Efficient Online Coaching: ChatGPT Strategies with Chris Liddle

You're listening to the PT Profit podcast, episode number 358. Today I am talking to you about efficient online coaching chatgpt strategies with myself, Chris Little. Are you ready? Let's get started.

Hi, I'm Beverly Simpson, former fitness manager turned online personal training business owner. And this podcast is where smart fitness professionals, including trainers and clinicians, discover how to increase client performance and movement, package and position their products and services and get out of their own way so that they can increase their revenue to live a life that they love without sleazy sales. Welcome to the PT Profit Podcast.

Welcome back to the PT Profit Podcast. My name is Chris. I coach at BE Simpson Fitness and do a lot of other things behind the scenes and actively work with other fitness businesses as a coach or even as a consultant with their marketing. Today I want to share with you a behind the scenes look at how I actively use ChatGPT to streamline my programming, help with my nutrition coaching and enhance my client engagement. So if you've been looking for ways to boost your efficiency and keep your clients progressing and engaged, this episode is definitely for you. Let's dive in. Welcome back to the PT Profit Podcast. My name is Chris Little. I work behind the scenes here at Bims and Fitness. I've been working with beverly since about 2022, so time flies and I'm going to quickly give some backstory if you are not familiar with me. I still actively coach people in person at the gym and online, but both through my own business and as one of the coaches with a team fitness founded by Alex McBry, who you may have heard on the podcast before Now, Alex's specialty is using his psychology background to help with the onboarding with the ongoing disconnection and accountability of our AT members. So there's going to be times when I'm referring to some of our onboard processes and some of my AI integration. So if you want to learn more about that process, I highly recommend going back through the episodes and revisiting the episodes with Alex. Now, I'm going to run through this stuff as efficiently as I can. So you may find that you might have to re listen to parts and you may find that you need to dive a bit deeper into some of the things that pique your interest. If there is anything that I discuss on this episode that you want more detail on that you like us to do a follow up episode on, please reach out to Beverly, make your request. You can find her on social media at Bimson Fitness or you can email info b.com if you want to get me, email chrisfitness.com and if you want to follow me on social media at Christian little liddle with Ds so l I D D L E Now I'm going to dive right back into this episode to kind of COVID the topics I wanted to cover with regards to integrating Chat GBT with your business. For full disclosure, I am basing this off of the chat GPT plus aka the chat GPT 40 as it will be seen visually. So if your prompts or your responses differ from mine and you are using the basic chatgpt that could be. However, I will say that the basic Chat GPT will get you pretty far with a lot of things that you throw in its direction. Now the first use case scenario that I'm going to outline for the use of ChatGPT is directly targeted towards people who coach general population where they're maybe updating the program every four weeks and sometimes those updates are due to a necessary progression like an increase in weight, and sometimes those updates are are simply to to keep being active fun for those people. There's a lot of studies that will show that doing the same thing consistently over an extended period of time, like running a 12 week program, can work really well for someone where you wouldn't necessarily want to swap out the exercises too much, but sometime for general population to change it from a reverse lunge to a Bulgarian split squat or to a machine kickback, glute kickback, however you want to look at it, changing it and still targeting similar muscles can keep working out exciting for people. So it's for that context that I'm going to suggest this next use case scenario for ChatGPT. And here's the way I do it now when I am programming people online, I currently use a platform called PG Distinction and I will be programming it on just a desktop computer. If I have a program in editing mode, I can highlight everything in that program from the exercise name itself to the reps, the sets, the tempo, the load, any additional notes and it will basically highlight it in sort of like a table form and then I can paste it into ChatGPT and request that based on the exercises and the equipment selected that it provide me with some modifications or progressions and I can even include in that prompt that I want it to be targeting similar muscle groups. I just want a different exercise selection. Where this can be really advantageous is if you like. For myself sometimes I'm doing programming on a weekend and I'm updating maybe like 15 to 20 programs all in one evening and you can get brain fog. You can kind of forget like what is another exercise that targets these muscle groups. So that's where I like to leverage this because what it'll do is it'll then as long as it understood your prompt correctly, it would then give you a suggestion of exercises