Free Books for Gym Owners: Chris Cooper's Complete Library Giveaway

Overwhelmed by business advice and the mountains of fix-your-gym resources?

That's common, and overwhelm kills action.

To help, Chris Cooper walks through six of his books for gym owners and helps you choose the one that will help you get big-time results today.

👉 You can even get the book you need for free between Aug. 4 and 8, 2025.

Maybe you need “Gym Owners Handbook” to help you systemize operations or “The Golden Hour” to build the daily habits that grow your business.

If your business is already operating at top speed, it might be time to focus on your coaching with Coop’s newest book, “Help Best.” Or maybe you want to build wealth—your resource is "Millionaire Gym Owner."

Don’t read dozens of books and sit on your knowledge. Instead, read the one book you need right now and turn that knowledge into gym growth.

Pick your book and download it for free Aug. 4-8, 2025.

Links

“Start a Gym”

“Gym Owners Handbook”

“Millionaire Gym Owner”

“Founder, Farmer, Tinker, Thief”

“The Golden Hour”

“Help Best”

Gym Owners United

Book a Call  

0:01 - What book do you need right now?

2:13 - Books on running a gym

9:22 - A book to help you take action

16:29 - A new book for coaches

23:59 - How to get these free books

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Hey, I'm Chris Cooper, and this is Run a Profitable Gym. Over the last many years of working with GMOs to help improve their businesses, I've written a lot of books. And this week, we're going to give them away to you for free. Today on Run a Profitable Gym, I'm going to walk through how to get your free book and how to pick which one you should be reading right now. After all, we've been publishing blog posts on 2brainbusiness.com for almost exactly a decade. And even before that, I was writing a free blog for GMO Thank you so much for joining us. Now, before we get going, and I'm going to go through these books one by one. And so if I'm describing one and you're like, that one's not for me, that's actually a good thing. Because what I want to do is get you off this point of overwhelm that you're probably sitting on. We all read a lot of books. We all listen to a lot of podcasts, just like this one. And the reality is that we rarely take action on any of it because there's just so much. And every time you learn something new, you think, oh, that's a great idea. And then you go straight on to the next thing and you're listening to the next book. And sooner or later, it's the end of the year and you can look back at all of your books in your Audible library or whatever and say, wow, I finished 30 books this year. And if I went book by book and said, what did you do from this one that grew your business? You might even struggle to remember. And so I want to help you by giving you the exact book that you need right now. Look, you can be a collector if you want to. You can download all of these. I'm not going to stop you, but I will tell you that Anytime you buy a new book, you should act on it right away. Don't just let your knowledge lead to learning. Let your knowledge lead to action. That's what's going to make your gym better. You don't get a price for reading the most books. You don't get a price for listening to the most podcasts. You get a price for growing your gym. So let's start with starting a gym, square one. And this is the first book I want to highlight. It's right here over my shoulder. It's the white one. Start a gym. If you are within the first year of opening a gym and you're you aren't really sure how to set your prices, or maybe you're six months out from opening a gym, or maybe it's years away and you're just kind of dreaming about it. This book was written to help you get off on the right foot. But a lot of people read Start a Gym and they say, I decided to wait, or I made some massive decisions that I wouldn't have made otherwise. I'm going to tell you how to find the right location and what you should be looking for in a lease. I'm going to tell you how to write a business plan. And I'm going to tell you how to be profitable from day one. When somebody starts a new business, cashflow is king. And most of us don't open up with months and months of savings to fall back on. And even if we do, we know that we need to make money right out of the gate. And so start a gym is if nothing else, it's a great check. You can check to make sure that you've got all of your boxes ticked, all your bases covered, that you've got a good plan and that you are about to make the right decision. Because let's face it, a lot of us act through our gut. A lot of us guess when we open up and every mistake that you make when you open your business will take you at least six months to fix. And many times it costs about$100,000 in mistakes before we finally realize like, oh, geez, my prices should have been X instead of Y. And I shouldn't have hired that person so quickly. And oh boy, maybe I didn't need 12,000 square feet for my micro gym. This book will save you a lot of time and money. But even if you've opened in the last three years, it's great to read this book just as a double check and say, oh man, if I don't fix this right now, it's going to really cost me. Now, Start a Gym is for people who are in the founder phase of business. And I'll explain what that phase means in a moment. The next phase of business is what we call the farmer phase. This is where things are up and running, but they're not perfect yet. You're not earning what you want to earn yet. You're working with some staff. You're trying to systemize your operations. You're trying to get things moving like a business should. You're trying to make it