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The Most Overlooked Continuing Education Opportunity for Fitness ProfessionalsWritten on December 22, 2011 at 9:29 am, by Eric Cressey I write a lot at EricCressey.com about various continuing education opportunities for fitness professionals. Reading this blog and other related websites on the ‘net is one. Checking out some of my products and those created by other folks in the industry is a second. Attending seminars is a third. Getting out to observe other coaches is a fourth; we have observational interns stop by all the time to check out Cressey Performance for a day or two. Fifth would be teaching. One of the best ways to master a topic is to have to teach it and answer questions about it. This is why giving seminars and doing staff/intern training makes me better at what I do. However, there is a sixth option out there that – to be very honest – blows all the rest out of the water. All of your clients/athletes have things to teach you.Case in point, Monday was the busiest day in Cressey Performance history, as lots of our college guys rolled back in from the fall semester and jumped in with our professional athletes, adult clients, and high school and middle school clientele. This week alone, we saw athletes from the following: 29 of the 30 MLB organizations
Over 20 area high schools and their associated middle schools I’m sure I’m forgetting a few – and this is on top of our adult clients, but that’s neither here nor there. The point is that every single one of these individuals has a unique background: different injury histories, different training backgrounds, and different responses to the training they are doing with you. Ask them questions about what they like and what they dislike. Find out what’s worked, and what hasn’t. Ask where their biggest shortcomings are; what do they struggle with on a daily basis? This form of education is the absolute best of the bunch for two reasons. First, it’s the best kind of information, because it’s already framed in the context of an existing schema in your mind (I covered this concept in an old blog, Strength and Conditioning Programs: How to Make Change Easier). Comparatively speaking, when you read about a concept in a book, you have to consider how it applies to a client/athlete of yours before you can apply it – and then you have to evaluate it to see what works. When you do “Q&A” with the individual in question, you get useful information that you can immediately apply. Second, it’s an opportunity to show clients/athletes that you genuinely care about them and are taking an interest in their unique situations. This simply doesn’t happen in facilities when they don’t do evaluations on the first day. And, it certainly doesn’t happen when everyone does the same program off the dry erase board. So, the next time you’re looking to pick up some new ideas to help your strength and conditioning philosophy evolve, start asking questions of the people who matter the most: your clients and athletes. For more business, training, and personal strategies, be sure to check out The Fitness Business Blueprint.
Related Posts 7 Steps for Attacking Continuing Education in the Fitness Industry Sign-up Today for our FREE Newsletter and receive a four-part video series on how to deadlift! Fitness Professionals: 5 Tips for Marketing to Physical TherapistsWritten on December 9, 2011 at 8:09 am, by Eric Cressey In light of my post earlier this week on how essential it is for fitness professionals to understand corrective exercise, I received an outstanding guest blog submission from physical therapist Ann Wendel that will serve as an excellent follow-up. As Eric alluded to in his recent post, it takes time and energy to build a network of providers in your area. Many fitness professionals are eager to market their services to physical therapists, but they may not know how to get started. Often, their attempts at marketing are ineffective and frustrating. I have worked in the health care industry for 20 years, starting my career as an ATC working with high school, college and professional athletes, and then as a PT/ATC in a variety of settings. Over the years, I have seen both good and bad efforts at marketing by local trainers. In this article, I will give you five pointers to help you market your expertise to the health care community.
