11 Fitness Skills That Build Your Fitness Business

The skills you’ve learned through fitness training can help you grow your business—if you know how to apply them.

In this episode of “Run a Profitable Gym,” Two-Brain founder and CEO Chris Cooper explains why workout habits directly translate to gym ownership and entrepreneurialism.

Every gym owner already has 11 critical fitness skills, such as resilience, adaptability, discipline and virtuosity, and Coop provides a plan to use those assets to grow your business.

Coop also details his simple Golden Hour habit—doing one thing every day to grow your business before doing anything else. This daily period of focused effort can transform your gym the same way daily training transforms your body.

Tune in to learn how to employ skills you already have and build a stronger, more profitable gym.

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2:06 - Habits, resilience & virtuosity 

9:58 - Progressive overload & recovery

12:57 - Measurement, coaching & feedback

20:33 - Accountability & adaptability

22:39 - Long-term vision & hope

Transcript

Chris: 0:02

Hey, I've said it enough times. Being a good coach is not enough to build a successful fitness business. Today, I'm going to talk about the skills that you do have that you might not appreciate that will help you build a good fitness business. These are fitness skills that apply to building a business. I'm Chris Cooper. This is Run a Profitable Gym. And hey, I don't want you to think it's hopeless. You do possess some skills that will help you build a really great business, but it's not your coaching skills that really matter the most. When I started my gym back in 2005, 20 years ago, I thought I'm the best personal trainer in town because I've got all these certifications. That means I'm going to knock everybody else off the board. I'm going to win a business by defeating every other trainer. Of course, that didn't happen. It took me a few years to realize that the skills that I had as a coach, or more accurately, the knowledge that I had as a coach, and all the time that I spent reading PubMed and all the seminars I was giving my staff on creatine supplementation and work to exhaustion and stuff like that, they were not helping me build my business at all. In fact, they were distracting me from building the skills of a business owner. When you become a coach, you get to help people by learning how to be a better coach. But when you open a business, most of those skills don't actually translate. Now you have to learn how to run a business. It's a different skill set. Even if your business is coaching, you still got to know how to manage other people, make payroll, pay their rent, make money, sell, market, retain customers, all of these other skills that nobody told you about, probably before you opened a gym. Today I want to give you some hope because the skills that you have in fitness can actually help you a lot in business, even if the skills that you have as a coach won't. So here we go. Now, if you're a gym owner or a trainer, I know that you're exercising. I know that you're probably dieting, right? And the same skills that you learn to train your body can also be applied to training your staff, your business, and yourself to run that better business. So, first, the first skill is routine and habits. In fitness, consistency matters more than intensity. You have to stay true to a program or to exercise over a long period, even if the intensity of that exercise or the type of exercise that you're doing changes, you're still pursuing exercise. And in business, building those daily CEO habits, working on the business, reviewing your financials, those matter just as much as pursuing fitness for the long term does. Let me give you an example. A lot of newcomers to fitness, and you know this, they'll jump in, they'll go full bore. They might even buy your t-shirt or buy, you know, like the outfit that your brand of fitness provides. They might buy the skipping ropes, all the accoutrement, right, of fitness at your gym. And then six months later, they're gone. And you're like, wow, they were all in. I can't believe it. And that's because most people are just in and out and they don't stick with it long enough to actually make it a habit. For people like you and me, we don't have to think about fitness. We don't have to decide in the morning, should I work out today? We're working out not because we wake up with inspiration, we're just so in love with working out. We're working out because it's Tuesday at 9 a.m. and Tuesday at 9 a.m. is when we do our workout. It's become a habit for us. And we need to do the same thing with our business. A lot of gym owners will work on their business only when they feel inspired to do so, or or it's urgent, or they're panicking. I got to do something to get five new clients this month. And over time, just like the people who jump in and out of exercise or in and out of diets and they get on this roller coaster, the gym owner goes through the same cycle of failure. It's, I'm gonna try this, now I'm not gonna try anything. I'm gonna try that, now I'm not gonna try anything. Things are bad, I gotta try something, I'll try this, now I'm not gonna try anything. The most important thing that you can do is actually build the habit of exercising your business every hour or one hour every single day. We call this the golden hour, and the