How to Unify Your Team’s Approach to Program Design with Ben Pickard

[00:00:00] Hello my friend. On today’s episode, I’m chatting with Ben Pickard and we are talking about program design. Very specifically, we are talking about how to unify your team around a, a singular principle and philosophy for how your team approaches program design. All too often we have teams who are all doing very different things, trainers who are all moving in different directions with different philosophies and approaches when it comes to designing programs, and this is a podcast about how to get everyone on the same.

Page to make sure you’re delivering a consistent, high level quality customer service experience for your clients. So if you want a more unified team when it comes to your program design, keep on listening, my friend. 1, 2, 3, 4. Welcome to The Business for Unicorns podcast, where we help Jim and studio owners create a business and a life they love.

I’m your host, Michael Keeler. Join me and the business unicorns team each week for actionable advice. Expert insights and the inside scoop on what it really takes to level up your gym. Get ready to [00:01:00] unlock your potential and become a real unicorn in the fitness industry.

Hello, fitness business nerd. What’s up? Welcome to another episode of the Business Unicorns podcast. Before we jump into today’s episode, I just wanna give a quick shout out to our friends at Kilo. Many of you out there are probably duct taping together many pieces of software to make your gyms run. You have one piece of software for booking and or billing and or program design and or lead follow-up, or emailing or texting your clients or your website.

And Kilo is our favorite place to go to get all those things in one. Place Kilo is like really your one-stop shop for website and marketing automations and lead follow up and booking and billing. And so if you want one place that can truly do it all for you, go talk to our friends at Kilo. Link us down in the show notes.

It’s use kilo.com. Let them know we sent you. And we’re not just a promoter here, we’ve been using them ourselves for years. Ben [00:02:00] also on the podcast, can talk about his experience using Kilo. We really do use them and we think they are the best out there at the moment. Go check them out and. Get yourself a Kilo website and some a kilo account.

You won’t be disappointed. Ben, what’s your experience Been with our friends at Kilo. Kilo does all BF Fus website and everything behind the scenes and it’s been great. Shout out to Tom in tech support. Tom is my man. Not only is he Canadian, but I will come to him with the most complicated yeah, plus one for that, but I will come to him with the most specific.

Questions about this like very kind of high tech thing I’m trying to do. Yeah. And not only do I get an email response and like typically under 24 hours, if not like 12 hours when the shit hits the fan, he gets on a call with me. Amazing. Like, so in addition to Yes, don’t make your own website professionals do a way better job.

And yes, you should have automations ’cause it will get back to people faster than you ever can. And yes, it’ll simplify your life. Like I, the testament to me of a good company isn’t how good [00:03:00] are they? It’s what do they do when something goes wrong? Sure, because let’s be real, things are always gonna go wrong, and my experience has been like.

10 outta 10. It’s fantastic. Yeah. Tom, that’s amazing. I bet he has most of this podcast, but he’s great. Shout out to you, Tom. Hopefully someone sends it to you. Yeah, that’s amazing. Awesome. Let’s talk about today’s topic. Today’s topic is really a challenge I think most gym owners struggle with. At some point, if you have a team, if you have a team of trainers, at some point you’re gonna run into a trainer who wants to go rogue, and they go rogue.

When it comes to. Program design where maybe they took a certification last week or took a new workshop or read a book. Now suddenly they’re coming in and wanting to do all kinds of new shit with your clients that y’all maybe have not approved of or never done before. Or maybe you’re hiring a trainer who’s come in with lots of experience and their approach to programming and.

And frankly, just exercise science in general is just different than yours, and there’ll be some friction. And oftentimes it’s really up to the [00:04:00] owner to really decide what is our approach here? How do we break the tie amongst the team or decide what. What do we, what are we gonna allow on the training floor?

What is our real approach to program design, and what are things we’re not gonna allow? Where are we gonna draw the line around this issue? I know we experienced this a ton to add Market Fisher Fitness from time to time. We had plenty of trainers come through and want to really challenge our current systems and try and add things, and it was tough at times to really lay down the law and find an approach that made everyone happy enough.