work like a machine or like an active farm. And that book that I wrote for farmers is called the Gym Owner's Handbook. Now, if your gym has been open for more than six months and you're wondering why you're working hard but it's not growing or you're not getting enough clients or you keep churning through staff or you don't know how to manage staff or you don't know how to write systems. You don't know how to make it a business. You feel like you're working for the business instead of the business working for you. Jim Orr's handbook, the black one right behind me right here, that book is for you. It's for people who are in the mix or maybe in the mess. It's going to tell you exactly like how to build a marketing plan, how to sell your service, how to hire, how to evaluate your staff, how to write SOPs and systems that everybody can follow without always coming to you and saying, how do I do this thing again? Without constantly turning through clients. It talks about retention. It talks about acquisition of clients. And basically, if you want to get one book as a gym owner, that is the book. It covers everything. It's extremely tactical. I don't write books that are meant to inspire you to keep with it as a gym owner, I write you tactical books that you can follow step-by-step, that you can use as a checklist. And that's what Gym Owner's Handbook basically is. This third tier of gym ownership is what we call the tinker phase. And that is what happens when you've got a single gym and it's doing pretty well. And now you're going to duplicate your success by opening another gym. or buying another business. Or maybe you just love your one gym so much that you're going to keep it and reinvest in other things. That's what I did too. Now, this book that I wrote for you is called Millionaire Gym Owner, and it's right up at the top here. There we go. And its job is to take you from income to investment. So to go from zero to earning an income, breaking even, that's start a gym. To go from breaking even to earning$100,000 a year from your gym take home, that's Gym Owner's Handbook. To go from earning$100,000 a year to becoming a millionaire by investing in other gyms or other places or buying your building or whatever, that's Millionaire Gym Owner. That's the third phase of business. And we work with all these phases in Two Brain. The cool thing about Millionaire Gym Owner that I love so much is that I wrote this book with about 25 millionaires who became millionaires through our program. They're all doing it slightly differently. They all have good gyms to start from, but then they reinvested their time and their effort and their money into different places. And this book is all about their stories. But it's not just a story. It's a tactical checklist of what you can do. There are a lot of different ways, but there are not an infinite number of ways. And so if you are thinking about buying your building, for example, and you own a gym, this book will tell you exactly how to do it. If you're thinking about taking money from the gym and investing in other things or people, this book will tell you how to do it. It will tell you what businesses you should buy that will complement your gym and what businesses will just steer your attention away and possibly harm your gym. That's what Millionaire Gym Owner is all about. It's one of my best-selling books and for good reason. Okay, so you've got Start a Gym for people in the founder phase. You've got Gym Owner's Handbook for people in the farmer phase. You've got Millionaire Gym Owner for people in the tinker phase. If you're not sure what those phases are or where you fit or what information is best for you, the book that you want is called Founder, Farmer, Tinker, Thief. And what this does is it describes the four phases of an entrepreneur's journey. When I wrote this book back in 2018, and by the way, this book became an instant bestseller with thousands and thousands and thousands of copies sold. This is the book that got me the big plaque on the wall for having an Amazon bestseller. When I wrote the Founder Forever Tinker Thief book, I said, boy, there's so much good information out there. Where would somebody even begin? How would they know what applies to them? What thing they need to do right now? And so I broke the phases down to say, when you're in the founder phase, you need this. And then I wrote, start a gym. And then I said, if you're in the farmer phase, you need this. And then I wrote gym owners handbook. And if you're in the tinker phase, you need this millionaire gym owner. But if you're not sure where you fall, if it's not really clear to you, you don't know where to start. You've been listening to this podcast, but you're not taking action. You're not getting results from it. You're reading my blog, but you're not getting results from it yet. Start with founder, farmer, tinker thief. We'll be right back. And you really need a book that tells you what you need to focus on. And you can start with Founder, Farmer, Tinker, Thief. Now, I want to move to The Golden Hour. Now, The Golden Hour is the book that I published last year. And I was writing this book about habits because, let's face it, most of the problems that we have as gym owners are not problems of lack of knowledge. It's certainly not problems of lack of passion. And it's not problems... We have a lack of work capacity. Every gym owner I know is smart. They're hardworking to the point of being an inspiration. They can grind. They're doing it for all the right reasons. Nobody got into this business to get rich. Everybody got into the business to help people. But you get so much advice and so much knowledge and our day is so long and we care