ISSA Talk, Episode 6: Trainers Lead the Way in Virtual Gyms

Edited for clarity.

Erin Mahoney:

Hey, everybody, welcome to ISSA Talk, a series of conversations and education that we have going on right now to help out the fitness professionals in this online world that we're living in, that we probably will be living in for a while. Today I'm extremely excited to bring Kevin over with us. Kevin is actually a lead trainer at Reebok CrossFit One, and he's also a native of Massachusetts. Kevin's been coaching CrossFit since 2011 and has been part of the team over there at Reebok since 2015. Before his experience with CrossFit, he was an occupational therapist, so he knows his stuff. And then, following his graduate studies, he also started working in orthopedic and neurological rehabilitation in a private practice on Long Island.

During that time, he was first exposed to CrossFit and he had found an opportunity to bring his passion, which I really feel like resonates with me, of sport and rehabilitation all under one roof. We're happy to have him here and he has experience working in acute care and subacute care, so Kevin brings a wealth of experience with us and from such a company like Reebok, we're thrilled on behalf of ISSA to have you. Kevin, my name is Erin Mahoney, we've already chatted, I'm the Vice President of Product over here at ISSA and we're looking forward to getting your thoughts on moving over into this virtual platform in general, for all of our trainers out there.

For our viewers, what I think is really interesting about Kevin, we chatted about this when we first started, is Kevin... Some of the other people that we've talked to already have already had the experience of being an online personal trainer, they've built that foundation, that's how they run their business. The good news about that is we can learn from the skills that they've acquired over time. On the flip side, I think it's fantastic to talk to people like Kevin, who is making the transition as we all are. He is learning at the same speed that we are, and it's great, because it doesn't really set us apart.

Transitioning to Online Personal Training

Erin Mahoney:

Kevin, I'm excited to hear your thoughts, why don't you, if you don't mind, talk about what that transition was like for you. You were training in the Reebok facility with about a thousand different people coming into all the different services. What was some of the first things that you did as a response to COVID-19?

Kevin O'Connell:

Sure, well, first of all, thanks for having me, I really appreciate being here. When we found out, I work with a team of about seven full time trainers and so we are having to constantly be in communication, I think it's probably the biggest piece you've taken away, is that none of us are doing any of this on our own, we've had to reach out to friends, colleagues also in the healthcare community and fitness community to figure out best practices as soon as possible, so services like this are instrumental and invaluable.

One of our first steps we did was trying to find out what platform to use. We had tried Zoom, we had tried YouTube, Instagram Live, and we found there are pros and cons with all of those things. We found that YouTube Live gives us a great inventory as far as having some products that can be available right now, but then also you can look back on, and because of some of the videos that we had done years ago in the past, when YouTube was kind of first coming out, we do have a good followship there that would allow us to do live videos. We started with those and simultaneously we would have a separate camera for some of these classes that will be doing an Instagram Live as well.

Our main goal was to have some degree of interaction, something that we found we might be missing otherwise. We did find it would become challenging with the lag times from both YouTube and Instagram, so it wasn't so much about I'll ask a question and get an answer, it was more so about trying to make sure I explain everything that's going to go on in one of our classes and then check in before the workout really got started, to make sure we can address any issues we might have. Following that we also incorporated some Zoom classes and we found some really good luck there in regards to interaction. But again, the downfall is that it can't really live anywhere long-term, so navigating the platforms was our biggest hurdle in the very, very beginning.

Erin Mahoney:

Yeah, I love that response you gave because a few weeks ago, we had done one just on choosing the right platform, which was really great to talk about because a lot of fitness professionals were assuming that they had to choose a specific application to the fitness industry and something that's incredibly advanced. It's great that everyone's navigating to the tools and the resources that kind of always been there, and that us as fitness professionals haven't really totally capitalized on. It's great to hear that an expert like yourself was doing the same exact thing.