1. Build the relationship: It takes time to build trust. You don’t want to come off like a used car salesman. If you rush into the PT clinic expecting to talk with one of the therapists and hand out your materials, you are probably wasting your time. When I worked in a busy orthopedic outpatient clinic, I saw a patient every 30 minutes for 8 hours straight, and I didn’t have the time to even come up to the front desk to meet the trainers who stopped by. Leaving your information without making a personal connection is futile. Call ahead to schedule a time to meet with the therapist. Then arrive on time and be prepared to present your business and explain why we should refer to you over others in your field. Offer us the ability to come to your studio/gym and observe you working with clients, or offer us a complimentary consultation so we can see how you work with a new client from start to finish. I have a policy of never referring to anyone (massage therapist, trainer, physician, etc.) unless I have personally worked with that person and been happy with their services. It’s our reputation on the line when we make a referral. In 20 years of practice I have only had one trainer offer me a complimentary session to see how he worked. I refer patients to him.2. Dress the part: When you go to meet with physical therapists or physicians, dress the part. You are entering a professional medical setting. What may be appropriate clothing for your gym may not be considered professional in a clinic. You don’t have to wear a suit; but, take a shower, put on clean, freshly ironed clothes, wear nice shoes, have clean fingernails. I’m being serious! Don’t show up to talk business in your sweats. We want to see that you are a professional and we want to be sure that the patients we are going to refer to you will be impressed by your appearance. Have your marketing materials ready to present, have business cards, have a website; we are going to want to check you out and so will our patients. And, if you participate in social media sites like Facebook and Twitter and have them linked to your professional website, make sure you are representing yourself as a professional. The last thing we want is to refer our 70 year old neighbor to you, and have them see half naked gym/beach/Spring Break pictures and talk of booty calls on your website.
3. Speak the lingo: We want to know that you are going to keep our patients safe. Know your anatomy, know the names of major surgeries and injuries, know about autoimmune diseases, have a basic knowledge of neurological problems such as stroke, MS, and Guillain-Barre. If we are going to refer post-rehab patients to you, we want to know that you understand the issue and know how to help the client regain strength safely. If you don’t have good knowledge of these issues, ask questions, do research, go to continuing education courses that cover post-rehab, ask to come in and observe what we are doing with patients of the same diagnosis. If you have already established the relationship with the therapist, it is easier to ask questions.
4. Have a desire to collaborate: Realize that physical therapists have gone through (at minimum) 7 years of schooling to get their degree. We have also done continuing education and post graduate certification courses. We don’t know everything, but we did learn a thing or two. I have had trainers come in to meet with me before who want to impress upon me how much they know, and they come off as so arrogant and unprofessional that I throw their cards away as soon as they leave. Come in ready to partner with us in treating the client. Share your knowledge in a non-aggressive manner. Most of us are looking for the right person to whom we can refer clients, and we are more likely to refer them to someone with whom we feel we can easily share information.5. Refer to physical therapy when appropriate: If the client starts to have a return of symptoms after discharge from physical therapy, worsening of symptoms or new symptoms refer them to a therapist for an evaluation. Know when it is time to bring in another set of eyes or hands to assess the client. Sometimes the patient is more appropriate for therapy for a while before they are ready to come back to you for post-rehab. Don’t worry, if you are good and the patient has developed a good relationship with you, they will be back. If you have developed a good relationship with a therapist, patients can easily transition between the two of you as appropriate for their condition. As healthcare continues to change, insurance reimbursement continues to decline and patients are limited to a certain number of physical therapy visits, we are going to need to develop a good network of trainers and fitness professionals. Start thinking about how you can make some small changes to make yourself more marketable than every other Joe out there. If you are taking the time to read this blog, you are clearly interested in becoming better at what you do. Understanding what therapists are looking for puts you ahead of everyone else already. Showing up to meet with a therapist looking professional, talking in a way that is non-aggressive while showing us that you do know what you are talking about, and having quality marketing materials makes you the perfect person to hand our patients off to for continued care.