To be on the same page about What about you, Ben? What’s your experience on this topic? Same thing. We started with no systems whatsoever for programming other than just hire people who believe in like kettlebells, barbells, et cetera. And then it’s very good program. Yeah. And that was literally day one, day 10, or day whatever of year 10 is drastically different because we encountered a lot of road bumps and there’s nothing worse than being like.

I don’t know what that exercise is, man. When you got a client on the floor, yeah, there’s, that’s the worst [00:05:00] moment is that other trainers who didn’t know those exercises, we have just such an egg on their face. They’re pulling on a program that someone else made or had an influence on and they’re pulling up this exercise and they’re like, what the heck is this?

And they just look so, they feel like they look so dumb in front of a client. Then the client’s getting told different things by different people. It’s just a real recipe for not a great. Client experience. Also a recipe for team conflict, right? And so I think making sure that you have a real unified approach to program design, I think is pretty critical.

A series of systems to have in place. And so what we wanna share with all of you today is we have a, we actually have a tool that helps guide you our unicorn setting members in this direction. It’s called the program Design pyramid. And so we just wanna go through some of the core questions that are embedded in this pyramid, because I think these are the core questions you want to ask yourself and have an answer for so that you and your team can stay aligned on what your approach is to program design.

Do you wanna kick us off, Ben? What’s one of the first most important questions to ask here to get everyone on the same page about [00:06:00] program design? The first one is the doozy, and that’s what are your core beliefs about training? Yeah. So that’s beliefs about the body, about nutrition, about movement, about achieving goals, about motivation.

It’s really what’s your philosophy? Yes. What do you like? Again, like I said, I heard people believed in kettlebells and barbells, but like that doesn’t mean me aligned on everything. Yeah, but I think you gotta start at this place. And oftentimes, I think for me, this is like synonymous with like values, right?

As a business, we wanna hire people and meet people on board that have the same values, but also when it comes to trainers, we wanna have similar, similar philosophies when it comes to how we think about I. The body, how we think about nutrition, how we think about movement, how we think about what goal achievement looks, what our role is in goal achievement as coaches, what, how we think about what we believe about motivation of cl.

These are all essential principles that we need to be on the same page about if we’re gonna work on the same team to get our clients’ results. And all too often I talk to. Trainers [00:07:00] and gym owners who are not aligned on this, right? Where it’s not, and you don’t have to be, everyone has to agree on everything, but there has to be some baseline stuff, right?

For example, one of like our training principles early on at MFF that I remember, I wasn’t even on the training team, but I remember them talking about many of them all the time. One was like beautiful movement. It was, is like a, it’s a philosophy about training. Another one that was like, do no harm, right?

No matter what we do, we wanna make sure that any decision we’re making about program design is intended to not hurt people. Right? And beautiful movement was about like, we prefer quality over quantity, rather you do five beautiful pushups, then 10. Awful ones, right? And simple things like that really help align a team to what do we care about here?

What, what are the things that matter most? Yeah. Anything you would add to that? I. Yeah, and this could apply to a lot of things. Like another example would be like, what’s the most effective way to lose fat for your avatar? How many grams of protein per pound of body weight do [00:08:00] you think is right amount?

Think even movement or muscles person. Yeah, lots of ways. Totally. Yeah. I think even zooming that out even a little bit is, okay, are we a place that takes a more precision nutrition approach and we really try to have a approach to nutrition that’s behavioral based. Are we one that really is gonna push for calorie deficits?

Right. Or a little bit of both, right? What’s what? What are our philosophies around nutrition? I think is, that’s important and we can go on with those other categories. I think that’s. I people, I think we’re making the point here. So you gotta start with what are the principles and philosophies that we follow as a team.

I’ll share the next one. So that was the first one. The second one that we really ask you to consider and have an answer for is, we use the word approach. What is your approach to training? And by this we mean what are the methods? What are the training methods that you use at your gym? What are the training methods you don’t use at your gym?