using probably very similar rep schemes. Sometimes if it gets the prompt wrong, it will simply progress the exercise by prescribing a heavier weight, which can work for a lot of people. But if you need more novelty it could. You could give it a follow up prompt just to clarify that you need just a different exercise selection with similar like volume lifted per session so that it's not going to make it impossible to recover from that workout in contrast with the workout from the week prior, but rather it captivates their intention attention, keeps them engaged and keeps them in the program, therefore keeping your business running in a rewarding way so that your people are having fun, they're getting value, they're getting results and you're keeping them in the program so they're not feeling discouraged or bored. In this day and age we have to get creative to keep people from getting bored when it comes to their fitness routines. So that would be use case number one is just simply like using ChatGPT to assess your current workouts, whether you are copying and pasting them from a Google sheet, from PG Distinction or from your go to workout platform form of choice. If you can, even if you take a screenshot of what the workout looks like, you can upload that into Chat GPT plus. So there's a lot of ways to achieve that desired outcome of giving you suggestions of different exercises to select. And of course always proofread any suggestion that you get from ChatGPT because there can be glitches, errors, there can be times when you have more proper context for that scenario or for exercise science or nutrition science. So don't blindly follow everything that AI gives you, but allow it to be part of the team to help you support your clients and to help you be efficient with your time so that your business becomes that much more scalable. Second suggestion here is now this is regards to when you're working with somebody as a nutrition coach, a lot of the time they'll have an idea of their macronutrients. They understand that they have an idea of like tracking their food, just being mindful of like portion sizes and ensuring that what amount of protein they think they're getting is the amount that they're getting. So sometimes they just have to get familiar with, like what is a serving of chicken in contrast with what they may have prior thought was a serving of chicken. Maybe it's they need a bit more chicken to hit their goals. So what this prompt will basically do and what I use as an example was I said I need you to create a list of staple meals for someone who is 180 pounds, looking to lose 20 pounds of fat, active three to four hours per week with moderate intensity workouts, and works a desk job. And I said I need detailed macronutrients and portions and there are no allergies or dietary restrictions. So I get pretty specific with these prompts. And these prompts tend to mirror a lot of the requirements that you would use for, let's say like the macro calculator for precision nutrition, where they have the integrated wizard that basically produces a PDF for you that will have very similar resources and suggestions. And it is just a guide and not necessarily meal plan. But with this we can custom tailor the responses it gives us. And in some cases it might actually give us two responses. So I will explain literally what it procured for me. It gave me a response number one which was very kind of broad in that it didn't necessarily give me the macronutrients that were customized for my person, but it gave very good suggestions for the general public. So it suggested Greek yogurt parfait, suggested oatmeal with banana and almond butter. This suggested veggie omelette, it suggested whole grain avocado toast. That was all breakfast items. And when it's all said and done, any combination of like two to three of those items would help that person reach their goal. But it might not be quite as straightforward, depending on how you deliver that information. Because some people might see it and they're thinking that's a lot of food. And so it might not as actionable because sometimes if you give people too many options, they have a hard time making the direct choice. So scenario two, which is also great, gets very, very specific. So in its response it outlines its calorie target, which for this instance it suggested 2000 to 2200 per day. It suggested 180 to 200 grams of protein. It suggested 150 to 200 grams of carbohydrates, and it suggested 60 to 80 grams of fats for the first meal. It just picked one meal. And so it suggested high protein omelette with veggies, where it prescribes 3 whole eggs, 100 grams egg whites, 50 grams spinach, 50 grams bell peppers, 20 grams onions, 1 tablespoon olive oil for cooking, 1 slice of whole grain toast is optional and the macronutrient outline that it gives is 400 calories with 35 gram protein, 20 gram carb and 20 gram fat. And then meal two they suggested grilled chicken sandwich. Meal three, they suggested turkey or beef stir fry with quinoa. And meal four was Greek yogurt and berries. And meal five was salmon with sweet potato and asparagus. And then snack option was protein shake with almond butter. So where I find this kind of stuff to be helpful is let's say you procured these sort of like template ideas and then your person said, well actually I am low fodmap, so I have to be very mindful of the specific cooking