Ann Wendel holds a B.S. in P.E. Studies with a concentration in Athletic Training from the University of Delaware, and a Masters in Physical Therapy from the University of Maryland, Baltimore. Based in Alexandria, VA, she is a Certified Athletic Trainer (ATC) licensed in Virginia, a Licensed Physical Therapist, and a Certified Myofascial Trigger Point Therapist (CMTPT). For more information, please visit Ann’s site, Prana Physical Therapy. Sign-up Today for our FREE Newsletter and receive a four-part video series on how to deadlift! So You Want to be a Personal Trainer?Written on February 3, 2011 at 6:44 am, by Eric Cressey New content on the way tomorrow, but in the interim, I got a kick out of this and figured some of you could use a good laugh today: The good news is that I have related posts that will actually help you in the process! Check them out: Want to be a Personal Trainer or Strength Coach? Start Here. 7 Steps for Attacking Continuing Education in the Fitness Industry The Most Important Thing for Rookie Trainers Sign-up Today for our FREE Newsletter and receive a detailed deadlift technique tutorial! Everything You Need to Know About Assess and CorrectWritten on January 18, 2011 at 5:33 am, by Eric Cressey We sometimes get questions about how our products differ from one another, so Mike Robertson stepped up and created the following webinar to describe a bit about one of our most popular products, Assess and Correct. If you’re on the fence about purchasing, this should help with your decision. “Assess and Correct may be the most comprehensive corrective exercise product on the market. I feel this DVD is a must have for anyone looking to make positive changes in their athletes’ bodies – or their own. The assessment section provides simple and detailed information for tests that can help anyone become more aware of their body’s limitations while the correction progressions offer forward thinking solutions that guarantee optimal performance. Eric, Bill and Mike have done it again!” Mike Irr “Assess and Correct is the most useful physical evaluation tool I’ve ever seen. It’s like having instant access to the knowledge that Hartman, Robertson, and Cressey have gained through years of experience studying anatomy and human movement, and working with real people. “But most important, it’s presented in a way that you can put it to use immediately. In fact, the design of the manual is genius because you’re given a series of simple tests to identify postural and movement problems, followed by smart exercise progressions–which you can tailor to a client’s ability—to correct any issues. So it’s a powerful tool that will help any coach create more effective training plans, customized to an individual’s true NEEDS. The upshot: Assess and Correct will make any fitness professional better at what he or she does. “One other note: Because I’m a fitness journalist, the authors offered me a free manual for review (common in the industry), but I had already purchased it. When they tried to refund my money, I requested that they not. The reason: I found the material to be so valuable that I felt like I SHOULD paid for it. I’m not sure there’s any testimonial I could give that’s better than that.” Adam Campbell Click here to purchase Assess and Correcting: Breaking Barriers to Unlock Performance!
Lose Fat, Gain Muscle, Get Strong: Eric Cressey’s Best Articles of 2010Written on December 31, 2010 at 4:46 am, by Eric Cressey Show and Go: High Performance Training to Look, Feel, and Move Better – This was obviously my biggest project of 2010. I actually began writing the strength and conditioning programs and filming the exercise demonstration videos in 2009, and put all the “guinea pigs” through the four-month program beginning in February. When they completed it as the start of the summer rolled around, I made some modifications based on their feedback and then got cracking on writing up all the tag along resources. Finally, in September, Show and Go was ready to roll. So, in effect, it took 10-11 months to take this product from start to finish – a lot of hard work, to say the least. My reward has been well worth it, though, as the feedback has been awesome. Thanks so much to everyone who has picked up a copy.
Optimal Shoulder Performance – This was a seminar that Mike Reinold and I filmed in November of 2009, and our goal was to create a resource that brought together concepts from both the shoulder rehabilitation and shoulder performance training fields to effectively bridge the gap for those looking to prevent and/or treat shoulder pain. In the process, I learned a lot from Mike, and I think that together, we brought rehabilitation specialists and fitness professionals closer to being on the same page.
Why President Obama Throws Like a Girl – A lot of people took this as a political commentary, but to be honest, it was really just me talking about the concept of retroversion as it applies to a throwing shoulder – with a little humor thrown in, of course! Overbearing Dads and Kids Who Throw Cheddar – This one was remarkably easy to write because I’ve received a lot of emails from overbearing Dads asking about increasing throwing velocity in their kids. What I Learned in 2009 – I wrote this article for T-Nation back at the beginning of the year, and always enjoy these yearly pieces. In fact, I’m working on my 2010 one for them now! What a Stressed Out Bride Can Teach You About Training Success – I wrote this less than a month out from my wedding, so you could say that I had a good frame of reference.