habit that you should build is every day do one thing to grow my business before I do anything else. This has served me well over the last 15 years. My business really started getting traction when I started employing it. And just like you're not going to build a 500-pound deadlift in one day, you're not gonna totally transform your business in one day. But if you exercise every day with the intent of building a 500-pound deadlift, eventually most people can get there. And it's the same thing with your business. If you exercise your business every day with the intention of building a business that has a specific goal, you know, maybe that's paying you $100,000 a year, you will get there. It's really the law of incremental gains and progressive overload, the same laws that we work with in fitness every single day. But the key is that no program works if you stop doing it too soon. So that's the first thing is the habit of consistency. The second skill that you build through fitness that will help your gym is resilience. So, for example, there are definitely times, more so when you start in fitness, but there are always times when it's tough to show up and do your workout. Maybe you look at the workout and you dread it, like, oh God. You know, I can remember talking to Greg Amundsen, the original CrossFit Fire Breather, about what would happen when he would check his website in the morning and he would see Fran come up. He he would get like almost physically ill because he knew what it took to beat his PR. He knew that people were watching, he knew that whatever he did would be on YouTube. And eventually he's like, I just didn't even want to do it anymore. But he still showed up anyway. Um, coming back after injury, we know what that's like. You have a setback and you're like, oh, I can't do what I used to do. I I lost motivation. Um, maybe it's just like, oh, I'm so busy today, my workout is zone two, or my workout is just mobility or stretching. Like, do I really need to do it or can I get by without it? After you've done this for a few years, you don't have to face that choice anymore. It's not hard to choose, it's just what you do. 11 o'clock comes, it's time to go stretch. And I'm looking at my watch because that's literally me today. In business, bouncing back from cancellations or financial hits or staff turnover is the key. You know, Dave Tate told me years ago that the secret to business is just surviving three more years. Because if you can survive three more years, other people won't. Your competition will probably gone. It's a war of attrition. You don't have to push anybody out of business. They will get pushed out of business. If you survive and push through these tough things, they won't. Every single hard thing that you do becomes a separator between you and them. Look, you know, what's made me faster on the bike than some of my friends or more fit than maybe some of my high school friends is not that I have a secret program. It's not that I'm more motivated, it's not that I was a better high school athlete by any means. It's that I just kept showing up and doing it and looking to improve. Even when I was sick, even when I was tired, it's not a negotiable thing anymore. This is called resilience. And you can learn it in the gym. Hopefully you have it, but you need to apply it to your business too. And just like a newcomer in your gym, new owners probably don't have it yet. So forgive yourself, but start building it. The third skill is virtuosity. And this is doing the common, unglamorous movements really, really well. So, for example, I've been teaching the squat now for almost 30 years, teaching people how to squat. I've been teaching people to stretch and what to eat and to get protein at every meal. But guess what? I'm still working on getting better. And when I go to a new city and I go to the gym, I love being coached because let's face it, if I'm doing something wrong, I want to know and I can't see it in myself. Because I've been coaching so long, it's actually harder to spot flaws in myself, even on video or in a mirror. So I love having other coaches say, Oh, Chris, yeah, do this one little thing. Perfecting the basic movement always results in long-term progress. And whenever I hit a ceiling in fitness, I know that I need to start from the ground up and fix one thing. I'll give you an example on the bike. So this year I've become faster than I've ever become on the bike. And I did that by last year going back to two fundamental skills doing more zone two work and lowering my cadence from 95 to 83. That took months. It sucked. I was slower in the short term, but eventually I got a lot better and faster. Now I've got two other things I need to work on this winter: VO2 max and pointing my toes when I'm climbing a hill. These are very basic fundamental things. And it sucks to have to go back to the beginning and kind of start over and undo mistakes and rebuild. But the reality is that every time I do that, I get faster in the long run. That's what virtuosity is. Now, in business, here's what that means: it means doing the boring but vital tasks, looking at a profit and loss statement. If you don't do this, it's like you're not doing squats. If you're not trying to get better at this, it's like you're not trying to improve your fundamentals. Clean bathrooms, absolutely. Consistent communication with your staff, publishing an email list to your clients, tracking