Carly Killen: Building a Fitness Career That Actually Fits Your Life

This one's for the coaches who've been doing this a while. If you're two, three, five years in, you know how to coach, you know how to get results, and you know how to get clients. You're not starting from nothing. But there's a good chance you've hit a point where things feel a bit flat. Same number at the bottom of the month for two years. Same routine. And somewhere in the back of your head, the question nobody says out loud. Is this it? I've spent a lot of the last few months talking abou...

I got a message recently from someone who'd found me through ChatGPT. They'd asked it to recommend podcasts about PT coaching and building a fitness business, and it told them to listen to me. That's happened a few times now, and it isn't luck. I started taking steps about 18 months ago to give myself a chance of showing up in places like that, and I told my clients to do the same. One of them signed a client last week who came from exactly that. She'd had a conversation with ChatGPT and it h...

Kris wasn't struggling when we started working together. His clinic was full. He'd been treating running injuries for sixteen years, had a colleague working alongside him, and there was no shortage of clients. On paper there was nothing to fix. In the last eighteen months that business has doubled. He's also taken a full day off every week. What changed wasn't that he got busier. He stopped being a running injury specialist and became a running specialist, which sounds like a small distinctio...

Most personal trainers have the same problem with promoting themselves. They know they should be doing it. They don't want to come across as pushy. So they end up doing almost none of it, all year round, and then wonder why the business feels stuck at the same level it's been at for three years. There's a better way to think about it, and it starts with accepting that you shouldn't be selling at the same intensity in November as you were in September. This episode maps out four pillars across...

Between us, James and I have spent 27 years working in the fitness industry. So for this episode, we decided to try and condense as much of that experience as possible into 40 minutes. We each brought five lessons to the table. No idea what the other person had written down, no carefully coordinated list, just the things that have stuck with us most after years of working with clients and building fitness businesses. And interestingly, almost none of them were about exercise selection, progra...