Baseball Showcases: A Great Way to Waste Money and Get Injured – In case the title didn’t tip you off, I’m not much of a fan of baseball showcases. Cueing: Just One Piece of Semi-Private Training Success – Part 1 and Part 2 - These articles were featured at fitbusinessinsider.com. I enjoy writing about not only the training side of things, but some of the things we’ve done well to build up our business. Three Years of Cressey Performance: The Right Reasons and the Right Way – This might have been the top post of the year, in my eyes. My job is very cool. How to Attack Continuing Education in the Fitness Industry – Here’s another fitness business post. Want to Be a Personal Trainer or Strength Coach? Start Here. – And another! The Skinny on Strasburg’s Injury – I hate to make blog content out of someone else’s misfortune, but it was a good opportunity to make some points that I think are very valid to the discussion of not only Stephen Strasburg’s elbow injury, but a lot of the pitching injuries we see in youth baseball. Surely, there are many more to list, but I don’t want this to run too long! Have a safe and happy new year, and keep an eye out for the first content of 2011, which is coming very soon!
Sign-up Today for our FREE Newsletter: Eric Cressey’s Best Articles: 2010Written on December 26, 2010 at 6:22 am, by Eric Cressey With 2010 winding down, I thought I’d use this last week of the year to direct you to some of the most popular content of the past 12 months here at EricCressey.com, as this “series” was quite popular last year. Today, we start with the most popular articles of the year; these are the pieces that received the most traffic, according to my hosting statistics. 5 Reasons You Aren’t Getting Stronger – This post came during the launch week of Show and Go: High Performance Training to Look, Feel, and Move Better. With some of the unique programming strategies outlined in Show and Go, it seemed like a good opportunity to outline some of the common mistakes folks make that I really sought to avoid when writing the program. How to Find Your Fitness Niche – The popularity of this post surprised me. I suppose it means that I have more fitness professionals (and aspiring fitness professionals) reading my blog than I’d previously thought. This piece discusses how I “fell” into my baseball training niche. Make My Kid Run Faster – Apparently, I’m not the only one who has to deal with the occasional crazy father who tells me how to train his kid! Clearing Up the Rotator Cuff Controversy – This post discusses my approach to structuring rotator cuff exercises throughout the training week. The Fascial Knock on Distance Running for Pitchers – This was a fun article to write because it combined a review (of Thomas Myers’ presentation at Perform Better) with a summary of my own experiences training pitchers. It’s always great to take the perspective of another and see how it meshes with your own philosophy – whether it confirms or refutes what you’re doing. High Performance Training without the Equipment (Installment 1) – I’m glad that I checked back on my statistics to find that this was so popular, as I haven’t gotten around to writing any subsequent installments. I’ll pick it up soon. I’ll be back soon with the top product reviews of 2010. Sign-up Today for our FREE Newsletter: Camaraderie: The Most Important Part of a Successful Training FacilityWritten on November 26, 2010 at 8:39 am, by Eric Cressey Today, we continue with ‘Stache Bash 2010 with another huge sale and another devastatingly good-looking mustache – and a very important message for those of you who (like me) own your own training facilities or hope to open one someday.
First off, the huge sale is pretty simple: everything on THIS PAGE (all collaborative products from Robertson, Hartman, and I) is on sale at 20% off. This includes Assess & Correct, Building the Efficient Athlete, the Single-Leg Solution, Bulletproof Knees, Magnificent Mobility, Inside-Out, and the Indianapolis Performance Enhancement Seminar DVD Set. You don’t even have to enter a coupon code; you can just go purchase them all in one place, and the discount is already applied. As for the mustache and the important message, check out this video of yesterday’s 4th Annual Cressey Performance Thanksgiving Day Lift, where we had about 30 people in attendance. The horseshoe ‘stache (minus the soul patch) makes an appearance at the 26-second mark. At risk of sounding overconfident, things have gone well for us at Cressey Performance since we opened our doors in 2007. We’ve had double digit percentage growth in each of the past three years and the job seems to get more and more fun each and every day. In the next two months, we’ll expand into an additional 1,000 square-feet. I talked a lot about how we’ve attacked things to get to where we are in a previous blog post, Three Years of Cressey Performance: The Right Reasons and the Right Way. One thing I’m not sure I’ve highlighted in my writing enough, though, is how important the camaraderie we have among our clientele is. “Creating camaraderie” was never a bulletpointed objective in our business plan, but in hindsight, it was the single-most important factor in our gym not only “making it,” but thriving in an economy where loads of other gyms were closing their doors just about every day. Each year, the Thanksgiving Day lift reminds me of that, as for me, Thanksgiving is all about family. In other words, if you’re going to spend a few hours with people on Thanksgiving morning (and get up ultra-early to do so on the morning after what is arguably the biggest partying night of the year), then you better enjoy the company of those people and see them as part of your extended family. We had high school athletes, college athletes, professional athletes, weekend warriors, Moms and Dads, and former interns in to get after it from 7:30AM to 9:30AM – and it really meant a lot to our staff. Sure, a lot of them were probably just there to see (and feel…and be photographed with) my mustache, but you get the point.