styles of foods that I have and how they are prepared. Or perhaps they are someone who is very sensitive to high sodium items and in that case it could just be that they need to prepare more food at home. In contrast with having food that has a lot of preservatives, that has a lot of different like flavorings and stuff that could increase the sodium. Like for example, if you are relying on a lot of canned food, there's a high likelihood that it's going to be higher in sodium. For many people it doesn't make a big difference, but for some people it totally could. And to be quite honest, a great guideline for leading people down the road of better sustainable choices without prescribing very specific meals to them is suggesting more whole foods, more lean protein sources, whether they are vegetarian or not. A whole food protein source, lean protein source. For someone who is, let's say omnivore, could be like beef and pork and chicken, etc. If they happen to be vegetarian, then you'd be looking at tofu and lentils and other high protein items like beans, etc. You get a bit more creative. But the cool thing with ChatGPT is you can input these little details and it can give you updated suggestions. And what I like to look at this as is it helps people from getting stuck and it helps people from resorting to the more drastic, less advantageous choice being if you gave them a suggestion to make a quesadilla and then they went and they made that quesadilla instead of ordering like a crunchwrap supreme and getting it delivered to their house, that's a win. Perhaps they don't like case ideas, but they liked the idea of creating a stir fry and you gave them an outline for how what ingredients go into a stir fry and they're at the grocery store and they have this recipe for stir fry that they they didn't have before. It comes down to that concept of proper planning prevents poor performance. So that is a scenario where I'd use that in. In a lot of cases where somebody really struggles with nutrition, I find that just providing them with some additional suggestions for if they are stuck and they want to choose a meal that they prepare for themselves, but they want it to be a meal that aligns with the goals that we've outlined for them, which can be very broad. Meaning that like somebody can have a calorie target of 2200, but maybe they hit 2700 one day, it's not the end of the world. Or maybe they hit 1800 one day is not the end of the world. It's sort of one of those things that you pay more attention to the long term trends than being super obsessive over measuring your food, over cutting out certain food. You still want to take a very mindful approach in that this is a long journey and it's not a kind of like a crash and burn, do it or fail kind of scenario because you want to give people a sense of autonomy and not create any kind of disordered eating. That is the last thing that we want to do. So our next use case scenario for using Chat GPT is we are going to look at the big five personality and parq. Now I want to use these kind of in an intertwined way because as you are learning about your personality with the people you're working with, you are in many cases legally obligated to also look at their PAR Q responses, essentially ensuring that they have clearance from a doctor to be physically active and to get more insight as to their health history, anything that we should be aware of with past surgeries, etc. So the prompt that I used to get my questions and I also add a little extra so I can kind of like walk you through how you can action this in your business. On the back end is I said word for word, I said I need to create a list of questions based on the big five personality traits in conjunction with a standardized parque assessment. And I said this will in turn be turned into a client profile to be used internally for demonstration purposes. Please include a mock example so I can see the extent to which a profile could be compiled when you are using it. You're not necessarily going to make a mock example, but you're going to get a list of questions and when you have the answers to those questions you can create either. You can either have ChatGPT suggest a profile compiled based on the responses, or you can have a preset profile of your own where you can go through like their level of extroversion, their level of conscientiousness. Perhaps you're got a section for like what workout equipment they have access to at home, which gym they go to when they entered the program, their pet names, fun facts about them, things you've learned in your check ins, etc like these are the kinds of things, this is the level of personalization that we offer with a team fitness. So this is the reason that I'm giving that as an example because it's things that are used in the industry that work really well for client retention and I'm basically giving you all the secrets of the business. That said, we all live by the abundance mindset and even if we tell you everything that we know, there's room for all of us to help people. So I'm not too concerned about giving away the secrets. Now when it comes to the big five personality traits questions, an example of the questions are going to be under the topic of openness to experience. The questions are going to be how open are you to trying new types of workouts or physical activities? And the next question is describe