so much about our clients that it's easy to get overwhelmed and paralyzed. And it's very, very easy to to start your day at 5.30 in the morning, to finish your day at seven or eight at night and look back and somebody says, what'd you accomplish today? And you think, man, nothing. I got there. I turned on the lights. I started coaching. I got some emails. I thought about posting something on social media. I got sucked into that web. The phone rang. A staff person came in late. Something bad happened. A client wanted to quit. I had to talk to them. Like your whole day just goes by and you realize you've done nothing to actually grow your business. And tomorrow is just going to be the same. And you're facing down this long road that feels like Groundhog Day. And you're just doing the same thing over and over and hoping your business grows. But really, if somebody said, how is your business growing? You don't know how to answer them because there is no plan. There's no strategy. And even when I started working with a mentor, I was getting tasks to do, but I was like really struggling to prioritize them I felt like I need to be doing this stuff. What do I do? And I didn't know how to get the work done. And that's when I learned the concept of the golden hour. The golden hour is a simple rule. That is every day I will do one thing to grow my business before I do anything else. That's it. And when my CMO, John Franklin said, Chris, you need to write a book about like what you actually do. I was writing this book about habits and how habits build skills and how the best gym owners in the world, all the gym owners in our millionaire gym owner book, had these same habits and you know what this habit was and he's like yeah but what do you do and i said oh well what i do is something nobody wants to read about i get up every day at 5 a.m and i come down into my basement i sit on the couch with a cup of coffee and i do one thing to grow my business before i do anything else and he said i don't think you realize it but like That has compounded over time from a bankrupt gym to a gym that was breaking even to a gym that was absolutely crushing it with five full-time staff to a couple of locations. And then, you know, back to one into two brain business and nine books and, you know, a thousand gym owners in our mentorship program and 65 of the best gym owners in the world on our mentorship staff. All of that came from that. Every day, do one thing to grow my business before I do anything else. And that simple rule has served me well for 15 years now. And that's what I wanted to share with you. But the big question, if you're not in the Two Brain Mentorship program, especially, is like, what do I actually do to grow my business in that time? And so while the concept of the book, Golden Hour, is super duper simple, every day you get up, you, you know, there's a golden acronym. You go to a place where the door that closes, you open your brain with some written meditation. You lead with a little bit of marketing. You do the big project that's on your plate. You end at the hour and you write down your next steps on a checklist. That process is enormously powerful, but it's not specific enough for a lot of people. A lot of people reading that would say, okay, but what do I actually do? And so I came up with a six week golden hour challenge. And If you go to goldenhourchallenge.com, you can follow along. I've got videos of exactly what to do and exactly how to do it every single day for 42 days. It'll grow your gym. You can get this book now for free this week on Amazon. I'll post the link to the Kindle book right below this video. And you can read the book. You can follow the challenge in the book. You can do the challenge on your own. We do this challenge once a quarter inside the Two Brain family, and it is enormously powerful. Every time people do it, they get better and better results because they quickly get into focus. And that means every single day they're doing something to grow their gym. They're creating content. They're publishing content. They're sharing content on social media platforms. I mean, that alone is more than most of us can remember to do in the average week. And then they're following up with their leads consistently. Most people know that they should be following up with their leads consistency, but they don't have time blocked out in their week to do it. They're getting goal reviews booked with at least five clients every single week. I mean, imagine if you sat down with five clients a week, looked at their progress, looked at their prescription, and either worked on getting a testimonial or upgrading their prescription to make faster progress. I mean, think how that compounds if you do that once a week for a year. That's 250 appointments. That's amazing. And then you're also planning out your social media. You're developing pictures and stories on Saturdays. And if you do nothing else, but just follow the golden hour for an entire year, your business will grow. I guarantee it. It's not just the habit of doing exercise to grow your business every day, but it's these specific things that will grow your business that often get overlooked because, well, I know all about that. It doesn't seem novel enough, right? It's these little things that done over time that produce virtuosity and excellence in your business. If you do nothing else, start doing the golden hour. If you start getting some traction. The people who have read the golden hour and done the golden hour challenge have told me things like, Coop, I felt like I was just kind of like in free fall. I was tumbling through the air. I had nothing to grab onto. I did this challenge and I felt