How do you create camaraderie among your clients?
The possibilities are endless in this regard, and the appropriate “strategies” (if you can even call “caring” a strategy) are going to be unique to each facility, but the end goal should always be the same: camaraderie. If you’re in the fitness industry and not working to create it both intentionally and unintentionally, you’re missing out on an important component of being successful. Thanks for reading; I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving. Don’t forget to check out the 20% off sale on all the aforementioned products HERE.
Sign-up Today for our FREE Newsletter: Cueing: Just One Piece of Semi-Private Training Success – Part 2Written on July 25, 2010 at 8:04 am, by Eric Cressey In Part 1, I talked about the importance of having an extensive set of effective cues to use with clients to get the ball rolling on a great training experience. However, cueing was just one piece of the coaching puzzle. It’s these other pieces that, in my eyes, make or break someone in the semi-private model. Here are a few of the factors you need to be successful as a semi-private coach: 1. Knowledge and Programming – As the adage goes, “failing to plan is planning to fail.” You need to have done your homework in order to not only write effective programming, but also know how to modify it based on individual needs. For this reason, I think that a lot of up-and-comers are actually smart to start off with some one-on-one training because it allows them to program specifically for a small number of clients and meticulously monitor the responses to those programs. And, it forces them to think through any modifications they need to make on those programs. As a frame of reference, when we hire a new employee, it takes approximately 6-12 months of education before I’m truly comfortable with them writing programs without me reviewing every one of them before the client sees the program. 2. Friendship – Here’s a straightforward one: if you’re a dork, loser, pain-in-the-ass, arrogant prick, or you smell bad, people aren’t going to want to be your friend. If they don’t want to be your friend, they certainly aren’t going to want to become your client – regardless of how good your programs and cues are. As an example, I’ve started a tradition of asking for reviews of interns at the six-week mark of their internship from some of our trusted clients. We just hand them a slip of paper with each intern’s name on it, and ask for the first two sentences that come to mind. One recent intern was not a popular one, as he received several negative responses, most notably “Kind of a douche. Not a good fit for CP.” Here was a kid who was enthusiastic, proactive, well-read, and had a strong resume – but none of it mattered because he sucked at making friends. This is a more crucial success factor in the semi-private model than one-on-one training, too. In personal training, you have time to cultivate very solid individual friendships with clients from the get-go because you have 2-4 hours of complete one-on-one time with them each week. You can ask about their kids, their vacation, their hemorrhoids, their stock portfolio, and their divorce settlement. When you have 3-6 other clients rolling at the same time, though, they chat with one another and not you – because you need to be busting your butt to keep things rolling on the training front. Don’t get me wrong; you’ll learn a ton about your clients over time and cultivate awesome friendships. In semi-private training, though, they’ll make a lot more friends beside you, too – and get results more affordably while you enjoy your job more. 3. Continuity – Semi-private models give rise to larger clienteles. A personal trainer might only be able to keep 20-30 clients at most, while in the semi-private model, coaches see a lot more people than that. As such, in businesses with more than one employee, you can’t expect to be present for every single training session. To keep the right flow, you have to hire and educate great people who you know will keep the trains running on time in your absence – whether it is with respect to programming, coaching, answering the phones, or just maintaining an unconditionally positive and energetic training environment. As a funny little example, I went on a quick trip to Orlando back in January after a speaking engagement in Tampa – so my business partners, Pete and Tony, were “manning the CP ship.” My fiancé and I were at Sea World, and I got a text message from CP client Kevin Youkilis of the Boston Red Sox: “Tony is fantastic. He really got the most out of me today. And Pete’s vert is legit.” I, of course, knew that Youk was screwing with me, and my business partners were laughing hysterically in the background