What's also interesting that I heard you explain is that you first went with YouTube because you already had a presence there and you already had a ton of content there, so it was an easy place for you to kind of pick up, did I catch that correctly?

Kevin O'Connell:

That's correct, yeah.

Erin Mahoney:

Okay, and then you were also saying, then long-term Zoom wasn't necessarily the best choice for you because where is that content going to live, how are you going to keep it, how are you going to keep redelivering it? Is that right?

Kevin O'Connell:

Correct, yeah.

Erin Mahoney:

I guess what I'm hearing is, and this is helpful for even us over here at ISSA, is this thought process of if you're getting into this and you're wanting to think long-term, you probably are going to want to think about having somewhere for your content to live, so that way, even after the next few months, when things start opening again, you still have that online presence and you still have that content hub that you can continue to share over time. Is that right?

Kevin O'Connell:

Exactly, yeah.

Erin Mahoney:

Awesome, great, well, good thing, we also, when we had done our previous one, we talked about all three of those platforms, so it's great to know when everyone says we're in it together, we're also as fitness professionals, we're all in it together and we're kind of doing the same thing, so that always makes me happy. 

How to Find New Virtual Personal Training Clients

Erin Mahoney:

All right, let's move on, so we had reached out to the community for this webinar to get some feedback on some things that they wanted to hear from you. I've seen this question pop up a lot on our social media platforms, which is, is there a right way to find a new client? There are a few questions on here, so I think I'm going to ask it like this, Kevin, is there a totally different way to find a new client in this virtual world that was not necessarily right in front of our faces back at the gyms?

Kevin O'Connell:

Yeah, I think it's a double-edged sword, because when you're in a gym setting or when you're just getting started out, you would probably coach or train your family and friends because they're close and you can interact with them and there's less stress associated with that. Now, instead people, if they have a tough time speaking in front of groups, now you've got you and a camera, which for me is hard. I like speaking in front of groups, but cameras are still terrifying.

To that end, I think that when you're looking to find your first client, it comes back to that same piece of a platform, you want to create something where you have a voice. To that end, you may not be able to have direct contact with somebody, so in the beginning it would be about creating content, to show people what you're worth. It's that same mentality of, if you give somebody 20% off to buy a product, they're more likely to then purchase that product, and not that you're all about trying to make money, but you're talking about making connections.

If you can provide whether it's an assessment tool, whether it's, "Hey, here's some exercises you can do to help with X" or here are some strategies you can do if you are someone who has tight hips." Trying to give some people content that they can utilize at home, it'll develop a level of trust, it'll develop a level of understanding on what you're speaking to, and from there, you can then start to leverage that in regards to training people in a more direct way, that's what I think.

Tips and Tricks to Feel Comfortable On-Camera

Erin Mahoney:

You mentioned being terrified talking to the camera because it's so different than talking in a real situation. What's so funny is I feel the same way. I'm sure, like you, I've taught group fitness before, I've presented at different conventions and conferences, but when you're talking to a screen, there's not that two way feedback, necessarily people being like, "Yeah, I get it" or, "I don't understand what you're asking."

Given that you feel that way, and I feel that way, I'm guessing that all of our listeners or a good majority of them feel that way too. Is there any tips or tricks that you've been able to overcome to make it a little bit easier on yourself for that?

Kevin O'Connell:

I think in regards to the prerecorded that I do, so depending on what class offering we have, some of them are prerecorded, some of them are live. With the prerecorded ones, I do reach out and have people look at them to let me know. In person, I'm not a father, but I'm a big fan of dad jokes, so I can tell if my jokes fall flat. On a camera, there's no way to know that, so our team is really good about peer review, giving feedback and helping us to grow, so for the prerecorded, that's probably the best bet.

In regards to the live, I have almost everything scripted. I don't mean to say scripted as I have a teleprompter, it's more so to understand the flow, or like a lesson plan for what I'm trying to accomplish because I can still deviate, but it gives me a frame of reference from which to deviate from, otherwise you can get lost in the weeds.