like, okay, I've got some ground under my feet or okay, I can build on this. A lot of other people said that they were just paralyzed by overwhelm. They made themselves shut out everything else. And for one hour a day, they just did exactly what the book told them to do. And their business started to grow. And every time we run this challenge, every quarter in the Two Brain family, we start to see people say, oh yeah, I've been meaning to do this. Or my mentor told me to do this six months ago and I'm just actually doing the work. That's what the book, The Golden Hour is all about. It's about doing the work and getting the work done. It's simple habit. It doesn't sound like a lot. Every day I do one thing to grow my business before I do anything else. But when you do it and you know what to do, you get way further ahead because most of us come into our business day with lots of energy. We know what we should be doing. We listen to a great podcast and we're ready to eat the frog and like make our bed and get 1% better, but we don't actually know what that means in practice. And so we can't do it. So if that's you, the golden hour book is maybe the best bet for you. Now, I do want to share one more recommendation before I sign off. I have a new book. My newest book is called Help Best. And I wrote this with four collaborators. Some of the longest standing, most successful coaches in the fitness industry were also mentors for Two Brain on the business side. And the reason we wrote Help Best is because years ago, I wrote this book that is kind of a cult favorite and that's called Help First. So if I shift aside, you can see it. I wrote Help First back in 2018 because a lot of gym owners at that point, didn't even want to do marketing. They thought that marketing felt slimy. Like, oh God, I've got to trick people. I've got to convince people to give me their money. And I wanted to show them that marketing wasn't about tricking people or taking their money. Marketing is the first act of coaching. And marketing is coaching people to come to your gym, coaching them to sign up, and then coaching them to push their knees out in the air squat. That marketing should feel good because you're saving a person's life, but it should also feel good while you're doing it. And the way that you do that is by helping them first. So I'm helping you first right now. I'm helping you by giving you books. I'm helping you by every single day for the last decade, giving you content, checklists, tools to grow your gym. That alone will not usually solve your problem. But hundreds of people have written me and said, Coop, I read this book and I feel so much better. I read this book. I followed this tactic. I made some money. Long-term, your clients and the people in your communities, they still need a coach. And long-term, I still believe that every entrepreneur should have a coach. Entrepreneurship is the hardest sport there is. You need to have a coach. You need to have somebody by your side with you on the bench telling you get in there, telling you get out of there, take a break or swing differently. That's what a coach does. And I believe that every entrepreneur needs one. But our coaches also need coaching. People who want to be coaches at our gyms need help. They need help getting clients results. So years ago, when somebody would come into Two Brain, they'd be a gym owner and they'd have like, a coaching staff that was seven, eight, nine out of 10, like amazing coaches. And their business couldn't support them because the business was like a one out of 10 or a two out of 10. And so they would churn through these excellent coaches and they would themselves like lose their passion for coaching because they just couldn't feed their family. There was this mismatch between the business and their coaching excellence. And a lot of us want to believe that being an excellent coach will just like Fix the business, right? If I get better, if I get the certification, if I take that course, that's going to pull the business up to my level of coaching. It's not true. This has a name. It's common in every industry. It's called the technician's curse. What will save your business is being good at business. But now that we've produced so many successful gym owners, like we've had 2,500 gyms through our program worldwide on every continent in almost every country. What we see now is that we've got these businesses that are like a nine or a 10 out of 10. And they have opportunities for coaches to make a full-time living. And they don't have people who can live up to that role. They need to bring their coaches from a seven to a nine. Or maybe like their pricing is great. Their marketing is amazing. Their retention is pretty good. But now it's actually the product that's their weakest link. Even though their product hasn't changed, it's still like an eight out of 10. Everything else is a nine now. Things are great. And now it's time to improve their coaching. So what they wanted to do was help their coaches become as good as they are as gym owners. And so we wrote Help Best to help coaches help people best. Look, for too long, the fitness industry has been selling stuff that it didn't really deliver on. And saying things like, we change people's lives, or we save you from the hospital, or we save you from decrepitude, or we give you back your autonomy, your physical freedom. And nobody's been measuring that. So it's not really true. And that's why it feels false when we say it. And when we do post up on social media, like, when you work out, your whole life works out. What does that actually mean? And so I wanted to write a book about what it actually takes to change somebody's life, how you