What are the training methods that are absolutely banned that you will never allow everyone even to talk about? What are the certifications and affiliations that you encourage [00:09:00] your team to get? So for example, at MFF, we really, I’ll talk about our classes. Our classes were really only used to three methods, and we would say, here we did body weight exercises.

This is a method of training. We did resistance spans and we used kettlebells. That was it. Like those are the kinda the methods that made up our classes and nothing more for the last 15 years. There’s, in our classes, there was never a sandbag. There was never, what are those clubs called? Um, Indian clubs.

Yep. None of the clubs. We never hung up any TXs. We never like, those are the methods that we use to help people who are in our classes and similarly, even in our small group personal training. We didn’t have every piece of equipment under the sun because we didn’t believe in every piece of equipment under the sun.

For most of our 15 years, we didn’t even have like a single cardio machine, not a bike or a treadmill. All of our finishers were things like bowel ropes and things like that, and all that points to, there’s some specific methods, some specific certifications, specific things that we believe in training [00:10:00] and some that we were like, no, we’ll never do that here.

Yeah, yeah. What do y’all, how do you all approach that, Ben? Very similar. We’re basically, quote unquote functional free weights, TXs bands, open space for body weight stuff. Yeah. But I will add to this. There’s going to be a circle of all the things that you believe are effective, and then there’s gonna be a circle inside that circle of all the things that you can actually logistically do in your gym.

Yeah. You may love having some select equipment and you can think hammer strength rows and pull downs, which I love are a great method. But like maybe from a floor space and budget standpoint, those don’t fit. So they’re, we’re not just talking about everything that you believe in or believe that could be good.

It’s also like you gotta decide like, how are you going to deliver this in a way that’s the most beneficial for members? Yeah. Yeah. We don’t all have 25,000 square feet in a $500,000 budget just for equipment. We can’t be the big box. Gym. Doesn’t mean that stuff is bad. It just means what are we deciding to do within this business?

Yeah, that makes [00:11:00] total sense. And I just wanna call myself out here to this audience, which I think knows this already, but I’m not a trainer. I’ve never been a trainer. So when I think about these questions, I think from like straight up like outsider monkey mind perspective, which is if I’m a trainer working at this gym, how do I know which certifications and continuing education is gonna help me?

Help me here. Help me grow and keep learning, and which I should really avoid because we actually don’t prescribe to that. That kind of training here, that’s really useful. And if that’s all you think about, when you think about what your approach is to training is like what certs you want your team to get and which ones you would not be willing to pay for.

I think that’s really useful. That’s a good, it’s a good place to start. It’s a good place to start. Hey there, business Unicorns podcast listeners. I’m just making absolutely sure you have already gotten your free, instantly downloadable copy of my new book, the Little Book of Gym Marketing Secrets. You can find a link to download it in the show notes, or you can go to gym marketing secrets book.com.

I worked super hard to make sure this is [00:12:00] a less than a 30 minute read and is a comprehensive overview of all the things you need to do. To grow your gym, get more leads, more clients, importantly, change more lives. Again, find the link in the show notes where you can download your free copy at gym marketing secrets book.com.

And now back to the podcast. Alright, so the first question, what are your core beliefs about training? Second question, what is your approach to training with methods you use and not use? What’s the third question in here, Ben? What is in your exercise library? What exercises do you do? What exercises do you don’t do?

How do you handle progressions and regressions? How do you handle adding exercises to the library, and how do you handle removing exercises from the library? This is where a lot of the rubber meets the road, right? This is where a lot of the tension appears with teams, which is, oh, I just learned this new way of doing these things.

Can we add them to our programming? And there has to be a process for that. How do you all handle this? I know you all went through a moment a while back then where you all really created an exercise library and have tried to stick with it ever since. [00:13:00] So tell us about that. Yeah. The long story short is.