Erin Mahoney:

Yeah, for sure, knowing what you're going to talk about in advance and how to sequence through it makes it substantially easier to just still sound natural, but also know that you're going somewhere. 

Getting Feedback From Your Peers

Erin Mahoney:

One of the other things that you said that I thought was interesting is you were talking about having a really good network of peers that could review your content. That's not something that I've addressed in any of these conversations or any of these webinars, and it's such a great point. We all have friends that are trainers or instructors or coaches, so why wouldn't we be sharing our stuff with them before we put it out there, or bouncing our thoughts over to them? Are there other people outside of the group that you're working with over at Reebok, do you have other professionals that you're able to reach out with and get their feedback as well?

Kevin O'Connell:

Yeah, so specific to some of the videos that I make, I do a series for mobility. It'll be anything from stretching techniques, smashing with an external object, flossing, kind of anything put together. For me, it's not that I don't go to the other trainers, is that I may also visit my friends from grad school that are OTs or PTs to kind of pick their brain about maybe what are they doing or what were they doing in the clinical setting.

Just because there's so many different approaches out there, it's kind of silly to think that you know everything and the longer I'm in this, the more I realize I don't know and so having people to go to is helpful. Pretty much for me, it's college roommates and grad study buddies.

Erin Mahoney:

Yeah, that's awesome, and I'm not sure, but if you're out there listening to this, I think that's a great takeaway. Because we're so separated, we might not be thinking, "Hey, I could run this by so-and-so and get their feedback before we put some pieces of content out there" so I encourage you all to do that. 

In some of our other talks, we had said, "Hey, just start doing something. It doesn't have to be perfect because everybody's in this, like we said, together and no one's doing it perfect right now." So, it's okay, and there's so many people out there that need our help, that they don't care if we might seem a little awkward or different than we would in person, they get it, they know what's going on, so it's all transparency. 

The other thing when we were talking about getting clients that I thought was interesting is, and we've touched on this a little bit elsewhere, is a lot of times trainers have had this preconceived notion that they had to be a fitness social media influencer in order to make a business for online coaching or online training. What we've heard people, and I think I heard you say it too, is you don't have to be an influencer. You have to be consistently putting out good quality content and then it will come over time and people will start following you if you're sticking to that rule of thumb. Did I hear that right?

Kevin O'Connell:

Yeah, you always look at the overnight success and then you see the 10 years of work that went into it. I'm not saying it's going to take 10 years, but the goal is to create that foundation by creating content to the point of which it's part of your daily routine. I'm not saying you don't have to work at it, but it becomes much less cumbersome as time goes on. Even in the early stages of making some of these videos, it was, "Okay, I'm going to write some script, I'm going to film the content and then I'm going to upload it to YouTube." It was basic, and then again, thanks to some of the interns that are working with us as well, they have so much more expertise in regards to using products like Canva or like iMovie, and so they have given us tools in order to add on to the editing portion of it.

We can add in music underneath some of these pieces and it creates just a more well-rounded video that we're putting out there. It doesn't necessarily mean that the content is any better or worse, but it makes it a lot easier to receive. If you're looking at those kinds of things, our first video to now, even over the course of the last seven weeks, night and day different. The good part is it's only going to get that much better as time goes on.

Erin Mahoney:

Yeah, it's an iterative process, and I think if we all look at it like that, it lessens the stress of immediately producing awesome content that we're competing with, somebody else that has an exponential multiplier of followers. You also said something really important there, which is make it part of your daily routine. I think that's awesome because we are in a situation that we're not comfortable with because personal training is a physical profession. This might even be good for us to say, just like our clients don't feel comfortable making working out a part of their habit every single day, likewise this might not be very easy for us, so it almost kind of gives us that opportunity to share in that discomfort of creating a new habit that we don't know that we love yet.