because a) I am a workaholic and worry too much when I’m out of the office b) Pete’s vertical jump (37”) is slightly higher than mine (36”), and he doesn’t let me forget it. Truth be told, I was happy to be the target of the joke, as it meant that my staff was executing the exact program I’d written to a “T,” and they were joking around in the office (a sign that the place wasn’t in chaos, and they were keeping things fun and entertaining with the clients). At the same time, as much as you want continuity, it’s important to have employees with different abilities and unique traits that complement your own. For instance, Chris Howard, our newest employee, is a licensed massage therapist and has a master’s degree in nutrition. And, on a funnier note, the running joke among clients is that the second I leave, Tony puts techno music on the stereo. The clients get continuity with some variety, and Tony gets just a bit more feminine! 4. The Individual Touch – While it can be hard to completely make every client’s day when you might see 60-80 people over the course of a day, that doesn’t mean that you can’t go out of your way “after hours” to find ways to put smiles on their faces. One example: in our case (predominantly baseball players), we follow all our players – from middle school all the way to the pros – in the papers and email/text guys whenever they get some love in the press. I also make a ton of introductions between our high school players and college coaches from my extensive network on that front, or I make a phone call to find a place for our pro guys to train or get soft tissue work when they’re on the road in a city where I have a contact. Sometimes, it’s as simple as just going out there to watch a game and cheer for them. Other examples include sending thank you notes for referrals or merely connecting a client with a practitioner (e.g., manual therapy, sport-specific coach) in a related field. You may only see them five hours a week, but that gives you another 163 hours each week to be a valuable resource and friend to them. 5. Organization – My general rule of thumb is that every hour of training requires at least one hour of planning. Here are Cressey Performance’s hours: Mo: 12-7:30PM That’s 45.5 hours (closer to 50 during busy seasons). My business partner, Pete, puts in about 40 hours a week on his own just handling billing, scheduling, phone duties, website maintenance, the CP blog, and other behind-the-scenes organizational tasks. I can tell you that both Tony and I spend about 6-8 hours per week on programming in addition to our coaching responsibilities, and I handle a lot of the phone calls and inquiries from agents and teams, plus the more complex questions that aren’t in Pete’s scope of expertise (exercise science). Chris Howard puts in a few hours a week on programming. There is always a staff in-service on Monday morning of at least 30 minutes. None of this includes the reading/continuing education we all do on our own, or the work Tony and I put in with our personal blogs, which are undoubtedly very influential in driving clients to Cressey Performance. And, it doesn’t cover any of the “after-hours tech support” from phone calls/text messages and Facebook/email messages that I think really separates us as a business. We are here to set the clients up for success, not just punch the clock and unlock/lock the doors. Wrap-up These are only five factors that quickly came to mind, and there are certainly many more that could have made this post much longer. Many of them will be influenced by your niche, business model, client-to-coach ratio, facility size and “flow,” hours of operation, amenities, and a host of other factors. Just make sure you’re looking past just the cues; there is much more to being a successful coach in a semi-private model. Cueing: Just One Piece of Semi-Private Training Success – Part 1Written on July 22, 2010 at 5:00 am, by Eric Cressey With the boom of semi-private training in recent years, there has also been a boom of questions from fitness professionals on how on Earth it is logistically possible to train several people when they may all come from different backgrounds and have different needs. Back in 2006, I was one of those people – so I can certainly speak from perspective. I did almost all one-on-one personal training for about a year from the summer of ’05 to the summer of ’06, when I moved to Boston and went out on my own as an independent contractor. When I arrived in Boston, all these questions on how to make it work in the semi-private model were rattling around my head. Admittedly, I entered this model cautiously, doing 50/50 private and semi-private training as I got my feet wet with it. By July of 2007, when I opened my own facility, every client