your metrics. These are the fundamentals that will lift the ceiling. You don't lift the ceiling by getting 10 more clients, just like you don't lift the ceiling by putting 10 more pounds on the bar. You lift the ceiling by improving the foundation so that the building can safely rise higher. Okay. I don't need to get into the injury safety analogy here. You get it, but the reality is that most businesses are not limited by their marketing. They're limited because their foundation is not broad or strong enough. And these foundations are the skills and habits that we find boring. I don't want to look at my bank account, I don't want to do payroll today, I don't want to look at my PL. I don't want to remind my staff. I don't want to write these SOPs. That stuff's boring. But these are the foundational skills that if you practice and get better at, will not only become less boring, but will actually make the difference in your business. The fourth skill is progressive overload. Now, in fitness, this just means gradually increasing weight or intensity. Constantly varied functional movement performed at high intensity, like the CrossFit gyms do. That's great for aerobic and anaerobic work because your body doesn't know the difference, right? It's it's fun, you can work harder, especially if you're in a group. When it comes to strength training, though, you need progressive overload. You can't just randomly do back squats once every two, three weeks and expect your back squat to go up. And that's why even in CrossFit gyms now, you start to see progressive overload in their strength training. In business, this means scaling slowly, adding staff or services only when the system is ready. So just like walking into the gym on your first day, seeing 500 pounds on a bar and expecting to deadlift it is an obvious bad idea to us. Opening your first business, going for 20,000 or 10,000 square feet, hiring three staff out of the gate, and just praying that 300 clients come and join is an equally bad idea. It's just as dumb as expecting to deadlift 500 pounds on your first day. Instead, what you need to do to build a strong business foundation instead of a fragile one, is you need to start small. You start in 1,200 square feet. Greg Glassman worked in 600 square feet most of the time. A lot of the semi-private and small group training class gyms that we work with don't ever get bigger than 2,000 square feet. You figure out business when it's small, when it's just you, when it's three classes a day or five personal training classes, and you're working in a 400 square foot rented apartment with carpet on the floor and wallpaper on the wall. That's where you figure out business. Then you add weight by increasing your space, or you add weight by increasing your staff and your payroll costs. You add weight by increasing expenses or bank loans or whatever. Slowly, not all at once. Jumping straight into something is a recipe for a disaster, just like a client coming into your gym and trying to go fully to the max on your hardest workout on their first day. Scaling slowly, adding staff or services only when the system is ready is the way to progress. That's progressive overload. You're only as strong as your weakest length. I can't resist making this analogy. If your back is strong, your hamstrings are strong, but your glutes are weak, and you go for a max deadlift, your glutes are going to limit you and potentially be the source of an injury. If your method is really strong, your branding is strong, your marketing is strong, but your retention is weak, you're going to injure your business. If your financial fundamentals are weak, your cash flow is weak, you're going to go out of business. Look, I was, I thought, the best personal trainer in town. I employed the other best personal trainers in town. Catalyst had a strong brand. We actually had the lowest prices for personal training. We were given clients homework. Nobody else was doing that. But I didn't know how to protect my cash flow. And so we almost went bankrupt because clients owed me $12,000 and I had no money to pay my staff or the rent. You need to build a solid foundation of business before you try to scale up. The fifth skill is recovery and deloading. Look, you know how general adaptation syndrome works. You recover at rest and you come back stronger. That's what supercompensation is. The same thing actually happens in business. In fitness, rest days prevent burnout. They probably prevent injury. The act of rest that a lot of gyms do is not restful enough. You need to actually take time off. And you need to do the same in business. The reason that most of us feel like we can't take time off is because we don't have the money to pay the staff to do it, or we don't have the trust to that the staff will perform at our level, or, you know, there's some other factor that scares us, basically. And so we never take time off. We haven't written out systems, we don't have expectations, we've never evaluated our staff. You know, we send them for certifications, but we never ever tell them how to actually run the class to our standard or whatever. You know, we we don't really understand our cash flow, and so we don't know how to change it if it goes bad. You know, we're we're broke, we don't know how to bring in more clients or raise our rates or make more money, and so we don't make any money, and so we can never take time off. And