Kevin O'Connell:

Yeah, I remember in some of our team developments that we would do, some of us rely a lot on visual cues or verbal cues or tactile, and so whatever our strengths are, there'll be times where we have to coach not using that. I'm a very verbal and visual, I'm not as much tactile, so there was one day where I wasn't allowed to talk during our training session.

Erin Mahoney:

Oh, gosh, that's awesome.

Kevin O'Connell:

I could only demonstrate, so to that end, now I am okay with the visual, but I can't do any tactile. I can do some verbal; it's finding a way to still make that resonate with folks that are only watching it from a screen.

Erin Mahoney:

I love that you said that, I think a great takeaway from this today is if you guys are working on trying to improve your communication styles is practice doing... And you don't necessarily have to put it out there where you can put it out there and say, "Hey guys, let me know how I did on not being able to talk. Did I get the point across?" I probably would imagine you just learn so much from that, and it probably alters your perspective on communication from there forward, right?

Kevin O'Connell:

100%.

Erin Mahoney:

That's really cool, right now, that's tracking my favorite piece of information that I've gotten from you, but there's been some other good ones. I'm going to check back in on some of these questions that we had. 

Transitioning to Online Assessments for Personal Training

Erin Mahoney:

Here we go, you were talking about your history in OT and rehabilitative, and then also your experience with CrossFit, but now you're also transitioning into this online world. Would you talk to us a little bit about if that's changed the assessments that you do, how it's changed them and what that all looks like for you right now?

Kevin O'Connell:

For sure, so onsite it's so much easier because in a gym setting, you have every single tool at your disposal, whether it's, "Oh, my shoulder hurts." "Okay, well, can you do a pushup or a burpee? Could you press this PVC pipe overhead? Are you able to hang from a pull up bar or a set of rings?" Now, people may or may not have any of these things at home, or if they do and we find out what the prevailing problem is, and we want to have some sort of implementation or treatment, I don't know what tools they may have. You have to be very creative and I think part of the mobility series that I've been working on forces you to do that because I may say, "Hey, grab a foam roller, but I have to remember not everyone has one."

In regards to the assessment piece, what we do find is it is a lot easier in a one-on-one setting and that's the big transition that we've made probably about two or three weeks ago, is starting to offer one-on-one sessions for folks that are at home that maybe it's not about training. It might be about nutrition, it might be about trying to have better quality sleep, whatever the case may be. What we do is we have them do an intake form before the one-on-one session, just so we have an idea of what it is that we're really coming into. That will kind of scale what I'll be doing for my assessment.

If it's something about sleep, that I know I'm not going to be having them go through a range of motion piece, it's going to be a different series of questions I'll be asking, but to that end, for most folks that are out there that are doing training, and they're looking at people starting off and you want to have an understanding of the person and what their baseline is, you can ask people to tell you, but you also can't really trust everyone because it' not that they're liars, but maybe their perception of where they are versus where they actually are, is going to be different.

You can't have them get onto a treadmill and run as fast as they can for five minutes and see how they do either. For me, it starts off with range of motion, which is easy enough to do from a screen session. Can they move their arms over their head and I go through all different planes of motion for shoulder, elbow, hip, knee, ankle, I'll have them do a lot of functional movements, having them do a pushup or a burpee or a squat or a lunge, which gives me a lot of information.

Based on what they're able to do movement wise without any pain, then I may have them do like a quick little workout where I can watch. Something three minutes or less, but it'll get their heart rate up, get them winded and then I can see maybe where the wheels are about to fall off, there's some degradation in the quality of their movement and again, that will also give me some feedback as to what we have to work on down the road.

But all that's well and good, the underlying piece, I think, would carry over with all assessment tools, whether it's, "Hey, I'm looking at some rehab perspective" or "Hey, I'm looking at as a trainer perspective" is what are their goals and what's your skillset? Because if their goal is that they want to... Like Thor the other day, "Hey, I want to deadlift 1,105 pounds." Okay, well then our series of questioning may be very different than, "Hey, I have a reunion coming up and I want to look better, feel good" because if we're not meeting them at their goals, then it's going to be a huge miss and the questions you ask are going to be significantly different.