was involved in the semi-private model and loving it for the affordability, camaraderie, and increased training frequency it afforded. It took time, but I’d learned the ropes. Now, three years in, I’ve taught it to an entire staff, plus the 22 interns we’ve had since we opened our doors. Looking back, I had been an idiot. I’d spent the overwhelming majority of 2003-2005 in college strength and conditioning settings – watching 18-22 year-old athletes thrive in a semi-private model (in the weight rooms, on the field/court, in the athletic training room, and in their courses and study halls). During my undergraduate years, I’d done an internship in cardiac and pulmonary rehabilitation, where I watched people rehabilitate from near-death experiences – in a semi-private model. Physical therapy? Semi-private model. And, as Alwyn Cosgrove reminded me, his cancer treatments were done in a semi-private format – and he’d beaten Stage 4 cancer twice. There must be something to that. What was I missing, then? Very simply, I thought that “cueing” and “coaching” were synonymous. Basically, “cueing” amounts to knowing what to say, when to say it, and to whom to say it in order to elicit a desired change from a client. Ask anyone who has been successful in this industry, and they’ll tell you that your cues get better as you become more experienced as a coach. It’s why my staff and I can teach a new exercise to a client much faster than an intern can; we’ve built our “cueing thesaurus” to know what to say – and what to say as a modification if the first cue doesn’t get the job done. No doubt, having a good “cue” arsenal is huge. It’s essential for us in the first 8-12 weeks when we’re intensively teaching new clients technique and getting them ingrained in our system. If done correctly from the get-go, good cueing sets a client up for tremendous future success. If they know what “chest up” means on a deadlift, they’ll get it on a lunge, split-stance cable lift, or medicine ball drill. And, for me, this speaks volumes for why client retention of those who have been with us for 2-3 months or more is so imperative; they become “students of the game” and are actually easier to coach because they have more experience and a bigger exercise pool from which to draw because a) they’ve learned compound exercises (or derivatives of those exercises) and b) we’ve ironed out a lot of their imbalances. As a cool little story, since the summer of 2007, I’ve been training a kid who is has just finished his freshman year on a scholarship to pitch for a PAC-10 powerhouse. I know his college strength coach now – and he told me that this pitcher is like having an additional strength coach in the weight room. You want clients like that – because it means that you just have to write good programs, crank up the music, and continue to develop the friendships you’ve built with them. In reality, though, it isn’t always that easy. Cueing is just one piece of the coaching puzzle – and those other factors will be my focus in Part 2. - Eric Cressey CP Internship Blog by Sam Leahey – It’s the Person that Matters, not the ProgramWritten on May 27, 2010 at 6:07 am, by Eric Cressey Today’s guest blog comes from current Cressey Performance intern, Sam Leahey. Many of the valuable lessons an up and coming Strength & Conditioning Coach learns do not fall under the guides of content knowledge (coaching, program design, etc.). On the contrary, many educational moments manifest in a social sense (interpersonal skills). During my Cressey Performance internship, this semester I’ve come to appreciate even more so how a coach’s success in the private sector of the profession (training facilities) is largely contingent upon the one’s ability to interact with people in a respectful yet confident and authoritative manner. More specifically, “no one cares how much you know until they know how much you care.” To this I would add, “no one cares how much you know and what results your program can give them, until they know how much you care about satisfying their personal needs.” In other words, through trial and error I’ve learned that a client or athlete really has more interest in-whether they know or admit it-how you make them feel as a person as opposed to how well-written and effective your program is. While this may be true in the collegiate setting, I find this truism has a larger bearing on a coach’s success in the private sector. This principle is discussed in the book Peak, by Chip Conley. He describes “The Customer Pyramid,” which is a derivative of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. He articulates how, in business, if you do not satisfy the base level needs of your clientele, they will never have the “peak experience” that you wish for them to have.
