Jonathan Goodman

Despite what IG will lead you to believe, the best trainers are boring.

They're not dancing on reels, doing dumb (and often dangerous) exercises, or photoshopping their abs.

They're on the gym floor. Early morning after early morning. Running the same clients through the same exercises, repeated relentlessly and progressively.

They wake up early. Go to bed early. Eat the same nutritious foods. Progress using the same exercises.

Being boring makes for bad content, but a great life.

-Coach Jon

A great personal trainer gives you more years, and better ones. Less pain, more energy, independence into old age, a body that still works when everyone else's is falling apart.

And yet the average trainer in the US makes about $50K a year (according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics).

Follow if you want to learn how to build that business and make way more than the average.
-Coach Jon

Major cheat code in life: Lifting weights and reading books with your spouse.

Jacked nerd marriages: Couples that lift and read together, win together.

-Coach Jon

Had a client years ago, Jenny — long-time runner, wanted to get faster and build some muscle. She was proud of her mileage but frustrated her body wasn't changing.

We put the running on the back burner for a bit and built her program around two lifts: the Romanian deadlift and the clean and press. Full-body, explosive, metabolic as hell.

Within weeks she wasn't just running faster. She was leaner, stronger, and finally saw the changes she'd been chasing for years.

Running builds your engine. Lifting builds your body. You need both.

-Coach Jon

The single reason why investing into your health and fitness must be your #1 priority:

If your body doesn’t work, nothing else you buy will matter.

It’s literally that simple. Fitness comes first.

-Jon

At the end of my interview about having $1.6 million in bitcoin stolen with the Wall Street Journal, I was asked to share a takeaway.

Here is what I said:

I don't have any words of wisdom to help people avoid an attack like this. But I am now in a position to give advice on how to move forward after a terrible and undeserved thing has happened to you:

A sad reality is that bad things happen to good people who don't deserve it. The only thing you can expect to happen with any degree of certainty is that, at one point, the unexpected will come and kick you in the teeth.

In Unhinged Habits I wrote that "Awful things happen. Loved ones get sick; business deals go sour; strings of bad luck feel endless. The question is not whether or not you will roll your ankle. It is whether or not rolling your ankle will injure you."

I’ve spent my career telling people to get strong. Not so they can lift more, but so they can handle more. That's the real reason I lift weights; not for the fitness industry I built a career in, but so I'm strong enough to take a hit. It's what got me through my wife's cancer diagnosis. It's what's getting me through losing $1.6M in Bitcoin.

I've also written 12 books, and most of them exist because writing is how I process the things that knock me down. Strength doesn't stop bad things from happening. It just means you're still standing after they do.

So maybe my takeaway is this: read books and lift weights. Jacked nerds are unstoppable.

Exercise isn't just about how you look. It's the cheapest, most reliable tool you have for a better brain, better sleep, and a better day.
You don't need 2 hours in the gym. You need to move — consistently.

-Coach Jon

The fitness industry is almost impossibly hard to succeed in.

Here’s why:

The easiest thing to sell works quickly, is painless, and is easy.

Fitness takes a long time, hurts, and is hard. As a result, selling it is almost impossibly hard.

Most trainers quit within eight months. The ones who make it to five clients might last two years. Even the successful ones rarely stay longer.

I’m happy I started in fitness because it forced me to level up in a way so many other industries might not have.

I had to learn how to sell something people don’t want to do but know they should. I had to keep clients motivated through months of effort before they saw results.

I had to build trust when the product is pain and the payoff is delayed.

Those skills translate everywhere.

If you learn to sell the hard, it’s an advantage everywhere else.

Pic details: My client Robyn and I circa 2009 at Body + Soul Fitness in Toronto where I was the senior trainer before I left to go full-time online in 2013.

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P.S. Over 15 years I've sold 250,000+ books, courses, and coaching packages — all because of a simple habit stack. Comment "STACK" and I'll send you my FREE one-page PDF.

The body you're settling for is the body you're choosing.

-Coach Jon

My roommate almost burned down our house in College.

He wanted to fry potatoes and put an inch of oil in the pan and turned the heat on. Then he went to smoke a joint and ended up passing out.

By the time I got there, the flames were a foot high, burning the oven hood. I carried the fiery pan to the driveway, grabbed a bucket of water, and dumped it on.

Water and oil don’t mix. The water closest to the fire gets vaporized, becomes airborne, and pushes the oil away. That’s a fancy way of saying that it turns a grease fire into a fu***ng fireball. My dumb ass didn’t know this at the time.

Imagine you’re a firefighter. It’s your first day on the job. The alarm goes off. You rush to the house. Inside, a big pan is on fire. You turn off the heat source and spray the fire with a dry chemical fire extinguisher.

Once the fire’s out, you tell the family that next time it happens, pour on baking soda, cover the fiery pan with a metal pot, turn off the heat, and let it suffocate from a lack of oxygen and self-extinguish. Then you kiss a baby, pose shirtless for a calendar, and do whatever else I imagine firefighters do.

In a group of experienced firefighters, you’re a newbie. Compared to them, you feel like an imposter. But you knew not to put water on a grease fire. Sure, you might get laughed at by other firefighters but nobody you helped cared because you solved their problem.

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It’s not what you know: Successful coaches haven’t memorized more peer-reviewed research than unsuccessful coaches have. They didn’t necessarily get better grades in school.

Did you ever wonder why some nutrition coaches do very well while others barely make a living?

Successful nutrition coaches don’t necessarily know more about the metabolism than other nutrition coaches.

Most people don’t know enough about nutrition to begin to evaluate a coach on the basis of their nutrition knowledge.

Don’t let your perceived inexperience or perceived inadequacy related to your peers stop you.