Working with a fitness coach online has a number of benefits. It allows you to choose from thousands of experienced trainers worldwide to find the perfect fit for you, it’ll provide the flexibility to carry out your workouts on your own schedule and will offer accountability well beyond what is typically experienced with in-person trainers.
Invest in your coaching dynamic
But like any meaningful relationship, the one you build with your online fitness coach thrives on trust, communication, and active engagement. So, how do you unlock the full potential of this dynamic to achieve transformative results? Let’s dive into some insider tips and strategies that will help you not just participate in, but excel in your online personal training experience. These are based on my 15 years experience working as a personal trainer and having worked with thousands of clients online from 54 countries.
Trust the process
The best start you can give yourself on any workout program is to choose the right coach for you as an individual. Which starts by doing your due diligence. So take your time to do your research. Make sure your chosen training has a clear track record for getting results for people that have shared similar struggles to you, looking to achieve similar things.
Take time to speak to them about what you want to achieve and how the coaching process is going to work. This is especially important if the exercise methods they use are new to you. For example, switching your focus from weight loss to fat loss for the first time, or from a focus on running goals to incorporating strength training.
For online fitness coaching to be successful, you have to believe in your coach’s ability to get you results and keep you on track. Otherwise, you’ve not really removed the guesswork, and doing so is half the battle of getting results.
If you donโt have faith in your coachโs expertise or commitment you might experience a knee-jerk reaction when you face your first significant challenge which could cause you to give up on your program or make wholesale changes (usually toward restriction). This could have negative second-order consequences that undermine the program before itโs had a chance to work.
Again, it all comes down to finding the right coach. Invest time in research upfront because it makes trusting the process so much easier throughout your coaching program. Like achieving anything meaningful in life, challenges on your fitness journey are inevitable so you’ll want to make sure you’re in good hands.
Track Accurately
There is no need to be coy or inaccurate with your training logs and meal tracking. Any coach worth their salt isnโt out to judge or reprimand you, and working with them shouldn’t be about impressing or pleasing them. Their job is to do one thing, to get you across the finish line.
However, if your personal trainer doesn’t know how things are playing out in real time, you could be a simple amendment away from restoring progress after a setback and never know it. This is the kind of insight an experienced trainer can make just by looking at the data, but will only be possible with accurate reporting.
For example, let’s say you weren’t performing as planned in workouts, that isn’t something you should be upset or embarrassed about, it’s just feedback. A good coach will be able to take that feedback and decipher why you aren’t performing as intended. Interestingly it may be nothing to do with actually working out, it’s often more to do with how you eat, sleep and manage stress.
It could even be an expression of psychological fatigue in an exercise program that simply needs a bit of a shake-up. If you had fabricated your workout results courting the good opinion of your coach, you’d never have uncovered any of that.
Communicate Your โWhyโ
When setting out to work with an online fitness coach, you might communicate your goals something like this: โIโd like to form healthy habits and improve my healthโ which is perfectly reasonable. But if the real emotion is more like: โI can feel that my lack of action and inertia is making my partner lose respect for meโ itโs important to be honest about that. Itโs important because it plays a huge role in understanding your motivation.
Thereโs also a big difference between โIโd like to feel fitterโ and โI want to be a role model for my kids, I struggle to keep up with them and they are only toddlers. I worry about what it will be like when they want to kick a ball aroundโ
You may get the same workout program in either scenario. But at your toughest moments if you want your online PT to be able to remind you of what youโre doing this for, then they need to know the real reasons. The politically correct, safe motivators just won’t land the same, because they aren’t truly what’s driving you.
This circles back to the idea of choosing the right coach to support you in the first place. There are qualified personal trainers, and then there are expert fitness coaches able to get the best out of their clients. There is more to getting results in fitness than designing an effective workout.
Ask Questions
The amount of questions you ask on your course of online personal training really depends on how you want to view your coaching dynamic, for example, some of my clients simply want to outsource their decision-making around health & fitness to a personal trainer and nutritionist. Because they want to focus on what in the context of their life, would be higher leverage decisions.
Others, have a shorter-term intention for their online fitness program and seek to view it as an intensive learning experience in which they can not only achieve impressive results but move forward after coaching, fully equipped with the knowledge of why the program was effective, and how to go on to achieve more moving forward.
To expand on the point, these are some of the questions I would suggest you ask your online personal trainer:
- How were my calories and macros calculated?
- When should I move up in weight or intensity in a workout?
- What’s the purpose of the individual workouts in my program?
- How long will we stick with the same program?
- What could be going wrong if I’m not able to complete the workout as planned?
For example, let’s say you’ve heard that doing cardio is a great idea for fat loss. Would you know the difference between counting steps, walking for fat loss, jogging and sprinting? the optimal duration for each, and how often, not to mention how they all relate to heart rates, and the types of energy they consume?
Some of the nuances in fitness can be rabbit holes, but asking the right questions can give you a very high-resolution view of the methodology you’re using. Which gives you a lot of personal agency. So make sure you’re asking your fitness coach the right questions.
Don’t sweat the small stuff
If I could give you one tip, as a fitness coach with 15 years of experience on how to approach your coaching program, no matter who you work with, it would be to ditch perfectionism, and not to sweat the small stuff. Go into your program fully aware that things aren’t going to go perfectly. The program won’t be without its challenges, trust me none of the big goals you’ll pursue in life ever do.
If you’re forced to miss workouts, can’t control your nutrition for a day or two or have some poor workout performances, just chalk it all up to a completely normal, and expected margin of error. Everyone experiences this. I like to work on an 80/20 ratio with my clients. You’ll get results in fitness through ‘net-positive’ days rather than perfect ones. Another way to phrase it is that little positive actions aggregate over time, so it’s consistency that gets results, not perfectionism. A good coach will always reassure you of that.
Do the inner work
This brings us to the need to do your own work on yourself if you really want your coaching experience to be transformative. I recommend looking at online fitness coaching as a major opportunity for change. Try not to think of it only as being on a workout program or not, or taking on some kind of new diet plan for a few weeks.
Rather as a way of changing your personal ‘story’ around fitness. By this, I mean the narrative, dynamic and identity you’ve built for yourself around health & fitness, especially if you’ve had multiple failed attempts at achieving your goals in the past. Take some time to think about what’s perpetuating the cycle, and how you’re going to change it once and for all.
Here are some questions to consider:
- Do I have any limiting thoughts about my ability, identity or potential? Could I find evidence to prove them wrong?
- Do I have an all-or-nothing approach to fitness? If so, how long could ‘all’ last? And what are the consequences of ‘nothing?’
- If I’m honest, am I working with a coach for guidance and support? or to alleviate myself of some of the responsibility if things don’t work out?
- What steps can I take to ensure the longevity of my results?
- How do I envision life after I achieve my fitness results?
- Do I have a lack of boundaries that derail my fitness progress?
- What tends to trigger me to stop exercising or eating healthily?
- How have I overcome other challenges in life? Could these strategies be applied to fitness?
- How will I cope if results are slower than expected?
- Am I genuinely ready to commit to this program? What am I going to have to sacrifice from my current lifestyle?
Give it your best
Choosing to embark on an online fitness program can offer an incredible opportunity to invest in yourself and develop your potential. Don’t think of it as just a workout and nutrition plan, when fully embraced it presents you with a vehicle you can use to close the gap between who you are today, and who you know you could be.
So stay positive, prioritise consistency, use challenges as a chance to build resilience and stay communicative with your coach. I’m sure with the help of the right coach the best of your health & fitness journey is yet to come.