When we apply this concept to our field, S&C and personal training, there are a few implications worth noting, starting with the first level and moving upward. First, clients coming through our doors expect to feel valued as people. They expect to be important to you and your business. When you treat people appropriately, it fosters satisfaction from the clients towards your business. This should only be the beginning of a customer’s experience at your training facility because if it ended here then your business would never reach its highest potential. This area is where we need to spend the most time investing in the customers’ experience. Most importantly, we need to realize this step forms the foundation of our customers’ experience, or, the base level of the pyramid. If you noticed in the depiction above the “Meets Expectations” category is the largest of the three. The bigger the base of our customer pyramid then the bigger the subsequent categories will be. We need to then aim to meet our customers’ desires as well. It’s pretty intuitive that a personal training client or athlete who is paying for your services actually desires results. But what’s not so obvious I think is that because of the lack of true results in our profession, mainly from the stain of commercial gyms, our potential clients have put actual program “results” in the desires category instead of keeping it in the expectations category. Believe it or not, an athlete may have signed up to train with you who previously trained elsewhere and left the experience with absolutely no, or barely any, improvements in strength, power, speed, body composition, etc., (aka results). Therefore, clients of today – be it a soccer mom just looking for fat loss or an athlete trying to make the varsity team at school – may have lowered their standards for what they consider “results.” If you can (and you should be able to) give results to your clients, then they will be committed to you and your business because they know their money is well spent and they’re actually getting the results they desired when they signed up for training.
Now comes the final level: the “peak experience” we all would like our clients and athletes to have. If you’re a business owner, you’d like to be able to guarantee each and every person who walks through your doors reaches this level. Unfortunately, the fact of the matter is that we really can’t guarantee it. All we can do is keep buffering the base and middle level of the customer pyramid and the “needs” will take care of themselves. So, what exactly is the “peak experience” and what unrecognized needs does it meet? Honestly, we can’t define it. All we can do is describe it. It’s almost a surreal experience, one they didn’t realize they would have before they came to your facility. It’s one that leaves each client evangelizing others and bringing in more customers better than any marketing plan ever could. It’s to the point that a person can’t even begin to think about training elsewhere because they “just HAVE to train at (your place).” It’s that unique feeling someone gets when they walk through the door of your facility because they know what’s about to transpire, and it’s the feeling they leave with afterward. Some young athletes can have such a euphoric experience that they can’t even fathom using equipment brands other than what you house at your facility. While that’s an extreme case, it’s a reality in some places and all goes under the “peak experience” category the folks at CP have worked to cultivate. The peak experience is best described as the culmination of environment and atmosphere CP provides its customers. It includes the interaction of staff members, interns, other customers, facility equipments, sights, sounds, etc. All these variables added together can help us describe that peak experience.
Conclusion Here I want to make myself vulnerable to the readers. Being young and eager to learn I’ve found it can be easy sometimes to get caught up in the scientific and technical side of things and effectively skip past the base level needs of some of the clients with whom I was working. Mistakenly, I wanted clients to have all their unrecognized needs met right away and right now! There were also times where I jumped right to coaching someone without taking the time to build a relationship with them first. While this might in some collegiate settings be acceptable, it does not yield a good outcome in the private sector. In fact, I would go as far as to say that as a college student this is the biggest mistake I’ve made in my learning process. There have been specific instances where an athlete simply did not like me because the very first day we met I was trying to coach him/her instead of trying to establish rapport first AND THEN coach him/her. Remember – “no one cares how much you know and what results your program can give them, until they know how much you care about satisfying their personal needs.” Essentially I was skipping past this client’s base level of needs to trying to cultivate higher lever needs first. I’m open and honest about my experiences for a couple reasons: 1. I’ve always appreciated when those who have gone before me were candid about their mistakes so that young up-and-comers like me could learn from them. 2. I think too many people subconsciously believe that just because someone is an internet author, they do everything right. You’d be surprised! Whether it’s a big name in the profession or one of their interns everyone has made both big and small mistakes in their career. Some were easily recovered from while others might have even been so extreme that the outcomes were career ending. At any rate, we should all strive to learn from our own mistakes and that of others and be diligent to make a permanent change that will prevent us from screwing up again. Make sure we are investing most of our efforts satisfying base level needs of our clients before getting them up to higher levels. Sam Leahey CSCS, CPT can be reached at sam.leahey@gmail.com. |
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