EXACT breakdown of In-Person Vs Online Fitness Coaching in 2024

Gym floor personal training versus online fitness coaching from somebody that has actually been there and done both of them. This isn't just theory. I did 11 years on the gym floor as a personal trainer and then in 2017 I moved fully online as an online fitness coach. I've done both. So I want to give you the kind of the pros and cons, I guess, of both, and then you can make a decision as to which route you go. Typically there's going to be sort of two types of people watching this. Either you are currently a gym floor PT and you're wondering whether you should move into online coaching. Is the grass really greener? Is it worth it, Is there an upside? Or you may be a fitness enthusiast that is wanting to get into the fitness industry and you don't know which route you should go down. Do you start as a PT or do you go straight in as an online coach? So I want to run through, in my opinion, sort of from most important to least important, the factors that you should consider between the two. So let's kick it off with just being really honest here that as much as we do this job to help people, really, we do this, you know, to earn money to get paid is why we do it. So when I was a gym for pt, I was working in London. I had a really affluent client base. I was the busiest PT in the gym and I was earning about five grand a month gbp, hence the dodgy pound signs as an average, so about 60 grand per year, which in the UK, at least for personal training is kind of like really one of the upper limits. If I wanted to earn more, I would have had to have worked a lot more and I physically couldn't. So I was working six days a week, Monday to Saturday. I lived around Gatwick Airport, about, you know, an hour and a half commute into London. I was up at 4:30 every day so I could get into London for clients at 6:30. I'd finish my last clients at around 8 9pm, would get home at 11 and the cycle would repeat 6 days per week. So for me to, if I ever wanted to do like the whole cliched six figures, if I ever wanted to break like a hundred thousand a year, it would have been really tough to do. So I would have had to have worked seven days per week and I would have had to have tried cramming in even more clients on the small gaps, the rare gaps that I had in between on an average day. In contrast, online coaching, I remember when I was coming to the end of being a gym 4pt, I wanted to go into online coaching. And I remember saying to my, one of my colleagues at the time, dude, if I could just work from a coffee shop and earn like 3, 4, maybe 5k from my laptop, I'd be living the dream. If I could just work from my sofa or a coffee shop, earn you know, 4k a month from my laptop, that would be amazing. What actually happened is within the first 12 months, the business that we had set up, our first online coaching business, had turned over £225,000 within the first year. Within the second year we were on track for half a million and so on. We had like a team of six so it grew really quickly. Within my current mentorship program we have coaches that are earning 10, 15, 20k months. We got some guys doing 38, 40k months. We got a few people at 70 and 80,000 pound months and we've even got one guy that I believe is PB month so far is about £210,000. So the potential to earn online genuinely is huge. If you think of it like this, you can take your phone, put up some free content on Instagram and end up getting paid more money than somebody that studied for nine years at med school. Like it's the opportunity is insane from online coaching. So online coaching from an earnings perspective drastically outperforms pt. The next one I'm going to do almost like in the opposite order where what you're doing with gym floor PT is extremely time inefficient. So you are trading your time and a lot of it for not a lot of money. Whereas with online coaching, because it's so time efficient I.e1, once a client is set up and running, you know, it's a once a week check in that will typically be somewhere between five and 15 minutes long. It's usually like a loom video or a voice note. You're exchanging not a lot of time, but the earning potential and the upside is huge. So from a money versus time perspective, this, you're trading your time directly for money because you're typically paid per hour. It's a lot of time for not a lot of money. Online coaching is the polar opposite. So that's that side of it. Now the second one that might not be important to you, but it was for me was travel. So anytime that I wanted to take time to go on holiday, to take time off the gym floor, I would lose money. I would lose money if my clients wanted to travel. So if it was around Christmas, Time I would be willing to work, but my clients would go skiing with their friends for the week in between Christmas and New Year's, meaning I wouldn't get paid because you only get paid per session. Anytime that I wanted to take a week's holiday myself, I would end up losing 25% of my month's income plus the cost of the holiday. So going away just became like obscenely expensive. So it's something that not a lot of PTs actually do. They do their best to never go away. It's why you just see them working 247 7. Whereas here's the cool thing about online coaching, there's three things when it comes to travel. Number one is you don't lose income. None, because your clients are paying you on a monthly recurring direct debit. So firstly, from a financial perspective, you don't lose a penny. Secondly, your clients still get great results because you can still coach them. Whereas as a pt, you go away for the week, your clients don't actually get coached, so their results are almost impaired. When you travel online coaching, they still get looked after. But here's the best thing, the third thing when it comes to travel is that you can actually still build your business. So I've had times where I was on a hotel room balcony with the sea in the background and the sunset closing a sales call over Zoom. I had it where I was at Wet Republic, a pool party in Vegas and I signed somebody up that was there at Wet Republic. I literally got my phone out and they signed up on my phone there and then I built my business. I still landed clients, I still delivered my current clients great results while being able to travel. And I think that's massively overlooked. It's huge. Next is presumably the reason that you got into, or looking to get into the fitness space is because you've seen the positive impact that it's had for you. So maybe you started training, maybe you've improved your confidence, maybe you've got in better shape, maybe you've lost body fat, maybe you've improved your health markers, whatever it is. And for that reason, you want