Blog: Musings of a Boxing Fitness Coach

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The Great SMART Goal Corruption

The modern SMART goal framework is a corruption of the original 1981 management criteria that removes assignability, and with it accountability. Restoring the original definitions of Assignable and Realistic is essential to transform goal-setting back into a rigorous tool for performance.

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Why Personal Trainers are Rushing to Master Padwork

Specialisation in padwork allows personal trainers to significantly enhance their service offering by integrating a highly effective, mentally engaging workout option. The resulting ability to meet rising client demand for boxing-style fitness establishes a distinct professional advantage in the competitive fitness landscape.

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How Personal Trainers Can Capture New Clients Without Buying Expensive Advertisements

Creative, low-cost marketing for personal trainers means shifting your focus from spending money to investing time in community engagement and exceptional service delivery. By applying clarity, consistency, and a sincere commitment to solving your audience’s problems, you build a recession-proof business based on earned trust rather than purchased attention.

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Big Gyms Are Not Big Business

Despite their large facilities and high volume of members, major commercial gyms are financially fragile because their business model relies on high customer turnover and members paying for a service they rarely use. The future of fitness is shifting toward mobile personal training, which offers superior convenience and accountability, making the business built on maximum customer loyalty and results instead of short-term acquisition.

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The Future of Fitness: Are Personal Trainers Obsolete, or Do They Become Digital Skill Coaches?

The idea that the personal trainer's role requires in-person physical instruction conflicts with Gen Alpha's digital-native preference for asynchronous learning. Perhaps the future of the industry is not in physical supervision but in the role of Digital Skill Coach, utilizing video feedback and data integration to deliver measurable cognitive and physical autonomy.

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Design Thinking for Personal Trainers

Design thinking is a client-centric problem-solving process that personal trainers can use to create bespoke, highly effective training programs by integrating empathy, creativity, and continuous refinement. This involves a five-stage iterative cycle: Empathy, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test/Iterate.

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Cracking the Code: Using the Big Five Personality Traits to Unlock Your Clients' Fitness Potential

The Big Five personality traits are a widely used model in psychology that can be highly relevant to personal trainers. By understanding and accounting for differences in openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, trainers can better tailor their approach to meet the specific needs of each client.

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Creative Problem Solving for Personal Trainers

Harness the power of creative problem solving (CPS) as a personal trainer. Utilize brainstorming and SCAMPER techniques to design effective workouts, market services, and manage time efficiently. Stay ahead, differentiate, and provide exceptional service. Teach clients CPS principles for their fitness success. Achieve better results and a rewarding fitness experience.

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How to Stay Humble and Improve as a Personal Trainer: The Dunning-Kruger Effect

The Dunning-Kruger effect describes the cognitive bias where individuals with limited knowledge overestimate their competence due to their inability to recognize their own limitations. To stay humble and continuously improve, personal trainers must take proactive measures including seeking feedback and critique, engaging in continuous education and mentorship, comparing their abilities with experienced peers, and utilizing objective assessments of their skills.

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Applying David Kolb's Experiential Learning Theory in Personal Training: A Guide to Engaging Workouts

Take your personal training to the next level with David Kolb's experiential learning theory. Discover how to engage your clients in meaningful and effective workouts by tapping into their natural learning styles. From reflective observation to active experimentation, this guide covers everything you need to know to apply Kolb's theory in your training programs.

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Integrating Piaget's Principles into Your Personal Training Program

Improve your personal training programs by integrating Piaget's principles of cognitive development. Discover how to adapt your training methods to your clients' unique stages of cognitive development and enhance their learning and growth in this informative post. From sensory-motor to formal operational, explore the key concepts of Piaget's theory and how they apply to personal training.

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Know Your Client: Using the Myers-Briggs Indicator to Enhance Personal Training

Get to know your clients on a deeper level with the Myers-Briggs Indicator. Discover how this popular personality assessment tool can enhance your personal training programs by helping you tailor your approach to each client's unique preferences and tendencies. From "ISTJ" to "ENFP," learn how to identify your clients' personality types and adapt your training methods to their needs and goals.

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10 Lessons from 10 Years of Coaching

After ten years in my coaching career, I've learned that being a great coach requires more than just teaching skills; it fundamentally means deeply caring about people and constantly reflecting on the ethical way I approach change. I've discovered that true student motivation is a by-product of great teaching, that I must skilfully balance challenge and skill to achieve 'flow,' and that my ultimate goal is to guide students toward the capability of acting independently of me.

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Elevating Fitness Coaching: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs for Personal Trainers

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is a foundational theory in humanistic psychology, but its traditional five-level structure ending at self-actualization is not universally accepted as the highest or final human motivation. The flexibility in the hierarchy is accounted for by Maslow's own qualifications regarding the fluidity of human motivation, and the other needs (Ethical, Cognitive, Aesthetic) are often considered non-hierarchical or supplementary.

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