a time when you tried a new fitness activity, what motivated you to try it and how did you feel about the experience. You can also format this to be more multiple choice questions or yes or no questions as it can help you in creating your final form in the end. But as ChatGPT advances further and further, it can also handle long form responses with just as much accuracy as short form. So it's. It's up to you. Just saying. You have the option to fine tune this if you find that asking people to fill out long form questions is daunting for them. If you find that you need to distill it down to just a quick and easy intake form, as pain free as possible for them on their end, as efficient as possible. You can adjust your prompt accordingly to get a different outcome, but this one basically handles the big five personality traits questions. First it asks them on the openness to experience, the conscientiousness, the extroversion, the agreeableness and the neuroticism. And that truly is the big five. You could make this more extensive in which it asks more questions for each trait, but in this one it asks for a two questions per personality trait, which I think should give you a very good idea of that person. Now for the PARQ assessment questions. Most certifying bodies will give you like a template form. And so these questions are generally very similar. The questions that it supplies are, has your doctor ever said that you have a heart condition and that you should only do physical activity recommended by a doctor? And then it asks, do you feel pain in your chest when you do physical activity? And then it asks, in the past month, have you had chest pain when you were not doing physical activity? Do you lose balance because of dizziness or do you ever lose consciousness? Do you have a bone or joint problem that could be made worse by a change in your physical activity? Is your doctor currently prescribing drugs, for example, water pills, for your blood pressure or heart condition? And do you know of any other reason why you should not do physical activity? So this is a very brief PARQUE assessment question form and you might actually want to get it more detailed. Additionally, a lot of people in their PAR Q will include their waiver. So if you have the proper disclaimer outlining what they're acknowledging, for most of us, we can either put in a box that allows them to virtually sign or allows them to put in place their initials first and last in place of a signature. Just as long as is acknowledged in that form that that is what action they're taking, that when they put in their initials, when they sign virtually, that this is acknowledging that they have understood the risks of exercise, that they are essentially not going to sue you. And of course everybody that's working in this industry should have liability insurance in case anybody needs any kind of support with regards to something unexpected happening and them needing to be taken care of or kept safe. So earlier in that prompt I said I was wanting to do a mock example and the mock example looks as such. This client's name is John Doe. His age is 35. Gender is male, big first personality traits. John is open to trying new workouts, particularly those that offer variety and challenge. He recently tried rock climbing because he enjoys activities that combine physical exertion and mental stimulation. This can be really helpful for the person programming the workouts. And when you are learning that they are open to trying new workouts, or maybe it says that they prefer new workouts, then you can understand where it can be advantageous to update to kind of different stuff, different equipment, different variations, etc. For those people who are getting updates every four weeks and then for conscientiousness, it is saying that John is very disciplined and prefers a well structured workout plan. He follows his routine meticulously and sets clear achievable goals. And it goes on to outline extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. For the PARQ assessment summary, it outlines that there are no known heart conditions, no chest pain during or outside physical activity, no balance issues or loss of consciousness. And it says John has a history of knee pain but has not experienced it recently, and medication not on any prescribed medication and other concerns is no other known reasons to avoid physical activity. And then it also gives us an internal use summary where it says that John is a highly motivated individual with a structured approach to fitness. His openness to new experiences makes him a good candidate for diverse workout programs. As I kind of outlined earlier, he thrives in social settings which should be leveraged to maintain his engagement. However, occasional self doubt may require reassurance and positive reinforcement to keep him on track. So these are where you can start to understand the value of kind of creating a community within a Facebook group for your people. If all of your people kind of like need that sort of like sense of community, or it could reinforce the value of just checking in randomly. A lot of people who are on a fitness journey really like to kind of feel validated with their efforts or when they've done something well, they want to be able to hear it from you. People like to hear their own name when you were finishing up a call with them. If you