Negative advertising

Everyone else is below average compared to you.

Everyone else’s diet plan is secondary to you.

Everyone else’s training plan and implementation is not nearly as good as yours.

Everyone else’s clients do not work nearly as hard as yours do.

If that was the case, the training world would be filled with a lot of Alpha males and Alpha clients, correct?

It isn’t. It is filled with braggadocio and fragile egos who can’t help but look beyond their scope of vision to criticize what others’ do. It is full of egomaniacs who think their way is going to transcend this business and land them in a pile of money and riches.

After close to 15 years as a trainer, I am waiting for that pile of money and riches.

I have tried negativity, I was that guy to put people on blast for stupid articles, dumb social media posts, and coaching terrible form.

What did that get me? Nothing. It may have landed me a few clients here and there, but did it make my name grow in a positive way? Not at all. What it did do, at that time, was gather feedback from other people like, “hey did you see this stupid article”, “check this idiot out? Look at his form”.

As if it was expected I would put them on blast because they didn’t want their name attached to it.

That is not a way to build a business and it surely isn’t a way to have your name propagated around the fitness world in a positive way.

I am sitting here and telling you with as much conviction as I can – you aren’t anything special. You are a trainer. There are many others who coach form well, there are many others who can calculate macros, there are many others who can weave a great program together to get results, and there are many others who can write well enough to motivate people via blog.

Now that we established that your superiority complex is nothing but an overinflated ego, pick yourself off the ground, dry your tears and get to work.

1. Service – make your service skills so effective that your clients are happy. Reply to emails within a day, return texts quickly, and follow-up.
2. Programming – learn a few different methods that vary in application. Conjugate, high frequency submax training, basic cardio programming. Work with those methods, study them, learn the ins and outs of all the variables, experiment on yourself to see how the results pan out, and do your best to master them.
3. Diet – if you choose meal plans, work with one to allow your clients to have an immense amount of success with it. Be flexible in that approach with food substitutions and food tolerances. Stay in your lane with this, you are NOT a dietician and shouldn’t be working with clinical patients. If you choose macros, study up different methods to calculate them, when to tweak the macro counts, how to cycle carbs, when to carb time, and how often they should be adjusted.
4. Form coaching – Learn how the body moves, watch it work, see how leverages and limb lengths affect setup, execution, and overall form. Learn how clients learn the best. Are they visual, hands-on, verbal, or a combination of both? What cues work for them?
5. Motivation – each person is a unique psychological profile. While I am not a Psychologist, learning about it is a hobby of mine and I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express once. What clients do well with an iron fist, which ones do well with a gentle prod, which ones need a pre-game speech to get back on track, and which ones just need a single word to get in gear.

These 5 things you need to absolutely work on mastering, this isn’t to mention the business side of things but that is a separate issue.

Your clients aren’t going to care one bit about what you think about Trainer John online and his adherence to a particular method you think is stupid. They are going to care that your method works for them. The trick to this business is mastering what you know, master the simplicity of program design, master your niche to an extent that people refer friends and family to you. Master your niche that way when a client has a question about their plan, your confidence shows in your answer. Master your niche to the extreme that you don’t care one bit about what some other trainer is doing across town or online because you are that confident in what your service provides, they pose zero threat to your business.

All negative advertising projects is a massive insecurity complex. Even if that trainer you think sucks truly does suck, that just means your name becomes that much better.

Remember, your name is gold, invest in it, nurture it, build it, and watch it grow in value.

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