We had a list, and I think the process was, if there even was a processes, was if you put it in a program also put it on the list. Yep. Anyone could add anything, anything, anything at any time. That’s a process. Anything at any time. And most importantly, they didn’t have to tell anyone that they did it. So you would put an exercise in the library for the program you wrote for Bob.

And I didn’t know that you did that. And I didn’t even know Bob got a new program and he comes in and trains me on Tuesday and I’m like, what the hell is that exercise? And I have to make a way of not looking like an idiot, but not throwing you under the bus. Yeah. Now we have a, we don’t use an app, we still use Google sheets for programming, which Yeah.

Falls into do. Where do you want your exercise library to be now? We have a process that if you want something on the library, we overhaul the whole thing. If you want something on the library, you have to petition it with the rest of the coaches. Yeah, and ultimately it’s my call. I’m not just gonna trump everybody for the sake of doing it, but we’re really trying to [00:14:00] think of it like from the lens of how is this helping our clients get results better?

Is it better? Is it safer? Is it easier to set up? Yeah. What’s the nomenclature we use for it? We even went through a phase of not calling things tall kneeling or half kneeling. We call them one knee down or two knee down, because as someone who’s not in the industry, two knees down is pretty self-explanatory.

But what the hell is half a knee? Make sense anyway. Stupid little thing, but that change for our clients. Yeah. That’s a perfect example of like why this matters, right? Is that we have to be on the same page about these are the exercises we use. If they’re not on here, we don’t do it. And if it’s on here, we’ve all agreed that it’s on here and we’ve all been trained to do what’s on here.

We know what it’s called, and we know why we added it. We added it because it’s gonna add more variety. We added it because it helps people with injuries. We added it because it keeps people safer. We added it because it’s challenging for X, Y, Z kind of person. That’s really important to making sure we have a consistent high quality client experience and people don’t have egg on their face by having some random [00:15:00] exercise that they don’t understand show up one day.

It’s just not a cute look. It’s not a cute look. Not, no, and it’s also, I found this to be the hardest step because I can make a case. I’m pretty good at playing devil’s advocate when it comes to exercise, and I’m not that dogmatic or precious about really anything. Yeah, this is where you gotta be brilliant to kill some of your darlings.

Like some stuff like Turkish getups are great. Are they a great F fit in a large root class? I don’t know. They’re high coaching demand, easy to screw up. That’s one cherry picked example. But this is where you gotta be really willing to just cut some stuff for the sake of the coaching experience, not just, but that exercise could be really good for this 1% of the population that might come in.

It’s, yeah. Is that really the only exercise we can do for that person? Come on, trainer. We can probably find an alternative. We can probably do another one. Yeah. Someone on this list is something that does the same exact thing. Yeah. I think there’s also a moment to really get, teach your team about the concept of learning to disagree and commit.

We may not agree on this, but we’re gonna have to, at some point, the owner or the. [00:16:00] A fitness director is gonna make a call and you might not agree with every call about what gets added or removed from the library here. And your job is just, okay, voice your disagreement, but you might need to commit anyway.

’cause this is the library we all have to work with. I think that’s a useful skill for teams to learn is to say, we might not get your way, but at some point we have to say, okay, I’m still on this team so I have to agree and just commit to delivering the best possible sessions. Yeah. Alright, let’s keep going.

So we got, what are your core beliefs about training? What is your approach to training? What’s in your exercise library? Question number four is what’s your proven process for writing programs? And I specifically put in here, what’s your proven process? Because ideally, you’ve been writing programs for a while and you have some real preferences that are based on your experience, you know what works and what doesn’t work for your clients based on their goals, based on.

Their preferences, and so the things that really matter here to answering this question are, do you have some shared program templates? Are your trainers or your team working off templates? Is there some sort of captain [00:17:00] of creating those templates? Is it someone’s job to create and maintain the standards that are in those templates?