Now, to pair that up, your skillset, so if you're someone who is very, very competent and skilled as a nutritionist or dietician, then you have to leverage that skillset and skew your questioning in that way. That person still might want to deadlift a thousand pounds, but your skillset would be, "How can I help them from a dietary perspective?" Or, "This person wants to look good, feel good, how can I help them from that perspective?" I think looking at yourself, being very honest in what you can bring to the table, and it may not necessarily be about high level concepts of nutrition, exercise, physiology, it might be about personality, what do you bring?

Okay, I am somebody who is incredibly positive, I like to help people get to their goals, I'm really goal set oriented, I can help kind of say, "Here's where you're at, and here's where you're going, and here are all the pieces to get there." I'm really good at checking in, my communication is great. Okay, then that's where your skillset lies. Looking at your skills, your goals, that'll kind of give you the preliminary piece and then finding out, "Okay, how can I help them with those pieces?" And everyone's assessment tool will be a little bit different. Mine is range of motion, starting, getting them out of breath and then looking at where their form might break down. That'll help me for 90% of people that I work with, but then I also want to keep in mind that my style has to still kind of blend with what they're trying to get to. Long winded way of saying that, sorry.

Erin Mahoney:

I wouldn’t say long winded, I would say that that response was filled with a lot of great information. First off, and it doesn't surprise me that you would start with that movement screen, especially because of your background, but it's great to reiterate to our clients, or sorry, to our students out there and our trainers because of the fact that you can watch that in this virtual situation and based on what you see, will then also up tell you a little bit more about just how much more you can add to that. Because, to your point, the clients might think they're in better off condition than they are and so if just on that movement screen, you're seeing something faulty, even though they might say that they can run five miles, no problem, or two miles, you also know that you saw all these other things happening, and it's probably not going to be very long, it's going to be like a minute and a half into it, and their knees are going to start hurting or they're going to have other issues. I'm happy to hear that that is your primary go to. 

Another thing that you were talking through is really understanding what their goals are and what they want. One of the things that I think is important too, with that is it's going to be harder and harder, not harder and harder, but it's not easy to uncover that stuff in this type of conversation. It's almost like we have to double down on developing rapport with our people and try even harder with our nonverbal communications to let them know that they can trust us, that we're here to help and that we're creating a positive environment. Is that a fair statement too?

Kevin O'Connell:

Yeah, I always look at it, back in the day, if somebody comes into the gym, their first session has to be fun because if it's not, they'll never come back and you have zero impact on their life moving forward. In this setting, to the same degree is how do you be engaging enough to have them come back while still giving them enough quality content and information so that you gave them something aside from just a couple of laughs? It's that fine balance of the two.

Get Creative with Clients Who Can’t Access a Gym

Erin Mahoney:

Yeah, and then something else that you said that made me come up with a crazy question for you is you were talking about how you might say, "Hey, grab your foam roller" and then you said, "Well, some people might not even have a foam roller" and I know that shouldn't be a surprise, but I was like, "Yeah." What is your most creative item around the house that you've told people to use in place of a foam roller?

Kevin O'Connell:

I did a video last week and I was working on doing foam rolling for your quad, and I said, "Well, if you don't have one of those, maybe you have a mobility stick." I have one of those ones that... My father was a marathoner, so he has those all the time, all over the place. "If you have one of those sticks, great, if not get a rolling pin." That being said, rolling pins are not designed to put a lot of force into, you break the handles off, so the level of force you're going to put into it is very different.

I've used a rolling pin, I've used a frozen bottle of water, a lacrosse ball, I've used a towel to do some shoulder internal, external rotation stretches. I've used a couch for five stretches you can do using your couch, but it's been great because all this does is give you more tools in your tool set. It gets you out of your comfort zone, which is where you grow, you feel silly, I can't tell you how silly I felt doing that. Again, in a clinical setting, in a gym setting, you have all of these tools and it's so easy not to become complacent or lazy, but to fall back on what you know, and get out of this idea of learning. It's been a really, really refreshing experience having to look around your house and say, "Well, what looks like or what can I use?"

