Navigating the Challenges of Coaching in Today's Fitness Landscape

In this Trainer spotlight episode of FITLETE Radio, we get to know John Moljo.

GEORGE: Introduce yourself and tell us a little about what you do and your background.

My name is John Moljo, and I'm the proud owner of Team Moljo Strength and Conditioning. We are an appointment-based training facility located in Westchester County, New York. We offer private training and small group training. Our facility is about 8,500 square feet and the primary clientele we deal with is student athletes grades 5 and up and the adult demographic age 45 to 65. I have five team members here who are all incredible and awesome in their own unique way. If you are familiar with me you know that I tend to represent the acronym STRONG on either a hat or shirt.

STRONG represents our business's core values, my core values, standing for self-discipline the S, teachable the T, relentless for the R, O for optimistic, noble for the N, and grateful the G.

The mission has been simple, we help build a strong and healthy community in a fun and empowering environment. I have worked in fitness exclusively for my entire professional career. Once I graduated college I became a personal trainer at a local health club and three years after that I opened my first facility and here I am still doing it in year 16.

GEORGE: Tell me a funny or interesting story about yourself that help's us get to know you as a human.

So I'll start this story by giving I guess a fun fact or an interesting fact about me. And I think this fact will help people kind of profile me right out of the gate. But my favorite piece of fitness equipment is the air bike, which is arguably the number one most hated piece of fitness equipment amongst coaches and clients. And for years now, I've been an avid air bike rider looking to challenge myself, push myself, design programming, just pretty much trying to bring the air bike to center stage for people, because I think its benefits are deserving of that. But an interesting story was I told myself in 2021, wow, the first blizzard that we get, I'm going to take this air bike outside and I'm going to do a 999 calorie ride. And for those of you who are unaware, 999 calorie ride on an air bike is a very challenging and daunting workout. And my goal was to do it in under one hour. So I lug this bike outside. I live in New York, pretty decent blizzard. It's snowing and I just start going and the snow is snowing so hard that it's blocking the screen. So I can't really see my RPMs. I can't see any data. So I'm like wiping the screen off without trying to press any buttons. And I finally hit a button that stops the workout. And one of the most important things of doing a 999 ride is actually getting the screen to populate when you're done and say 999. So 255 calories in the bike stopped and reset. I came back in for a hot second, threw a quick temper tantrum to my manager, got back on the bike and just restarted the workout. 65 minutes later, the workout was done. The last 15, 20 minutes was absolutely miserable. The bike was squeaking. The belt was icing. My normal pace is about 70 RPMs. I was going like 50 RPMs. It felt like 70, but the workout got completed. I share that story because I think what I like to highlight about myself is putting myself in positions of discomfort, challenging myself, getting out of my comfort zone. And as a business owner, I think that's a very important quality.

GEORGE: What strategies do you use to attract and retain clients in your personal training business?

With my primary education coming from business, that's been pretty advantageous for me running a successful fitness business. And what I have found over time is successful coaches don't really just rely on their ability to structure programming and deliver the X's and O's of fitness. From experience with some of the philosophies we teach here at Team Muldrow and what I have seen through years in the industry and being at seminars and workshops, is some of the best coaches are great people and they're great people's people. They understand the importance of developing and cultivating a strong relationship with somebody and what it takes to maintain a relationship with someone. And part of what has made us successful here at Team Muldrow is we have great people who can become great coaches. And too many times we see people who are great coaches in the X's and O's, but they're not necessarily great people. They don't have the soft people skills to engage in a relationship, make someone feel comfortable, make them feel special, make their day. So I think, one, having great people skills is an excellent way to attract and retain clients. Next would be, I think, obviously your professional expertise. People come and see coaches for some level of education, some level of results. They want to make some progress. So you need to understand how to deliver that to people, but stressing the importance that how you deliver that to people is going to be best if you individualize it to that person and their lifestyle. So someone's ability to look at someone's entire life as a whole and make recommendations based on their entire life as opposed to structuring a program based on some type of end result is, A, will allow someone to be more successful, but, B, I think demonstrates a higher level of care and coaching. So I think people skills and looking at someone's entire life can really be advantageous in terms of building a coaching business. It sure has been for us.

GEORGE: What is your process for assessing a new client's fitness level and addressing their goals?

Any new client we take on undergoes some type of fitness consultation. And generally that consultation is a two-way street of education. And what I mean by that is, A, the client needs to educate us on as many variables in their life as possible. Everyone is going to have some type of end goal. They want to lose X amount of weight. They want to do this lift, perform this or perform that. And as a coach, you need to understand that fitness and exercise is a very small variable, for the most part, in contributing to a client achieving their goals. There's going to be a lot of other variables that you can help impact and educate on that are going to allow them to experience success. So the first direction of education is the client informing the coach about as much as possible. What do you do for work? What are your stress levels like? What are your recovery modalities? How do you sleep? What's nutrition like? What are you doing for exercise? What injuries? What restrictions? What limitations? Give me as much information as possible because the more information you provide me, the better of a program I can create both in and outside of the gym to help you achieve your goals. And then the second portion of education obviously comes from the coach helping that client in those areas make certain adjustments. Clients are unaware about the benefits of sleep. They're unaware about how they should be training, which is why they're coming to you. They're unaware about adequate nutrition. They're unaware about stress management techniques. So you as a coach need to educate them on as much of that as possible, but also let them know that, hey, this is going to be a process and we're going to tackle things little by little. But the long term plan is that we eventually have provided some education and have taken some serious steps into making progress in these areas. So you need to learn about as many variables from the client as possible. And as a coach, you need to let them know about all of the variables you can provide support for them. So that's generally like a 60 minute conversation.