Is there an SOP for using those templates, for coaching those programs? Have you made it clear what your process is at your gym for writing and using. Programs and all too often this is like we’ve all started out, we’re all swinging it at first, whether it’s an app or spreadsheets. We also had printed out piece of paper and spreadsheets for a long time at Mark Fisher Fitness and while there were templates, it was still a little bit wild of west, right?

They people were using templates, but still a lot of rogue stuff. Would swim in there from time to time and sneak onto that, onto those programs. So who’s responsible for creating the templates? Maintaining the quality control, making sure people know how to record the sets and the reps in a session. Is the trainer doing it?

Is the clients doing it? If there’s an app, there’s a whole nother set of things you need to decide, but if you’re not clear on these things, again, you’re just contributing to confusion. And making a less consistent experience for your clients. So being clear about how program [00:18:00] design and how templates or the design process itself works seems pretty mission critical.

Yeah. What’s your approach been to this, Ben? Yeah. Just plus a million again. Yeah. Record, but this is also a kill your Dialings element because there’s a lot, there’s a lot of ways to write a good program and only a handful of ways to write a terrible program, in my experience. And some of it is just being like, it’s not even what’s the best, it’s what’s the approach that we’re committing to.

Yeah. And that might just be people train four days a week. We move to an upper lower split if, and here’s what those templates look like. Do we do power first? Do we do a main lift first? Do we like, and I don’t wanna get into the nuance of what’s actually better or not, but you’re not really asking what’s the best, you’re just being like, what’s the way we’re willing to commit to knowing that we’re allowed to change our minds down the road?

You can always add templates, you can always tweak templates, but the more you simplify here that. We as a someone who comes from a training background, I believe that having less boundaries will make me able [00:19:00] to serve clients better. But what actually happens when you have a team that needs to be consistent, less boundaries lead to a less consistent experience.

So by having tighter boundaries, you actually get a better client experience because it doesn’t seem like everything’s different and everyone’s flavor of programming is drastically different. Yeah, I think that’s the most important part that you said it a few times, which is this should be simple. This should be simple.

It should be easy for your team to follow these templates, create great programs consistently. And you want to think about here, what is the, when you’re making templates for your clients, what are the things that most of our clients need? Most of the time we don’t wanna design our templates and all these processes for the, for the outlier cases, for the people who come in who are the most strong and lift the heaviest, and they’re the most extreme athletes.

We also do don’t wanna design it for people who have never worked out a day in their life before. And for most of you, your client’s gonna be somewhere in the middle. And depending on your avatar, you might have more beginners. Like at mff, we had a lot more beginners who did never lift like that before.

So some of our templates had to be really simple. And so I think the more simple you can keep it, the more, the more [00:20:00] boundaries you can maintain here means that you’ll have just a more and more consistent experience for your clients, and your clients don’t really need. As much variety as you think they do.

Trainers need the variety ’cause they get bored of coaching the same things day after day. But your clients are fine. Their clients are fine with doing a lot of the same thing repeatedly. And so I think keep that in mind as well, which is maybe a whole nother podcast topic. Do you wanna take us home with the fifth question here?

Our final question? Yeah. The final question is how do you ensure client’s results? How do you get them the thing they’re actually paying you for? Yeah, so that would be looking at things like goal setting sessions, check-in sessions, maybe you run some sort of challenges, whether they’re weight loss, behavior, whatever, some sort of challenge, as well as some like degree of accountability coaching, and there’s 1,000,001 ways to give ’em this cat.

But it’s again, what do you really wanna commit to doing is, I’ll think an example that I see ’cause I get the ads for is F 45. It seems like F 45 is always running a six week challenge. I don’t know the intricate details, but it seems like that’s a core part of [00:21:00] their retention, client acquisition, some sort of philosophy.

Yeah, because other gyms like don’t often run challenges and they do. At one point in my gym, we had everyone do like a weekly check-in. And they would track the metrics that were important to them. I know it’s not probably as common with the gyms that we talked about most or talked to most, but like some gyms are really weight loss driven and it’s, Hey, every Monday morning you get on the scale like, sure, I’m not advocating for or against any of this, but I am advocating for that.