Erin Mahoney:

Okay, so a couple things, number one, for all of our listeners, please put into the comments what your most creative foam rolling modality is or apparatus, because I can't wait to see what else we can get, because he came up with some good ones, but then number two, one of my favorite things, and that makes me really happy for our industry right now, is that again, I don't think trainers were necessarily becoming complacent, but I do feel like this is forcing them into a situation where they're looking at the world as their gym.

It's just opening up our eyes to these restrictions that we were forced into thinking that we had, and now we don't have them. Now, everything is a possibility when you look around, really? That's kind of cool, I get excited about that. You know, we, over at ISSA, we've been having these... We're all remote too and we've been having these different fitness competitions. The one for this week that came up today was doing a wall sit, and at first I was like, "Okay", as I was reading it, I was like, "I wonder if I can win, I wonder if it's worth me doing it" but then the rest of the sentence was holding other household items, like a can of paint or this or that and then I was like, "Oh man, now things just got real, and do I try to get the heaviest thing and do a wall sit or do I get the lightest thing?" I think everyone's being creative, it's great.

Kevin O'Connell:

That's so funny, we are literally doing the same challenge this week with our Reebok employees.

Erin Mahoney:

No kidding.

Kevin O'Connell:

I kid you not, we've done a different movement each week and so we have an internal... Like a Twitter feed and so on Fridays we post two options, two different movements with the video to go along with it and then all of the employees that want to participate will vote and then the majority will rule. The two options for this week were lunges or wall sits and the wall sits won out by one vote.

Erin Mahoney:

Oh, nice.

Kevin O'Connell:

We have different team leads that for good banter back and forth and at the end of the week we'll list what team won and then what the movements are for the next week. It's just so funny, wall sits, I haven't done them since high school and it brought back a lot of feelings and emotions.

Erin Mahoney:

I know, it really is like a major decision for my week, like do I want to go through this? Because it hurts, but it might be worth it. As we're talking about this and this is just out of nowhere, but what I also realized just by this conversation, Kevin is when trainers and instructors think about hosting competitions, they're usually thinking about, and correct me if I'm wrong, longer term, like 30-day challenges or 90-day challenges and they look for... They've asked us when we've been providing some different templates and tools that they can use, but my gosh, why not have some of these more fun, silly competitions that aren't a make or break, did you lose the body fat percentage that you were aiming to lose?

I think that's nice and I think we could all probably... That's another way of getting great content out there, is by having that engagement with other people, doing some of these funner challenges.

Kevin O'Connell:

Absolutely.

Erin Mahoney:

All right, so we're a little over two thirds of the way through, and I'm looking back over at my questions that everyone's submitted to us, and one of them is, this one's great because it's saying... This person had been reading that there's actually a lot of benefits to be derived from virtual personal training, and what realistically... This is a combination of two of the questions, what realistically do we think are those new benefits that we're learning from this online world? Actually, I'll start with that one. What do you think are the greatest benefits that we have with this virtual situation?

Kevin O'Connell:

Well, for me to give you an idea of my commute to and from work round trip is about three hours, so I got a lot of that time back. For me, there's significant more flexibility, and if for instance, your entire training platform is online, your overhead's pretty low by comparison to owning a studio or something like that. If you're starting out, it's definitely a safe call, by comparison to opening up a brick and mortar. On top of that, you get more chances. What I mean by that is when someone walks in the door, you have a first impression and if you're chewing gum or your hair is not... Mine's fine today, but if your hair is messed up or what have you, you may have lost that first interaction.

In a virtual setting, especially if it's not live, if it is prerecorded, you have the power to edit, to re-shoot. If you're someone who is big on control, I think that's, that's a huge advantage. The flexibility of being able to do it on your schedule, on your time, the fact that it's less of a financial commitment upfront, especially if you're utilizing a lot of the free services that are out there, I think all of those are really, really attractive components to doing a strictly virtual interaction with your clients.

Erin Mahoney:

Yeah, a lot of good stuff that you put in there, especially... Anybody that's considering becoming a personal trainer or even an instructor, hopefully they wouldn't even think twice about it right now, because to your point, it has never been cheaper to become a personal trainer. No one has the equipment, so no one has the facility, so if anything, now you are right on track with everybody else in the business, so you almost have a running start. I love that for the new trainers, they've got such a leg up that they might not even realize what they have, so that's great.

The other cool thing is that we're all appreciating our commute right now and I'm hoping, and this is definitely the optimist in me, I'm hoping that the clients are taking that time that they've earned back and reinvesting that back into their health and fitness. If I could project or predict, I would imagine that there are going to be more people that are seeking out personal trainers or fitness in general, because they have extra time that they didn't have before. There almost is no excuse and we're running out of things to watch, so what else are you going to do? So that's good, too.

Realistically, which was part two of this question, what parts of this online personal training do you think is going to be around 12 months from now? Are we all doing bodyweight exercises because we have to, or do you foresee everybody working out with slim to nothing for a long time?

Kevin O'Connell:

I think to the same degree of what you were saying before, that people have the time now and so they're hopefully choosing to invest it in themselves. I think that once people get into a routine, they want to stick with it. The hardest part is always starting or restarting, and so to that end, if they can kind of stay on the track, it's going to be about just simply staying on that track.

I saw someone online posting the other day, and this guy's been coaching for years and years and years and had a couple of injuries and so decided to go extremely just bodyweight calisthenics, and then continue to do it for five years. Part of his online training platform, there's an option that is bodyweight only, he's been doing this again, long before we've all been stuck inside. There's a lot of ways you can do it if your goal is for hypertrophy or calisthenics or performance or what have you. There's more than one way, where you don't necessarily need all of the fancy bells and whistles. I sure do like them, but you don't need them per se.

But I will think that moving forward, this idea, we're not going to stop making classes. We already discussed that, we'd been wanting to do this ahead of time and so for us, we'll probably continue to do so. The only difference is on what platform, if we're going to have assistance from a production studio, are we going to end up offering more types of varying classes? Because as of right now, the full-time staff at the gym are doing all of that, but we also have significant amount of part time staff where their full-time job is working in finance or legal or HR or design for Reebok. Those folks are full time working on something else, but they're still active trainers.

Once we get back to that, it's about including them and creating a more diversified program that we can offer to our members. I don't see it slowing down, I see it picking up, I see people being more creative. I see people working out outdoors more often, especially in the summer months or depending on where you live. I see mainly only benefits aside from negatives, from all of this, from our perspective.

Erin Mahoney:

Yeah, so to restate quickly what you said, you're seeing that a lot of these things are going to stick around in a really great and positive way and that also habits are hard to break and right now people are developing habits that in a great way are going to be hard to break. They're going to be developing habits of using their computer as the resource to get interaction with a personal trainer, going outside, using bodyweight activities. What's so great is that I've had the chance to talk to you, I think you've provided a ton of valuable information for ISSA, so thank you.

Kevin O'Connell:

Thank you.

Erin Mahoney:

The more I have these types of conversations, Kevin, I don't know if you feel the same way, but I feel more and more excited about where we're at and what this is going to mean for the industry. To hear other professionals like you kind of echo it back, I just think the sky is the limit and we've never had the type of opportunity as fitness professionals as we do now to make the entire world our gym.

The work you will put into growing a successful in-home personal training business will be worth its weight in future income and the job satisfaction you are sure to earn. The field of fitness can be time-consuming, but getting educated doesn’t have to be—sign up for ISSA’s Online Coaching Certification for the fasted way to take your business online and start earning now! Enjoy the journey and it starts today!