you go down this downward spiral until eventually you lose hope and burnout. You have to have time off, just like in exercise, and that means protecting your owner time, protecting your mindset, protecting your focus, taking breaks. It means delegating things and trusting people because you've got a system to make them better and a system to catch them when they fall, and a system to tell them exactly what to do, and a system to measure their progress. That's what recovery and deloading means is that you can do it. Now, a lot of gym owners tell us they can't take time off because they're micromanaging their staff because they've never told their staff exactly what to do, or they've never done a formal evaluation process. Or they might say they don't have money and they think that they need more clients, but the reality is nobody wants to join their gym and nobody wants to stay there if the owner is burned out and exhausted. These things seem like a complicated mess. The way through that mess to get yourself the time off that will elevate your mood, which will elevate your business, is to work with a mentor to sort through the mess and get things done, get them in place. All right. The sixth skill is tracking and measurement. Look, in fitness, we're all addicted to smartwatches, right? And heart rate monitors and logging our weights and our times or our heart rates and using beyond the whiteboard to track like what was a PR for us, or a lot of us still use a pen and paper journal. We are addicted to this stuff. I mean, half the time when I'm on my bike, I'm looking at my screen because I want to see the Stravis segment, I want to see my heart rate, I want to see my RPM, I want to see the power that's going out, I want to see my speed, I want to see my distance. And it's the same in the gym. We're looking at how fast did I do this before? What weight did I do before? Am I getting stronger? Am I getting weaker? Have I ever done this before? Right? We're obsessed with metrics and they can really help us. But then it comes to business, and we get a gym owner on the phone. You know, how many clients do you have? Uh, about 130. You, you know, that's the most basic metric. You can't tell me exactly. That's like saying to a client, okay, well, we're gonna build you to a hundred-pound bench press. Where are you starting from? About 50. Well, maybe let's get the real number, okay? The first thing you're gonna do is find the real number. If somebody says, I want to lose weight in your gym, you're gonna say, How much do you weigh now? I don't know, between two and 300 pounds. Well, I can't make you a weight loss program until we know how much you weigh. And it's the same with body fat, it's the same with any other metric in the gym. So, why do we expect that we can improve our business without knowing where we're starting from or without tracking our progress in the business? You know, you don't need to become an accountant or a bookkeeper. You need to track six basic metrics in your business. You need to track them relentlessly. You need to look for improvement. Am I getting better? What did I do to improve this last time? What will it mean if this gets better to my life? So these six metrics are arm, average revenue per member, how much each person pays? It's a measure of value. Leg, length of engagement, how long each person stays, it's a measure of uh your ability to actually change their life. ROI, am I getting a good return on the money that I put out, or am I just paying staff and equipment and the bank for no reason? Is the the landlord and the government and the bank making money off this business and not me? Net owner benefit, how much you get paid by the business. Let's face it, the number one reason most gyms close is because the owners starve. You need to track other things too, like EHR, effective hourly rate. Are you doing a better job as a CEO than you would as a trainer? And of course, you need to track your client headcount. That's it. Arm, leg, ROI, net owner benefit, effective hourly rate, and client headcount. If you don't know what those are, get on a call with my team or read one of my books. Like this, you just need to track these things like you track your back squat, front squat, 5K time, et cetera. Okay. If you track it, you will improve it. If you don't track it, you never will. I'm sure you've said that to 100 clients 100 times over. I'm saying it to you now. The seventh skill from fitness that translates into a fitness business is getting coaching and feedback. Look, years ago, Malcolm Gladwell wrote this book about the tipping point, and it was about the 10,000 hour rule or outliers, one of those two books. And the premise was that if you practice something for 10,000 hours, you would become a master. That's only kind of true. Good practice for 10,000 hours makes you a master. What makes good practice? Feedback, coaching. You did this right, here's how to do it better. You did this poorly, try it again. That's what makes you a master over time. So your clients can achieve elite levels of fitness, even for the average person, because they're getting cues and feedback and corrections to accelerate their growth. And that's coming from you. You are their coach. They're not going to get that from Men's Health magazine. They're not going to get it from a program that they found on the internet. They are not going to get that from AI. Cues and corrections and