to now go and share this message and help other people go through the same thing as a gym floor pt, because of the time aspect, you can typically only work with around 15ish individual clients, depending on the frequency, of course, of sessions that they do. So if you've got clients that see you, say, three times a week, you'll probably end up having somewhere between 10 and 15 clients in the business. If you have clients that see you once a week or once every two weeks, maybe you could work with 20, 25 clients at a time. So you're sort of limited, you know, to around, let's call it 15, 20 people online. However, again, because it's so time efficient, you can impact so many more people. So we have kind of a couple of models that you can do. We've got some of our coaches that price themselves really quite high and they purposely want to restrict their numbers and have a more intimate coaching business. So in that case they will work with around 40, 50, maybe 60 clients. Then we have other coaches that will prefer to load up on client volume and charge a little bit less and they will have anywhere between 80, 90, 100, maybe 110 clients that they can help. What we then teach them is that when they figure out what their own capacity is, they can then take on additional coaches to work underneath them and they can pass any additional clients to them. So again, you're able to just have way more impact through online coaching. You can genuinely change more lives, help more people because it's more time efficient. And here's the best thing is you can actually hold them accountable over seven days per week at a higher level versus just that like one hour on the gym floor as a pt. So it's actually in the client's best interest as well. So the final thing that I'll put out here, and this is like an interchangeable one, is whether you're an introvert or an extrovert. And this never really gets mentioned. So so far I think it's pretty one sided that you know, online drastically you can out earn more money from online coaching. For a time perspective, it's way more time efficient. You can travel and grow your business versus being penalized. You can impact and work with more people at a higher level than you can as a pt. But this bit comes down to you. So for me I'm an introvert. After doing, you know, over a decade on the gym floor, I was burnt out from the small talk, counting people's reps, forced conversation. I don't need a lot of like, you know, personal interaction and stuff like that. I just don't really need a lot. I'm happy to get my headphones on, get dialed in on my laptop and focus. So for me moving online was amazing because I could just get straight to the point with these clients, give them exactly what they need, build rapport, get them phenomenal results versus making all the small talk. Whereas as a gym floor pt, if you are somebody that needs to sort of like scratch that social itch, then you might want to be around people and that is of course tough to replicate online. So what I would do in this case is if you are an extrovert watching this and you know that you would need to sort of get out the house and be around people a bit more often, I would then probably just run a bit of a hybrid model. So what I would then do would be maybe have two to three of your favorite PT clients. You could just coach first thing in the morning at a time that suits you and. And then spend the rest of the day focusing on online coaching. You could just do this even just like, let's say Monday to Wednesday, or even just like Saturday and Sunday. You could just totally pick it. You could do Monday to Friday, whatever works for you, and then fill up the rest of the time with online coaching so that whenever you travel, you don't have any of the downside. So that's what I would do if I was an extrovert. So if you're watching this, you're probably either a gym floor PT and you're wondering whether to go online, as I mentioned earlier, or you are about to get into the space. So if you're about to get into the space, some people say, do I need to become a PT first? I would say, no, you don't. The skills are quite different. They're not interchangeable, not many of them. So I would just go straight into online coaching. If you're a PT watching this, this bit's important. So I'd listen up is right now, you are watching this today and you've got two choices. Let me go with the green pen. Choice one is you start building your online business. And I would say that that's you jumping on the green line to building your online business. The second option is that you decide not to build your online business today and instead to stick, you know, being a PT over here. I would say this is having you drift. I would say that you're sacrificing freedom financially, vocationally, in terms of time. Jump on the green line and we're drastically increasing freedom. You have a bigger opportunity to earn. You buy back more time so you can spend it with friends, family. If you've got kids, you can actually put them to bed at night. You can travel without getting penalized and so on. Work from your sofa, a coffee shop, a sun lounger, it doesn't matter. Now, the biggest bit and the crux of this video is if you're watching this, you've made it this far. This must be on your mind whether you go online or not. So the final bit that I want to highlight is an important bit and that's that as time goes on, the gap between the two lines gets bigger and bigger and bigger. The harder it gets to get off that red line and make a success of it online. So think of it like this, that if you're here today, you've probably already got gym floor colleagues that are posting content, building their social media profiles, building a personal brand, working with online clients, starting to deliver social proof, starting to take market share. And the longer and longer and longer that you deliberate and you wait, you're drifting down this way with volatiles. Add another one into this, the volatility pt. As I mentioned, anytime your clients go away, you suffer. So the longer that you wait and deliberate, the bigger this gap becomes. While the marketplace becomes more sophisticated, other online coaches get ahead and you're left on the gym floor. So I would really just question, if you're watching this video, do you want to jump on the green line sooner than later? I would suggest that you jump on it sooner. Now, I've put a training together to help you do this, by the way. So there's a training. It's completely free, six minutes long. I'm just going to run you through the three initial key pillars that you need to start landing your first online clients. It'll be in the description somewhere below. It's totally free, six minutes. You got nothing to lose, go check it out.