can actually make the claim that You've extended their lifespan or their health span and how to tie new science into your coaching. It walks you through a process that's called the prescriptive model about programming better and better and better for each individual client in the gym and how to do that if you've got a group coaching gym, how to do that if you've got a one-on-one or a semi-private or a small group gym, how to measure client outcomes. How do you actually know that you're getting them results? Because I'll tell you, it's more than just the client saying, I love this place or I We've got such a great community. When a client can come to you and say, hey, I'm off metformin. Hey, my doctor wants to know how you did that. Hey, I was never supposed to get pregnant. And guess what, coach? I'm pregnant. When somebody comes to you and says, I've never felt this good in years, or I feel like I did when I was 30, or hey, this Christmas, I did stuff that I couldn't do with my grandkids three years ago. That is how you know. That is the potential that we all have. to really change these lives in measurable and meaningful ways. And we can do that, but we need to be specific about it. We need to be intentional about it. And we can't just hope that we can be the best CrossFit coach ever and hope that will save them. It's not enough. It is necessary, but insufficient to be a great coach at your method. You also need to know, here's what my client wants and prove that you're getting them there. You can be the best coach on paper. Absolutely. You can have the most certifications. You can have a black belt in coaching, whatever that means. But if your clients are not getting the results that they signed up to get, we're failing them. And that's what Help Best is about, is helping them get the results that they want in a measurable and repeatable way so that you can build a system of excellence in your gym. Look, if you're the only gym in town that's getting people results, that might not be enough to guarantee your success. But it is still necessary for success. On top of that, you're still going to have to market. You're still going to have to sell. You're still going to have to be a good gym owner. You can't just be a good coach, but you must be a good coach. It is necessary but insufficient for having a successful gym. And when you become a good gym owner, you need to make good coaches in your gym. You can't just invest in different certifications that they want to take and put them through the Kids Cert and put them through the Speed Cert. You have to create... an opportunity for them to excel and they have to excel. And that's what Help Best is all about. Now you can get that Help Best book free. You can tell all your coaches to get it for free this week too, if you want to. We're giving them away for free because I am here to help you first and help you best. Look, there's a lot of business coaches and gurus, and there's still some ad agencies around in the fitness world too. They come and go. But the reality is that once you read these books, you'll know how to tell when something is legit and true and helpful because you can just hold them up and say, which metric does this improve? You'll know that. You can hold it up and say, where does this fit into my golden hour? You'll be able to determine that. You can hold it up and say like, will this actually help me get my clients better results? Or is it just like hype and hyperbole and excitement? You'll be able to know that. That's really what I'm trying to get out in my books. Now, I don't make money from books. So I'm not giving away a million dollars here. What we do is we sell books and my wife and I donate all of the royalties to charity. This week though, instead of paying full price for a book and having me donate the royalties, do this. Go get the book. If it helps you, talk to us about mentorship. If it helps you only a little bit and you make 10 bucks, donate that money to charity if you want to, or donate it to taking your wife for coffee. That's worthwhile too. But this week, I want to make sure that you've got at least the knowledge to make your gym grow. Because I know that you've got the motivation. I know that you've got the intention. You just need the action. The books will give you everything you need except the clear call to action to actually do the work. And it's my hope that after reading one of these books, you're going to send me a message on Facebook, Coop. I read the book. I did the thing. That to me will be worth way more than the royalties that we make from the books. I'm going to ask you what your next best step is. And hopefully you can tell me that too. But the place to get started is with these books. So go on Amazon. I've got some links. This week, the Kindle version of these books are free to you between the 4th and the 8th. Download them all if you want to. Save them for a rainy day. Just promise me you'll take action and promise me you'll keep growing your gym. because that is what we're gonna need to turn the tide on healthcare and save more lives. I'm Chris Cooper. This is Run a Profitable Gym. If you can't find the books on Amazon or something, Just type in my name. There's another actor that likes to call himself Chris Cooper, just to feel good about himself. But you can just go into gymownersunited.com. That's our free Facebook group. You can discuss which book is best for me. You can send me a message on Facebook and I'll respond personally and tell you which book I recommend for you. Or if you just want to pop in and say, hey, Coop, I got your book and this is the action that I took. I would love it. Thank you for your service. Thank you for saving people.