feedback and encouragement come from you. And that is what leads your clients to elite levels of fitness. Why do they need elite levels of fitness? Not to compete, to ward off preventable disease, to bounce back after injury, to survive longer with a more positive health span. The only way to get there for them is going to be coaching. It's not finding the perfect workout, it's not the cheapest gym membership, it's coaching. And it's the same for you. Mentorship and feedback are what help you grow. Just owning a business for 10 years will not make you a good business owner. It will not make you a good business. We have to stop measuring success by how long you've been in business and start measuring success by the actual metrics that measure success, net owner benefit, revenue, head clown, those kind of things. Just like we can't measure somebody's fitness by how long they've had a gym membership, you can't measure the success of your business by how long you've been around. You know, I don't like, and CrossFit is probably the most guilty for this. This affiliate has been around for 10 years. Let's put them on the stage and hear their tips. Well, I might have had a gym membership for 10 years. That doesn't mean that I should be coaching anybody in fitness. We need to find the people who are the fittest and say, how did you get so fit? And then teach that to everybody else, just like we need to find the people who are best at business and say, How did you make that great business? And then teach that to everybody else. That's what T-Brain is here for. Nobody else is doing this because nobody else is even measuring. They're just guessing. Good business mentorship and good feedback keep your business growing because we measure what's important. We coach you to get better at it and build the actual skills that will build your business long term, not just give you a workout that's going to work for today. Most importantly, it keeps you from making mistakes. The eighth skill from fitness that can apply to your business is community and accountability. You know this, and this has been true since at least the 70s. Training with a partner or a group keeps you consistent, keeps you on track, keeps you motivated. Greg Glassman said when you ride or loan, your wheel is always in front. I get faster at riding bicycles because I ride with other people most of the time. Training with partners pushes you to show up. You can't bail on your partner, you can't cancel, you're gonna do one more rep because they got your back. Uh, you're going to do one weight heavier because that's what they're doing, right? It keeps people consistent. You feed off each other, the whole is more than the sum of its parts. And in business, having a peer group or a mastermind or mentorship to keep you accountable does the exact same thing. Hey, I noticed uh you ran this ad. Why did you do that? Oh, I'm gonna do that too. Hey, you gained 10 clients last month. How'd you do that? I'm gonna do that too. That's why the community at TwoBrain is so important. Having a thousand other gyms who are on this journey, some ahead of you, some behind, gives you the opportunity to copy those ahead of you and turn around and teach the ones behind. By the way, teaching the people behind you helps make it permanent. That's why I do it. And in TubeBrain, you get a lot of that every single day. There's mastermind groups, there's peer groups, there's breakout groups, there's challenges that we do. And we do all this because this is what helps you grow, just the same reasons that you do it in your gym to help your clients grow. The ninth skill is adaptability. And in fitness, this means modifying your workouts for injuries or circumstances. In business, it means pivoting during crises, adjusting your offers when markets change, knowing that the thing that you offered 10 years ago is probably not the thing that people want right now. Knowing that, hey, my market has evolved from these fire breathers to 50-year-olds and adopting your services to them. That's what adaptability means. In fitness, it means modifying your workouts. I'm not having a great day, or my leg hurts, or I'm stiff today, I'm not going to do the normal weights that I do. Building this skill in the gym helps you pivot during crises in your business. The tenth skill is long-term vision. You're a fitness coach. The average fitness person might not understand this, but we work in macrocycles. We think about progressive overload, we think about rest, we might be thinking about periodization, you know, whether conjugate or linear or whatever. But we have a long-term vision of where we want to be. There's a purpose to what we do. Most people, when they start working out, they have a very simple goal. I want to feel better, I want to get in shape, I want to lose weight. As you begin to learn more about fitness, those goals become clearer, sharper, more concrete. And it's the same in business. In business, at first, your goals are very, very simple but vague. Survive, right? Pay the rent on time, that kind of thing. And as you evolve from that early founder phase of business into the farmer phase, it becomes more specific. Well, I need to make this much revenue so that I can pay my staff this much and pay the rent and pay the loan and pay the government, and I need to earn this much. And you start to get really, really clear on your metrics. And the goals change over time. And