can say their name so they can hear you say it. When you are congratulating them on good work, say their name. All these things are kind of like soft skills that get picked up over time. But if you're tuning into this episode, I'm helping you out. Might be saving you some time, might be giving you a friendly reminder. If you've been in the game longer than me, you never know who is tuning into this. That said, we're going to take a little quick break. If you are enjoying this episode, please go to Spotify Rate 5 stars. Or if you listen on Apple, go to Apple Podcasts and leave five five stars. But then also leave us a rating so that we can see what you've enjoyed about the episode. If you find that there's anything that you would like us to present differently, or perhaps you really enjoyed a topic and you want more of that, in that instance you can reach out to us directly. Info bitness.com will get you Beverly and Chris Bimson. Fitness.com will get you me me. And it'll be a combination of both of us where we're able to action your feedback and make it happen on to the next chat GPT topic Use case scenario in this instance we've actually done this for an accelerator who works with us. She wanted to create a custom macronutrient calculator that she could embed into her web website. Now I will have you know that ChatGPT wasn't always able to do this, but in a recent update it can now do this quite seamlessly. The things to pay attention to are the formulas that it'll display. The basically the Python formula because it's going to outline how it comes to its calculations and there are going to be some differences of opinion in its calculations. I'll give you an example. In my first prompt I basically said I need to create a Python script for assessing someone's macronutrient targets based on their body type, goals, lifestyle and dietary needs. Now after making this initial prompt, it gave me ectomorph, mesomorph and endomorph in that instance. Like that is not necessarily a protocol that I leverage for my people. I'm more so looking as to when I'm thinking about body type. I'm thinking about a competitive athlete versus someone who gets gets 2,000 steps per day or less on a regular reoccurring basis. So hopefully that makes sense. I am basically trying to identify the lifestyle of that person through their body type and not necessarily trying to go off of an infographic and decide if they're shaped like a bear or shaped like a cheetah. Like that is oftentimes what we'll see when it comes to ectomorph, mesomorph and endomorph. And there will be differing opinions. There will be people who listen to this and they respectfully disagree with me. But. Well, what I will say is if you want your form to calculate it with that, then you would prompt that. If you want it not to, then you would give it a follow up prompt as I did. So just about everything else worked quite well, but I had to follow up and give it another prompt. And I said by body type I'm more so referring to muscular and athletic versus sedentary. And so after I gave it that then it gave me a new formula for base macros and it basically said if they're muscular and athletic, the protein is going to be higher and the carbohydrates are going to be consistent and the fat is going to be lower. And then if they're sedentary is set the protein as just a little bit lower and the fat at a moderate 30% and the carbs at 0,45. When it all comes down to it, there is going to be different setups and you can clarify those. Meaning that if you're looking at protein, fats and carbs, some people will say 30, 35 and 35, some people will say 35, 30, 35, some people in this instance will say 30, 25, 45. And when it comes down to what difference it makes, if they're on track with their energy balance, their calorie intake, their energy output, it's, it's kind of negligible. But there is a lot of merit to ensuring that someone, an athletic who has goals to gain muscle is reaching their target protein goal, which is a lot more efficient to achieve if the protein ratio is higher. Now, going further through this, it will create all your formulas for Python. But then you might be wondering, how do I embed this into my website? So the follow up prompt that I gave is now can we make this so I can embed it into my website? And so what it'll do is it creates an HTML form and that HTML form would then be copied into a custom code section of your website. It's also going to include the JavaScript in this instance. There's a lot of different ways that you can put code in, but when you use JavaScript you're going to save it as macros js and it basically has like the back end brains of the calculator so that as people are filling in the form, the calculator is able to detect their inputs and give the outputs intelligently and not just be a blank form with inputs. And then you press submit and that does nothing. So if you have questions when you're going through this process, the really nice thing is you can do follow up prompts and say please explain this to me in terms of very beginning, beginner level tech user. And it'll basically make it a bit lower level so you can kind of follow along, do the steps. And to be quite honest, these are the kinds of things that we help accelerators with all the time. So if you're at a level where you want to grow your business and you want to implement things like this, probably the path