Online coaches: how customised do your training programmes need to be?

By Johnny and Yusef

We’re often asked by other online coaches how customised their training programme needs to be.

The question usually comes from personal trainers whose clients could be anyone - from Doris, who’s in her 60s and has a dodgy knee, to 25-year-old Alan who’s been training for five years and wants to get his deadlift from 280kg to 300kg.

This can make the move to online coaching feel a bit overwhelming.

But luckily, there is a way around this.

What if ALL your clients were like Alan?

If all your clients were like Alan, and they all had similar problems and goals, your programmes would all start to look quite similar.

The great thing about online coaching is that you can cater to clients with a specific niche.

This also means that you have more time to tweak your programmes and become a specialist in solving a specific problem, for a specific person. In a specific way.

And you become the go-to person for that niche.

This all helps you:

• get better results for your clients 🏋️‍♀️
   
• get better testimonials 💬
   
• get more sales 💵

It’s much harder to do this when you’re relying on face-to-face coaching and all your clients have very different needs.

If you’re writing a programme from scratch for every single client, that’s a lot of pressure on you to get things right every single time.

But if you’ve got a template for a programme that:

• meets a specific need
   
• can be tweaked for each client

this helps provide a better, more dependable, more standardised service.

Because it’s been tried and tested, and you know it works well.

Once you’re solving a core problem for a core group of people, you can also speak directly to those people when it comes to your sales sequence, ad copy and targeting.

What happens when you scale your business?

If you still feel like you need to tailor your programmes for every single client, this might be because you’re working with a small group of clients online. And they’ve all come from people you used to work with face-to-face.

But if this sounds like you, you might start to struggle when you want to scale your business.

Because if you’re not addressing one particular problem for a specific type of client, you’ll find it hard to get the messaging right in your marketing.

And people will always look to a specialist to help them with something specific.

So, by standardising your coaching, you’ll actually find that you’re:

• saving yourself time
   
• improving your marketing
   
• giving yourself a competitive edge

You can find out more about finding your niche in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kl6RoB63bYg

Find out how having a niche can help you as an online coach

We’re not saying that you should just give everybody a cookie-cutter plan.

What we are saying is that you could arrive at the same outcome as an online coach by either

• writing a programme from scratch
   
• having a template for a specific person

And if you’re not standardising your coaching, your marketing won't be specific enough for clients to know why they should choose you over another online coach.

So, the better you get at becoming a specialist, the more clients you’ll attract.

And by building a better, more standardised programme, you’ll be able to get better results for your clients.

Finally, the more clients you get, the more feedback you’ll get. And this will help you tweak your programme over time so it responds even better to their needs.

Next steps

If you'd like to know more about how to grow and scale your online business, we offer a free training video that takes you behind the scenes of Propane and covers stuff like:

• How we selected our ideal client & a simple niche selection tool
   
• How we set up and run our online fitness group coaching programme 

Get access to the training here.

We also offer business mentoring, so if you'd like to have a chat about how we might be able to help you, book some time for a call here.