GEORGE: What certifications do you hold, and how do you stay updated on the latest fitness trends and research?

Regarding certifications, I am a CSCS through the NSCA. I have my PPSC level 1, and I generally travel one to two times a year for workshops that are generally at least one, two, arguably three days long to learn from other fitness professionals. So my preferred method is stepping out of the gym, getting into a conference, networking, collaborating with other professionals in the industry. We have staff development here at the gym bi-monthly, and one of the biggest benefits of having a team of six coaches and instilling growth and learning into the culture is that these six coaches are constantly trying to better themselves. And every week we have staff workout, every Friday 12 o'clock, and one coach is responsible for a full month of staff workout. And it's that coach's responsibility to bring something to the table that not only help them develop their skills, but that will help develop the skills of the other team members. So we have a very good divide and conquer system in place where all of the other coaches are constantly trying to learn, grow, and bring stuff to the business that we can either provide feedback, refine, and ultimately deliver a better product to our members. So relying on the divide and conquer method amongst our team, traveling for continuing education, and then just being a student. I like to read. I'll do some research. If someone I know is posting something, diving a little bit further deep into that, I think the way people are able to access information these days is pretty easy. You know, I have a couple of YouTube channels that I follow that provide good content. So there's a lot of information out there. But again, like I mentioned before, primary is getting out of the facility and getting skin to skin with people who are doing it and making it part of the culture of our team to get better, learn. And it is my responsibility to make my team better, but at the same time, it is their responsibility to make me and the other team members better as well.

GEORGE: How do you envision your personal training business evolving in the next few years?

Having been in the brick and mortar business for 10 years and experiencing a lot of different situations, I guess you can say, what has become very important to me is just staying true to what your business does well and continuing to prove on that. And for us, that has been coaching, private training, and small group training, and delivering kind of a high-touch relationship-driven service. And part of what is going to continue to get us to do that better is acquiring good talent. I have coaches in the past who have worked for me, interned for me, and have come up through our I'll call farm system that have turned out to be excellent, great coaches. So continuing to make sure that we are feeding the farm system so that we can provide a continued great service to our community. And I also think with everything that's going on in fitness and everything transitioning to online and hybrid models and an influx of people into the market, there's going to be a lot of opportunity for more of a collaborative approach to provide services for people. An example of that would be we have a large fitness space, and we weren't really maximizing it, and we just brought in a Pilates studio as a tenant to our gym. And some people might think, well, why would you put a Pilates studio next to your gym? It's a conflict of interest. And the reality is it's not, because they have a completely different clientele, and they offer a completely different service, and it's actually complements what we offer here. So I think finding ways to collaborate with other health and fitness services to, A, provide people with, you know, not necessarily just like a one-stop shop, but provide people with the ability to maximize what they're getting out of fitness as seamlessly and conveniently as possible. And I think there's a lot of opportunities for online coaches and even brick-and-mortar coaches to collaborate to offer people a better service and to maximize their business offerings as well.

GEORGE: What do you think are the biggest challenges currently facing the fitness & personal training industry?

I think this question is interesting because I can answer it multiple ways. I'll start by maybe sharing my perspective on online coaching. I think what I'm noticing, and obviously there are some people that do it really well, but what I'm noticing is that some people, when the primary product of your business is coaching and training, but you're not spending majority of your time on the primary product of your business. So what that means is, I find a lot of coaches are spending an incredible amount of time on creating content. They're spending an incredible amount of time on marketing and sales. And if your business is coaching, you have to coach people, and your focus can't be on just creating content. But I understand the importance of that to growing an online business. But at the same time, if you're spending 80% of your time on your next Instagram post, is that serving your business best? So that's number one. I think when people focus on, they're spending more time on things that are not the primary offering or primary product of their business. As far as in-person business, I think just the biggest challenges are going to remain what the biggest challenges have been. Client acquisition, clients being able to find other offerings and think they're going to get something better for cheaper, as a brick and mortar, and someone who leads a team, the biggest challenges are, you know, if you have a change in staff, if you have any actual issues in the facility. We've, you know, personally, we had a flood that kind of set us back a little bit. If you have rising costs in your real estate. So there's a lot of things that they're just challenges, they're just obstacles. And I think any good business has the ability to see its way through a lot of these things. But again, for me, being like a brick and mortar owner, those would be some of the challenges I would be most concerned, you know, a change in team and maybe any issues with the facility.

Want more John Moljo in your life? You can find her here:

Team Moljo: https://www.teammoljo.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/j.moljo/

—Gym: https://www.instagram.com/teammoljo/

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