You have a system. Yeah. ’cause the reality is like part of the, this is the final step in this program Design pyramid for a reason, is that if you’re really clear on your beliefs about training, you have a very clear approach for what you, the methods you use and don’t use. You have exercise library of all the exercises you and your team use with clear programs and templates for how you deliver that.

Then this final question asks you, is all of that working? Is all of that actually getting your clients the results. They, hi you, they hired you for, right? So this last question is how are you ensuring that all of that [00:22:00] work on the programming and the delivery is actually yielding results and your program design decisions can’t be in a vacuum.

You can’t, you can’t make them and maintain them without asking this final question, which is, are we designing and delivering programs in a way that works for our clients and the goals they have? And that’s why you need something like a check-in, a challenge and some accountability coaching, anything.

Because if you don’t close that loop, you’re just program designing in the dark, right? You’re, you’re just doing what you and your team like to do, which is cool, but also that’s not the end goal. The end goal is actually getting the results on the back end. So you can do whatever training you want for yourself, but you Yes.

Gotta do the training that gets the people. To the goals who are hiring you. That’s, yes, those are different problems to solve and frankly, this is the, this is maybe the hardest part, this last question, and I think the thing people miss the most, right? Is having a process to guarantee that you’re actually getting the people, the results that they promise you.

Frankly, it’s something we struggle with in [00:23:00] unicorn society for business unicorns as well, is making sure that we can close a loop with all of our clients and say, are all the things we’re doing for you actually helping you grow your gym, for example? It’s one of the hardest things we do. Same thing at MFF.

We tried a million things over the years to try and make sure that our clients were actually getting the results they wanted from check-ins through surveys, to actually calling and texting every client every quarter to up to a million more. So I think this is one that I encourage you all to really think about.

’cause whatever you will learn here. About what’s working for your clients has to circle back to the top of the pyramid. Has to then go and rein, inform all the choices you make about how you do program design. Yeah. ’cause if it doesn’t get to the results, you got some changes to make. If it is getting results, cool.

Double down, solidified, but I think this is important kind of loop that needs to be closed. Yeah. ’cause you might have a bias towards like sports performance or power lifting or. Strength training, and you’re getting a lot of clientele who are looking for general quality of life and fat loss, like gen pop to a t.

Yeah. [00:24:00] I, yeah, generally philosophically believe getting stronger is going to help people with all those things, but like true powerlifting training is not ideal for fat loss, generally speaking. Yeah. So you get to test your philosophies against the avatars that you’re working with, and you’re gonna have different templates of programs.

You might have different even methods depending on who you’re working with that you’re tailoring that to, like what’s the optimal way to get to this person, where they want to go, rather than just, what do I like doing? Yeah, I think it’s a good place to end things, my friend. I think that we covered it all.

I think that for those of you who have trainers who are going rogue from time to time, or just a team that doesn’t really feel aligned behind an approach and a principles regarding your program design, I think asking yourself those five questions is just a great roadmap for getting really clear about how you’re gonna deliver the best possible client experience and deliver the best possible client results.

Those have to go hand in hand. Yeah. Any parting words for our dear listeners, Ben? Yeah. This is a big egg to crack if that’s an [00:25:00] expression. Yeah, it’s now, it’s a worthwhile egg to crack that there’ll be some friction and there’ll be some challenge on your team, and this isn’t a to do that you’re gonna get done next week, but as you roll this stuff out, I guess the parting words are, if you’re having some of these problems right now, they’re only gonna get worse as your gym grows.

So the time to fix it is now. Yeah, said my friend. Awesome. Thanks for a great conversation. And dear listeners, if you want to level up your software game, you wanna level up your website, your marketing automations, your booking and billing platform, go click the link in the bio. Check out our friends use kilo.com and they’ll take great care of you.

You won’t be disappointed. Thanks Ben. See you on the next one. Thank you.

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