How I Was Ahead of The Entire Fitness Industry

You have to seize change. It means being quick. I took this screenshot a year ago yesterday. Mid March 2020, I had already converted to 70-90% virtual appointments. While the big box gyms and others resisted the coming tidal wave, we grew. While they lost billions of dollars debating the emerging infection, I had already adapted, expanded, added equipment and then more coaches. I watched fitness influencers begin to piece together at-home programs and virtual seminars by April, May and June. It was already old news to me then. Heck, it was old news before the pandemic, as I'd already been doing at least a third of appointments virtually for close to eight years. It was such old news to me and we were so secure in our business that we had to take a family vacation for most of June because I was getting burned out from taking on so much new business, so much expansion, so much upside.

It’s not always easy to be one-hundred lightyears ahead of a trend. It absolutely isn’t. But I have one piece of advice: reevaluate how good you actually are at adaptability. People talk a big game about being fearless in the face of change; but then they look exactly the same no matter what tide shift comes their way. I don't talk about being fearless in the face of change. I don't talk. I just change.

I coach a lot more MDs and health experts than other strength coaches and nutritionists. So I never really had the grand luxury to delude myself about the pandemic. Clients have been giving me the inside scoop of treating actual Covid patients and their own epidemiological numbers for thirteen months. I had a big advantage in that sense.

But there is a lot more to it than that. I don’t hold onto the past, with anything. I see a lot of people make a concrete decision to suffer. You heard me. Pain is inevitable. Suffering is a choice.

Being adaptable means being so quick with change that it looks to others like luck or prescience or magic. Not just with the pandemic, with everything, people throw away the opportunity of today because they can’t let go of a past which maybe never even was. If you’re gripping the past, the lost, and the imaginary with all your might, you don’t have a free hand to reach for the now, the available, and the real. Don’t just relent to change. Don’t just embrace it. Open your hands. Seize it.