then eventually, when you're making enough income and you move into that tinker phase, you start thinking about the future. Do I want to have three gyms? Do I want to have one gym? You know, do I want to have more time off? Like what do I actually want? And what do I need to set aside so that I'm anti-fragile, I'm bulletproof, I can weather the storm if it happens again. And eventually you graduate into that chief phase where you start thinking about your impact and your legacy and how can I change my entire community here. And that's what basically happens in the skill is vision, and your vision evolves and it gets bigger as you see more success. You know, when you started doing fitness, maybe you just thought, like, I gotta feel better about myself. I need some confidence, I want to talk to girls. And then eventually you start thinking about competition, or maybe you start thinking about coaching, or you start thinking about owning your own gym. And that vision evolves, and fitness teaches you to be good at that, to have a long-term vision, to change goals, to shift goals. I went from being a competitive power lifter to competing at CrossFit to just being okay at CrossFit to getting back on the bike to relax my brain to actually competing at cycling again. And I think that over time it's natural to evolve, and that's what keeps it interesting, and the same thing is true of your business. And the last skill, the 11th skill I want to mention today, is creating hope in others. In fitness, this means helping your buddy succeed. It means being that spotter, being the person that they have to show up for. Hey, we're meeting at 9 a.m., shooting them that text. We're still running today, right? You know, my cycling group always has a group text going where we're talking about the workout that we're doing on Sunday, for example. And what we're really doing there is creating hope. We're painting a picture. Hey, we're gonna be doing this climb, we're gonna be doing this workout, we're gonna be running at this speed or whatever. And also helping them take the first step. Hope, according to Brene Brown, is a combination of seeing a brighter future for yourself and being willing to take the first step. You, as an exerciser, are good at creating that hope in others. You as a coach are great at creating that hope in others. And in business, it means creating that hope in your staff and your clients. It means giving them a clear path forward, inspiring belief in the mission. It means showing them here's how good things can be, and let's do the first step together. Hope is the ultimate leadership skill, and you start to learn how to build hope in other people when you're pursuing fitness. I got started in fitness because my buddy Ray and I had this really weird, like empty block in high school. And he said, let's go to the gym. And he kind of drugged me in there. And I was 18 years old, poor self-confidence, kind of wimpy. I was this farm kid and um, you know, thick glasses, lenses so thick I could see into the future. And we just started doing stuff. And the the gym had this old like global gym machine with, you know, the arm that you bench press and the leg press on the side and a triceps push down. We had no idea what we were doing. We didn't have a clear picture of the future, but I showed up because, you know, it was two o'clock. There was nothing else to do, and Ray was there saying, Let's go. And then I continued that into college and I started thinking about like, what do I want from this fitness? Well, I want confidence for sure. And hey, maybe it'd be cool to be able to bench press 135 pounds like those guys over there are doing. Or, you know, maybe it'd be cool to have bigger arms or whatever. And gradually the goals became clearer and more specific. And as I started to achieve things, I started to build be hopeful for the future. Like, wow, what if I could do this better? And, you know, I started cycling and then I started powerlifting, and then I started crossfitting, and you start getting really specific. Like, I want my friend time from four minutes to three minutes. I want to deadlift 450 at the next meet instead of 435, that kind of thing. And then, you know, eventually it's like I want to be able to put out uh 307 watts for 20 minutes. Like you get more specific, and that builds hope. You build momentum, and you can carry that skill into your business. Imagine showing your staff person, here's what's possible for you, and here's the first step, and then they achieve that step. And high five, here's the next step. Do you see the goal getting closer? That's how you build hope. You learn that skill from fitness, and you need to practice that skill and use that skill in your fitness business. Hey, I'm Chris Cooper. I've been working out for a long time. 40 years. I've been, well, almost 40. I've been coaching for 29 years. I've owned a gym for 20 years, and I'm still practicing all of these things. The skills that I learn in fitness are not sufficient to build a great business, but they are necessary. I lean on them all the time. I still love working out because of the progress that I'm making, and I still love owning a business because of the progress that I'm making there. I hope you feel the same. And if you don't, book a call with my team. Let's paint a clearer picture of a better future that you want to live and show you the steps that you need to take to get there.