness coaches often assume that the people who join their programs want to be healthy and fit—maybe to lose weight, lower cholesterol, or move better. I know I always did. I also assumed that if I could help deliver these physical goals, I’d have another satisfied customer.
I assumed wrong.
Some years back, I read a review from a former group-coaching client. Someone asked her if she would recommend our program. Here was the gist of her response:
I don’t recommend it. I lost some weight, but I never felt like I connected with my coach. I didn’t really need much help from her. But if I would have needed help, I’m not sure how much I’d have gotten. So no. I don’t recommend it.
Curious where we went wrong, I dug into our database to discover that this client lost over fifty pounds working with us! Yes, fifty. In addition, nearly every metric we collected improved—from health, to body composition, to food and nutrition knowledge, to resiliency.
Yet here she was: unhappy and actively not recommending our coaching.
I could have chalked up these comments to her being overly picky, to having unreasonable expectations, or to being fundamentally unpleasable. That would have come at a huge cost. Instead, I asked her if she would sit for a paid interview so I could learn more.
What I learned changed our business.
It turns out that losing weight and “getting results,” while nice, wasn’t enough.
Even though she was in a group, she didn’t want to feel like part of a group. She wanted the feeling of a one-on-one relationship with her coach. She wanted someone to reach out daily, someone to get to know her schedule and her children’s names, someone who made her feel special, and taken care of, and cared for. And she didn’t get that.
We missed a big opportunity to create a meaningful, lasting relationship with this client, and she left dissatisfied.
Of course, if we had asked about her goals, she probably wouldn’t have said, “I want to feel connected.” That’s because learning more about clients isn’t as straightforward as asking any old question. You have to learn a specific way of asking questions, which I’ll share in Chapter 3.
The answers to these questions were invaluable to us. And nowadays we’re asking them more than ever. This allows us to better identify the true values of the people we’ve promised to help. They feel better served and better connected while we feel happier and more satisfied in our work.
I’m confident this can do the same for you.
In his book Start with Why, Simon Sinek shares the idea that most people live their lives by accident—they live as it happens. The antidote, he proposes, is to live life on purpose, to find our “WHY” (the purpose, cause, or belief that inspires us) and use it as a filter to choose the careers, organizations, communities, and relationships that are most likely to lead to fulfillment.
In my experience, most of us working in health and fitness are here because we’ve had a transformative experience. Maybe, like me, a health and fitness mentor helped reshape your life, and now you want to pay that forward to others. Maybe it’s been a part of your life since you were young, and it’s been a way to connect with your family or to express yourself. Maybe you lost someone to a preventable disease, and you’ve committed to helping others avoid that same fate.
Whatever your reason, you must deeply connect with your purpose and explicitly call out the reason you got into this field in the first place. Because work can be tough. Down in the weeds, it can feel like Groundhog Day. Wake up, go to work, chip away at your never-ending to-do list, navigate workplace politics, deal with clients, go home, squeeze in some time for self-care, go to bed, repeat.
However, when you have a clear sense of why the day matters, when you know how your daily tasks connect to your reason for doing them, when you recognize how your daily tasks are “moving the needle” on something important to you, things get easier. At worst, this connection helps your day make sense. At best, it keeps you enthusiastic, motivated, and inspired.*
It can’t stop there, though.
The magic really happens when you align your purpose with your unique abilities.
Popularized by Dan Sullivan, one of the world’s most influential entrepreneurship coaches, the unique ability process defines the things that:
1 you are, or have the potential to be, world class at;
2 you actually enjoy doing;
3 will actually make a difference when you do them.
Imagine a scenario where you have a deeply felt and explicitly stated purpose and you’re working toward that purpose using your strongest talents, having fun, and making a difference. #livingthedream
Yes, lots of people in health and fitness have strong reasons for why they work in this field. Yet more of us need to explicitly define our purpose (and that takes a little extra work). Once that’s defined, we need to discover how to use our unique abilities in the service of that purpose.
In Chapter 2, I’ll help you discover both.
“I’m looking for a bench-press-only personal trainer, a kale-first nutritionist, and a psoas-only massage therapist,” said no one ever. Why not? Because prospective clients—group 2 as described earlier—don’t think in terms of specializations.
Quite simply, quite profoundly, clients just want help. They have some sort of pain in their lives—physical, mental, and/or emotional—and they want it to go away.
At the same time, the idea of “staying in your lane” prevents professionals in this field from helping as much as they could. Personal trainers shouldn’t talk about food. Strength coaches shouldn’t talk about pain management. Nutritionists shouldn’t talk about movement. This specialty-centric kind of thinking has deepened the divide between the people willing to help and those who need it.