of least resistance is to join the program and work with us. But with that being said, we don't believe in pressure selling anybody and we're happy to help you for free with this very valuable podcast. And so now I'm going to share with you one last instance where you can use ChatGPT. So an instance that I like is I will use ChatGPT to help with show notes of podcasts and with YouTube. And I will will often have to kind of tweak the messaging or like the language used to make it suit my end goal. But it's great for kind of like fleshing out the the body of the text. Example being I will get the transcription of the episode or the video. I tend to generate it by using descript. But there are a lot of different ways that you can do it, whether it be through a free platform or through like a transcription add on that maybe you have through zoom. Or you can let's say you upload the video onto YouTube. After a period of time, it'll automatically caption it and you can export the SRT file. You can also use capcut. In the past you could export the SRT file for free, but now you have to have the capcut Pro addition to export the SRT file just like as a text file. But you can also in some cases highlight the text in like the caption section to export it that way. Long story short, to be able to take the rough transcription from any piece of content and then ask for show notes plus guest profile and key moments in the episode or video is pretty powerful because then you can tailor the messaging to kind of target your key audience, to maybe promote your offer, to just make sure that all the links are accurate. But like Chat GPT is to the level where if I have a guest on the podcast and that guest outlines some of the websites that you can find more information about them, Chat GPT can take those websites and incorporate them as hyperlinks in the show notes that it creates for you. But that said said, it can also make typos, it can also scramble information, it can make inaccurate statements. And so it's still up to you to proofread things, to test things, and to make sure that everything is the way that it is in reality. So just so that you are not confusing yourself by trusting ChatGPT too much. But it's a game changer for anybody who has hosted a podcast since before ChatGPT was something in our industry. If you've ever had a podcast prior to 2021, and you have looked into like, how can I transcribe this? It used to be a very time consuming, very expensive process that only the most successful podcast could efficiently do. Now we can do it in moments. You could in an afternoon probably transcribe 50 different podcast episodes of yours and repurpose them into blog posts. You can take some of the messaging and put it into social media content. You can take these Things and prompt ChatGPT to create like a skeleton structure for how it would look like in a week's worth of content. With different topics to speak on and different problems that could be solved with that content, you can get creative. There is so many possibilities. And truly at the end of the day, if you are not leveraging ChatGPT and AI tools within your day to day, it puts you in a very vulnerable position where the person who is leveraging these tools will most likely outperform you. I find utilizing AI helps with times when I have decision fatigue, when I feel overwhelmed, when I know what has to be done but I just don't have the time to do it all by myself is like adding more people to my team and I work with a lot of other teams. So it's a very powerful tool that we should all continue to learn, but then also know where it can fall short with its inaccuracies or with its selecting the wrong variables for a formula, such as for macro calculation. And even with the glitches that may come up when it is prescribing a suggested meal, it could say 30 grams protein when in fact that actually has 25. Or it could say this will meet your goals for the day and it gives that person 70 grams of protein when in fact they needed to be at 180 to 200 grams of protein for the day. So always use your education as part of your methodology when leveraging ChatGPT. It is not a replacement for your intellect, it is simply something that can bolster you and help you be more successful, be more resilient, be more equipped in the industry. So all that said, thank you so much for tuning in. You can follow me on Instagram Hristian Little. You can definitely follow Beverly if you don't already. You really should if you aren't. Beverly is always giving out tangible, actionable tips for marketing and growing your fitness business. And we really appreciate that you tuned into this episode. If you like this episode, let us know and otherwise we will catch you for the next one.

Thank you for listening to the PT Profit podcast. If you like this episode, chances are your friends will too. So it would be a huge service to us if you would please leave us a review and share with your friends on your social media channels. When you leave us a review, be sure to take a screenshot of it and email that screenshot to my team@info simpsonfitness.com and we'll send you a very special Instagram podcast that will show you how to create compelling content so that your ideal clients come to you. And you go from wanting clients to a waitlist of clients ready for your services. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode.