COACH'D
Join us on COACH’D, a podcast where the some of the world's top athletes, coaches, and performance experts come together to share their stories, insights and secrets to what has made them successful in their own right.
Think of it as a "locker room" chat — unfiltered, raw, and real. We dive deep into all things athletic performance, wellness, science and culture.
COACH'D
BRAIN DUMP: The Real Pros & Cons of Online Training For Coaches & Athletes
Online programming bridges geographical barriers between coaches and athletes, offering unique benefits and challenges that require understanding from both perspectives to create successful virtual training relationships.
• Coaches gain scalability and flexibility by creating programs that aren't limited by time or location
• Online coaching provides passive income opportunities alongside regular coaching work
• Global reach allows coaches to connect with athletes anywhere, expanding their potential client base
• Effective online coaching requires systems for video feedback, check-ins, and accountability
• Coaches must balance automation with personalization to maintain connection with remote athletes
• The market is saturated, making niching down and clear messaging essential for success
• Athletes benefit from accessing specialized coaching regardless of their location
• Self-motivated, experienced athletes typically succeed best with online programming
• The hybrid model combining online programming with occasional in-person sessions offers the "best of both worlds"
• Finding the right coach-athlete fit requires thorough vetting and clear communication about expectations
• New coaches should prioritize in-person experience before expanding to online programming
If you're considering online coaching as either a coach or athlete, focus on providing or seeking value. The relationship works best when both sides are committed to communication and the coach delivers more value than the athlete pays for.
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https://open.spotify.com/show/1YJMztpYSgnPusEXB3fWcc?si=FJsWITv7QdSCSgCt3lkElw
Join us on Coached, a podcast where some of the world's top athletes, coaches and performance experts come together to share their stories, insights and secrets to what has made them successful in their own right.
Jordi Taylor:Think of this as a locker room chat unfiltered, raw and real. We dive deep into all things athletic performance, wellness, science and sporting culture and sporting culture. Hear from those who have played, coached and built their way to the top with athletes from the field, coaches and medical in the performance setting, or owners, managers and brands in the front office, while also getting an insider's view on my own personal experiences in this high-performance world. If you're passionate about sports, curious about the minds of champion athletes or looking for information and inspiration on your own journey, coach is the place for you. Welcome back to another episode of Brain Dump. Today I want to chat around online programming or online coaching, and talk from two perspectives from the athlete's perspective, so what it is actually like to receive and undertake online programming as an athlete, and then the inverse, from a coach's perspective, the pros and cons of what it's like to be able to offer online programs and how it may or may not be a good trade-off for where you're currently at. So I will start with the coaches, because it's probably easy to speak to from my own experience and then dive into the athlete side of things as well.
Jordi Taylor:I guess the biggest thing when people talk about online training is it's a scalability component to what you do. You're essentially not now limited by time. You have ultimate scalability and ultimate flexibility. You're not trading an hour for a set price. You now have the ability to the classic laptop lifestyle and do your work from anywhere. And I guess the same thing with online programming is that you can train 10 people. If you wanted to go, a high-end, highly customized approach, or you could have a thousand people at the same time on a very generic-based program. So that's when people talk about scalability. They just see these great ways of being able to exchange or get out of that exchange of time for money, which is true, but also only to some extent. The other part is that obviously it's really great for passive income. If you've got X amount of hours in the day, but you still want to be able to do a little bit of extra work or try to find some extra income, online program can be a great way to get some extra passive income on the side that doesn't necessarily take away from your main job or main role throughout the day, so it does have a lot of pros in and around the scalability side of things, which is usually where a lot of people will automatically jump to, and especially, I guess, the quote-unquote business gurus will always say it's scalability, everything's got to be scalable very true, but also you've got to think about what is required to make it scalable, and I guess that probably comes into a con, but I won't jump into it just yet.
Jordi Taylor:I'm going to stay to the pros. If you've got a global reach, so if you've got a large audience or it doesn't have to be a large audience, but you have an audience and you know they're not going to be able to train with you in person and a great way to look at that is within your metrics. If you've got access to Instagram professional dashboard, if you've got LinkedIn, there's heaps of tools that you can jump into and have a look at where your audience is based and especially if you realize that your audience isn't based near or where you are, online programming could be a great option there to be able to get people that would not normally be customers to be able to jump into your ecosystem and obviously be able to use them and turn them into paying clients, which obviously a massive pro of that is. It doesn't matter what your postcode is when you've got the ability and the resources value to you on the internet and with a good programming app something like Illumine you could then program for anyone anywhere. So that's again another fantastic pro. Again, off the back of that, you've got the flexibility, the ultimate flexibility. We don't have to be on a call for every session. You give the athlete autonomy. There's a great way where they don't have to worry about being with you. It's really really easy and quite a frictionless experience, provided that they have a good level of training under their belt.
Jordi Taylor:Another really good pro can be a price point factor. So, depending on the price point, if you wanted to go a higher ticket, you may be able to leverage yourself or position yourself in a way that you are a high end online coach versus some lower end templated programs, or you can have a combination of the both. You could then leverage your lower tier into your higher tier and then vice versa. So it looks like great from a pricing scale standpoint, but it opens you up to a much larger audience and a much more affordable audience, depending on the type of tiered option that you offer. When you have online athletes and mentioned there before something like a Lumen, you have the ability then to have a lot of automations and utilize data really effectively. So what you have the ability to do is have your online check-ins, your emails, all that sort of stuff there.
Jordi Taylor:If you're using something like a Lumen, you can also look at readiness and daily wellness, which can help look great from a credibility standpoint and really offers a nice, I guess, way to show that it's just more than the coaching element or the programming element. I should say it does come back into the entire package, which is your wellness and everything else alongside of that. Again, if you can do it right, it really does position yourself as a really position of authority and someone that you know is a bit of an industry leader. If you can really leverage and utilize that online space correctly through your personal brand, a lot of people won't reach out to you and use you because of you know your business or anything like that. It's you, the person that they connect to and that's something that, again, if you built your name through a brand, it can be a little bit harder to, I guess, get into the online space, because people want to work with individuals and they want to work with people. People want to work with people. They don't want to work with companies, which obviously makes heaps of sense, right? So they're some of the pros and, honestly, online programming can be really, really, really, really good.
Jordi Taylor:I usually call it online programming or online coaching, and the reason being is you have to identify that it is not the same as being in person, and I know I'll probably tend to lean more towards the negative a little bit, but that's just the reality of it for me and from my perspective. Is I'm a coach, I love coaching people face to face? Is I'm a coach, I love coaching people face-to-face. And when you don't have the ability to communicate with people on a daily basis or see them and they come into the gym in real time, it does eliminate the coaching aspect. Therefore, it does become a lot more programming. A key thing, and one of the best things that I've implemented personally, is a month trial or a first program trial, where it's still paid, the athlete still commits to the whole program, but we essentially, at the end of that period just say, hey, is this a good fit? Does it work good for you? Does it work good for me?
Jordi Taylor:Because, ultimately, when you're doing online coaching, you are more so at the mercy of the athlete, because you can talk, talk, talk as much as you want, but if you're not getting anything back, you can't really make any adjustments or provide any feedback. So, for me, the number one thing when I'm working with athletes online is getting video feedback, and sometimes it's a one sentence or it's a short paragraph saying great job, that looks awesome. Other times it could be a voice note, it could be a bit of a breakdown, it could be a little bit of analysis, but without that video feedback I really struggle to really provide the true value that the athlete deserves when they're paying their money, their hard-earned money, and also then providing the time to do the program. You've got to be able to see something, you've got to be able to have something there on offer, and that's again. I love the video element side of things.
Jordi Taylor:There's a few testing protocols that I use, which I won't dive into in this one, but that is also again keeps from an accountability standpoint, from a tracking standpoint, that we know we're in the right direction, and ultimately, that does fall on the athlete, though, to be able to give you that. So if they can't do that, then they may not be the best fit, and I have found that the best athletes for me personally are, ironically, coaches themselves or people that love training, and they love that element of it as well, so then they get the feedback themselves. So not only are they getting better as an athlete, ironically, they're getting better as a coach at the same time as well, and honestly, that's probably the biggest drawback. Especially if you've got working with either athletes that really struggle with motivation or athletes that may be a little bit more novice, the lack of real-time coaching can become a real barrier, and a real, I guess I feel like I'm not providing the value that I want to give them, and ultimately, for me, that's everything that I want to do. I want to give as much value as possible, and sometimes, when you're not necessarily with someone face-to-face and you don't get a chance to have that consistent feedback, that consistent communication loop, it may feel like you're not giving that value. Now, I also try to talk to my athletes all the time and tell me if it doesn't feel like things are going right. If there's anything I can do for you, please let me know. And they truly believe that I also have such a high standard personally that I really want to deliver as much value as possible, and for me, I really struggle with that sometimes. But on the flip side, when athletes are hitting PBs, when athletes are for example, an online Indonesian athlete that I have that's a cyclist just hit his fastest race ever and had his highest power output ever and he's absolutely stoked Again. Didn't get a whole lot of video feedback from him, got bits and pieces, but for him he's so happy. So if he's happy, I'm ultimately happy.
Jordi Taylor:You can have high dropout rates too, just depending on how you position yourself from a pricing structure or standpoint and depending on how you arrange your check-ins, follow-ups, all that sort of stuff. So drop-off rates can be high. Typically, as per usual, the higher you charge, the less drop-off rate you have. You have to be in a position to be able to do that. A big thing is that the market's pretty saturated, so there's everyone and anyone offers online coaching, online programming, this, and that you are probably better off to niche into a specific little area. You know that might be, say, end-stage rehab. That might be hybrid lifters, it may be something in particular like that. But then all of a sudden you can start to stand out a little bit more and you can be quite specific with your communication. I don't do that, I simply just say it's online programming. I think people have a pretty good understanding around what that looks like. If I did change that, would it be better, Probably, but for me right now I'm quite happy with that.
Jordi Taylor:But again, you have to have some sort of audience number one. But then you also have to have a really strong either brand personal brand is ideal a really clear messaging in regards to your strategy and how you want to direct potential followers into customers. And that's obviously through social media, through email funnels, through landing pages, all that sort of stuff there, because typically no one's just going to randomly find your stuff. You have to usually show it to them or have some call to action somewhere within your social media emails, whatever it is, to be able to direct people towards the program or what you offer. So at the end of the day, you've got to reverse engineer everything. You've got to make sure you've got a really clear landing page or squeeze page set up. You've got to maybe have emails that you may send out to share insights, client results, whatever that may be, just as another communication form. If you've got something like a podcast or youtube where you can direct people to listen to you and create a bit more credibility through longer form content obviously ideal and then through your socials and your short form content, you've got to have something somewhere that you can direct people to, and that could simply be a pin post at the top of your page. That could be ctas, which is a call to action in your, in your captions or in your videos to direct people towards something somewhere so they know that they can reach out to you.
Jordi Taylor:A big one that obviously will. Probably well, because I would argue that no matter what, if you've got someone in person or you've got someone online, the someone in person will always get better results. You've got to understand, you've got to be realistic with your results, and that's something again that I have found that's taken a little bit of time the last six months to really try to identify and nail. But once you can communicate to an athlete that, look, these are probably the realistic results that you're going to get, things become a lot better because you're setting clear expectations and clear guidelines and then obviously it's great if you exceed those. But then if you've got a bit of a flaw or a barrier, you know that as long as you're exceeding and ticking those boxes off, that you're on the right track. So it's just being realistic with what your results are and things like that become really, really important. Again, that all happens in that initial onboarding call. So you've got to have a really strong system, strong belief, strong understanding around what you deliver and how you deliver it, to make sure that in that first call you meet and understand all the athlete's expectations. Then inverse if they've got any questions for you, you can answer them straight away.
Jordi Taylor:The big thing for online coaching, where a lot of people probably either stop or don't do it, is there's a lot of initial startup. So, depending on how you set your programs up, obviously you've got a programming software. Obviously, building the programs out, you've got to film the demos, upload all the texts and captions because that's really key and critical to make sure that they know what they're doing Integrating a payment option, having onboarding systems it's a lot of front-loaded effort but if you can get through that, then obviously there's big opportunity there. So I'd say for someone as a coach who has quite a large following or they've got an audience that they know isn't necessarily local around them, it could be a really good opportunity to look into online coaching. Even if you wanted to do an expression of interest to see what your uptake would be Probably a really great way to do it before you dive into something and you maybe have to commit to something because you already dove headfirst into it. Expressive interest is always a great way to have a look and see what people are after, whether you may fit their needs or maybe right now is not the best option for you.
Jordi Taylor:When online training really makes sense is if you can start to convert and I guess look at best of both worlds, having the hybrid coaching being online and in person. That is probably the sweet spot I find. But again, if you are new, the best thing you can do is get on the gym floor and coach as much as possible, as many people as possible, as many different athletes as you possibly can, because then, and only then, can you actually make tangible changes to someone's program on the fly, based on your experience as a coach, not as someone that just writes programs. Now, if you're an athlete, some of the best things about online programming is you have access to coaches anywhere in the world, and I think that's really, really amazing. There is so many great practitioners out there across so many countries that you could reach out to in niche fields, your inside rehab, your Olympic lifting, lifting, your sprints like there is so much stuff there that you could reach out to and get um that finer details through. So from that standpoint, it's absolutely amazing. Obviously, the other great thing is that is that once you've found that person provided the right thing for you or that right niche for you, then obviously you can fit that into your schedule, however that may be, so that can fit into your around in and around your training schedule school games, you know, anything like that work, obviously a big one, and you don't have to travel to a facility If you've already got a great gym bang, you're already laughing. And for a lot of athletes it is a little bit more affordable than in-person coaching. So you can still get some sort of guidance experience. Add probably a bit of a lower cost or a lower barrier to entry versus signing up for a program for a year or something like that.
Jordi Taylor:The key thing is that athletes have to take ownership of their process. So if they have the self-discipline and that independence, then it can be really, really, really good for them. On the flip side, if you don't have that level of motivation or that level of discipline, it can probably be not so good for you as well. So just understand what type of athlete are you. Are you self-driven? Do you need a handheld? If that's the case, then you're probably better off getting something in person. But if you don't and you do have that discipline, then online could be really really helpful as well.
Jordi Taylor:Again, as I mentioned before, like using data can be really helpful and using data that you know that you don't say normally get or you can't get by not having face-to-face. So that's having readiness surveys, that's having wellness surveys, all those sorts of things that can give really good, I guess, insights into not only how you're performing within the gym, but also outside of that as well, which obviously you don't get that communication standpoint or you don't get to see that. So that's a big thing there. So good coaches or great coaches, will have things set up like that They'll have testing protocols, they'll have recovery strategies, they'll have all that sort of stuff there as well for you. Obviously, the cons for an athlete is you don't get in-person feedback, so the feedback loop can be a little bit delayed. You know what it's like, especially for more complex base lifts, for talking about Olympic lifting, jumps and things like that. You may start to not get the feedback that you need in the time period that you need and that can also lead to bad habits or performing bad technique, and then that can lead to obviously multiple things down the line First, second and third order consequences. Off the back of that, again, if you're not self-driven, definitely don't look at online coaching. You definitely need that energy or in that room or that group experience. Then definitely jump into that.
Jordi Taylor:One thing you've got to be careful of is coaches that promise or over-promise the world and there's plenty of them out there as well that offer more of that cookie cutter that will just slap on some sort of fancy label or something like that. When you're going through an online coach, do thorough background check, check their other online athletes if they have that. Check their in-person Check their results. Just do a thorough check and don't be afraid to reach out and jump on a call with them and it's okay to say no. Saying no is absolutely fine and you're probably going to gain more respect from the coach by saying I don't think I'm right for you, then just jumping into something and saying yes for the sake of saying yes.
Jordi Taylor:As I mentioned there before, there's that no immediate adjustments as well into your program. So if you are banged up from the weekend or under recovered, sometimes without that direct and quick communication, you may sort of fall into a little bit of a trap of um, maybe not doing, say, the perfect thing for you right then, just based on how quickly you can get that feedback and communication through, again, just depends on the tier and the type of programming that you're getting. Um, obviously, the other thing too that you might not get is you don't get that team environment, you don't get that group training feel or you don't get that feeling of being around a coach that can really drive that culture and that connection. So if that's something that you're after, obviously probably your online side of it isn't really the best option for you. But for athletes, again, if you are experienced awesome If you move well perfect. If you're motivated the again like if you are experienced awesome If you move well, perfect If you're motivated, the best. And then if you just want to sort of tidy all that together with an expert into a little niche or someone that you really want to work with or someone that you want to trust or try, fantastic option for you. But again, if you're less experienced injured probably not the best option for you, because you need the hands-on coaching, you need the real-time cues, you need that performance-based environment to really work for you, versus you having to go above and beyond and provide a lot of that feedback yourself.
Jordi Taylor:In saying that, I've been working with at the moment some fantastic online athletes from all around the world Indonesia, ireland, plenty in the US, new Zealand, australia, perth which doesn't really count as Australia these days, but Perth, all these sort of places and the type of athlete that you get that I've been getting and working with is really cool. So many different athletes, so many different journeys, so many different goals, so many different experiences. It's been really cool and it's challenged me a little bit in regards to how I communicate, how I provide feedback. Um, I've found personally that written just starts to take too long, so our voice notes become really great. Also. That builds a bit of connection as well.
Jordi Taylor:So just trying to find ways and building your own systems and it honestly just takes a bit of time. I've found that I'm very lucky that the right athletes reach out. I haven't had a whole lot of uh, those ones that feel like they're forced. I had one that I tried and I had a gut feeling and I should have went with my gut from the start. It probably wasn't going to be a good fit and it wasn't. And we wrapped up after that first month, which is great. No hard feelings. We both moved on and went on our own ways. But I feel that that could have been avoided with a little bit more proactive, I guess, from my end.
Jordi Taylor:So online coaching it's a cool thing. It's something that you should definitely experiment with at some point in time. But again, just put feelers out, see what people want, see what you can offer that a lot of other people cannot, because it is quite a competitive sort of market. And the number one thing from an athlete and from a coach is make sure that if you're an athlete, you're getting value, and if you're an athlete, you're getting value and if you're a coach, you're providing value. You've got to be able to provide value and you've got to be giving the athlete more than what they pay for. That's the rule number one of anything be athlete centric, provide as much value as you can and go from there. I hope that gave some insights If you're a coach or an athlete. If you've got any questions, shoot me a message. Have a great week and we.