Don’t believe me? Then imagine I’m fifty pounds over my ideal weight, my cholesterol and blood sugar are high, I have heartburn, I have pain in my lower back, and I get winded walking across the living room. Imagine it’s been like this for a long time, ten years or more, and I’m finally ready to get help. Then, when I reach out, I learn that I’ll need:
a physician to treat my cholesterol, blood sugar, and heartburn;
a rehab specialist to treat my lower back pain;
a nutritionist to help adjust my diet for weight loss;
a gym membership; and
a personal trainer to help me figure out how to use the gym.
Of course, my insurance only covers a small portion of these fees, none of the specialists work in the same part of town, and none of them know what the other is doing. So, in addition to all the exercising, healthy eating, stress managing, and self-caring I have to make time for, I’ll also need to become a project manager overseeing four new part-time employees and one new facility.
Is it any surprise people are struggling?
I know what I’m about to say will be unpopular—especially to those who’ve developed a deep expertise in a single area, or to those who profit from dividing things into specialties—but it has to be said: in health and fitness, the future belongs to the generalist, not the specialist.
Yes, that was hard to type for a guy who spent twelve years in higher education, each year getting progressively more specialized, and who now runs the industry’s top nutrition certification. Yet the writing’s on the wall: there’s huge opportunity for those professionals who are willing to think of themselves as health and fitness “case managers,” “solutions providers,” or “concierges.”
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with being trained as a specialist. There are lots of upsides too. But it can’t stop there. The professional of the future will need to support all aspects of health: movement, nutrition, supplementation, sleep, stress management, and more.
Do they have to be experts in each area? No. Should they diagnose or prescribe? No. But they’ll need the training and expertise to deliver the equivalent of a Cliff’s Notes* summary of each topic.
In other words, nutritionists will still focus on nutrition. Trainers on movement. Physicians on diagnosis and treatment. However, each will also share resources and insights on other lifestyle-related topics. And they’ll tap into their contact lists of—or refer out to—other trusted professionals when they have questions, if someone needs more than they can provide.
This shift is already happening, which is great. But it’s happening too slowly—in part because of territorialism and lobbying from professional organizations, but mostly because of old habits and knee-jerk reactions.
For example, in a private Facebook group I’m part of, a personal trainer and lifestyle coach mentioned that his client was recently diagnosed with renal disease, and he was wondering what he could do to support her. He was bombarded with at least fifty comments that sounded like: “You’re beyond your scope! You’re not a doctor! It’s illegal and immoral to help! Run!”
Of course, this trainer shouldn’t diagnose or prescribe anything directly for renal disease. But there’s a lot of value he could bring to this situation, making himself a crucial part of his client’s allied health team.
For example, he could help her find help. This is likely a frightening and stressful time for her. The last thing she needs is a trusted coach telling her, “This is out of my scope. Bye.” So, while he won’t be able to support her medical or dietetic needs, he can help her remain calm, think clearly, and perhaps even help her search for the professionals she requires to move forward. Also, if he feels confident, he could continue to support her exercise, sleep, and stress-management practices, in conjunction with her new health-care team. If he doesn’t feel confident, he could help her find someone to take his place. In essence, for a period of time, his role may shift from trainer and lifestyle coach to case manager and concierge.*
In the end, if we’re to legitimately embrace client-centered coaching (more on this in Chapter 4), the logical next step is to develop a more robust knowledge set and coaching practice (more on this in Chapter 7). No, you shouldn’t try to be an expert in everything. But you should learn fluency in all the areas that make for deep health.
Clients aren’t interested in perfect squats or nailing their macronutrient ratios. They’re interested in living a healthier life.
There’s a whole buffet of books, workshops, certifications, seminars, websites, and friendly advice available for health and fitness professionals. There’s so much information but so little context. And almost no one is tying it all together.
Don’t get me wrong: I love education. Like I said, I’ve done twelve years of higher education (studying medicine, philosophy, psychology, exercise science, and nutritional biochemistry). I’ve also invested a tremendous amount of money in “continuing education” courses both in health sciences and other areas (coaching, change psychology, business, marketing, and so on).
This means I started with a strong foundation determined by the universities I attended. Then I continued my education, delving into the areas I was most interested in, found lacking in my university training, or needed to learn to continue my development as a well-rounded professional.
This strong foundation is what I find missing in a lot of health and fitness professionals today. The majority of their education comes from “continuing education.” And that’s problematic for two reasons. First, these courses aren’t meant to be foundational. They’re meant to expand upon an already-strong foundation. No matter how great the courses are, something is always missing. Second, without a strong foundation, professionals aren’t really equipped to make good decisions about which course to take next. Sure, following your interests is fun and engaging. However, it’s no guarantee you’ll learn the things you need to know to be an effective professional.
Consider personal training. With a weekend certificate, anyone can hang up a shingle and start taking clients. After that, the best trainers will commit to a process of lifelong learning. But which courses should they take? When? How can they stack learning on top of learning in a progressive way?
Without a solid foundation or some guidance—what I call context—they’re just guessing. Having guessed wrong, many coaches end up chronically busy with courses, heavily invested (financially), without a great education to show for it.
Contrast this with medical training. Physicians have a well-established, multiyear curriculum that includes coursework, clinical rotations, progressively more independent consultation (though still supervised), and context-specific evaluation. That’s just to become a doctor. After that there are continuing-education requirements to help guide their careers long after medical school is over.
Or take skilled trades. A plumber, for example, is required to attend technical school, get 144 hours of classroom time, and apprentice under a master plumber before they can take their first job. Then, when working as a plumber, they need to collect eight hours of continuing education every year.
While drastically different professions, physicians and plumbers have something critical in common: professional infrastructure based on discrete phases of development. “First you do A. Then you do B, because it builds on what you learned in A. Then comes C, which ties it all together.” Schoolchildren don’t start with advanced calculus. They start with basic arithmetic and build from there.
The same is true of training clients. You don’t randomly give them kettlebell swings, box jumps, and hill sprinting and hope that an elite Olympic performance emerges. As a coach, you offer a progression that goes step-by-step, working systematically toward a specific outcome.
That progressive plan is what’s been missing in health coaching, exercise coaching, even—to some degree—nutrition coaching.
This book will help remedy that. Not by proposing governmental regulation or the creation of trade schools (although those could make a difference in some contexts). Rather, by helping you create your own custom curriculum, a personal You-niversity that balances what you need to learn (to be a complete professional) with what you want to learn (to pursue what’s interesting and fun).
Not only will this approach help you level up your career, it’ll also help you stand out from the sea of amateurs. It’s fascinating to look around and see coaches who have PhDs, others who have “read some stuff on the internet,” and everything in between. It’s also sad to see how this confuses prospective clients. They’re not quite sure who’s qualified and credible. By creating a solid curriculum for yourself, and articulating what you’ve done (and why), you’ll stand apart. We’ll explore this idea more in Chapters 6 and 7.
When most people in health and fitness—especially fitness—hear me use the word “professionalism,” they’re afraid I’ll recommend trading in T-shirts for collared shirts and dropping conversational language for business speak. I’m actually talking about something deeper here: courtesy, integrity, ethics, communication, giving and receiving feedback, dealing with criticism, and the other “soft skills” that earn us our reputation.
You can wear a suit and tie, but your professionalism is lacking if you’re constantly late and rude when you do finally show up, if you say one thing and do another, if your business practices are designed only for your personal gain instead of creating value for your prospects and clients.
To be trusted, respected, and seen as professionals, we need to become professionals. That means setting a high bar for how we communicate, for how we behave around others, and for how we live (even when others aren’t watching). Like it or not, our reputation isn’t solely built on the results we get for clients and patients. The rest is determined by how we show up, how we communicate, how we listen, and how we make others feel when they’re around us.
We’ll dig into professionalism more in Chapter 6.
Again, the health and fitness field is young. And the young often set up false dichotomies. They ask: Would you rather have a coach who delivers results? Or one who makes you feel good about yourself?
Both! I’d rather have a coach who delivers results and makes me feel good about myself.*
If you want to become the ultimate health and fitness change maker, you’ll have to learn to do both. Let others fixate exclusively on muscle physiology, nutrient biochemistry, hormonal pathways, organ systems, macronutrients, and micronutrients.
Yes, learn these subjects too. But don’t miss the biggest opportunity of all—becoming the kind of professional that clients are willing to line up around the block to work with.
* And not only are we not helping, we might even be doing harm. Consider the opportunity cost, unnecessary injuries, and constant cycle of trading short-term transient changes for long-term healthy behavior. The industry may be wasting people’s time, energy, and trust. Eventually, those people give up, worse off and more confused than when they started.
* One of my good friends does a “Start with Why” exercise with students at the beginning of her workshops. This helps them get centered on why they’re there and what they hope to get out of it, which, in turn, helps them stay motivated and inspired even as the fatigue of long days of learning sets in.
* Cole’s Notes, for you Canadians.
* You can, of course, provide this kind of service for a fee, if required. While this idea may feel uncommon in health and fitness, case management as a paid service is very common in medicine.
* This realization is an inflection point for many. Early in their careers, they believe that if they do the technical side of coaching well, everything else will fall into place. But, once they see evidence to the contrary, they set out to level up their interpersonal skills . . . or they dig in their heels, assuming people are too stupid to see their obvious brilliance. As one colleague said in response to a question about why less-credentialed coaches often get more business: “Have you ever considered, even for a moment, that you may just be an asshole?”