What is online fitness coaching, and how does it work?

"Online fitness coaching" sounds vague, and a lot of what's sold under that name is. A PDF with twelve workouts and a group chat is not coaching. So here's what it means when I say it, and what I'd expect from anyone who calls themselves an online coach.

The short version: a real person builds a training and nutrition plan around your life, you follow it through an app, and that person looks at your numbers every week and changes the plan when you change.

What you actually get

Strip the marketing away and online coaching is five things:

• A program built for you. Your goal, your experience, the days you can train and the equipment you have. Not a template with your name typed in.
• A place to follow it. Mine lives in Trainerize. You open the app, it tells you what's next, you log what you did.
• Nutrition you can live with. Calorie and protein targets, portion guidance and meal ideas. No forbidden foods. (Here's how I set the numbers.)
• Check-ins. Weigh-ins, progress photos and a weekly conversation about what's working and what isn't.
• Adjustments. The plan changes as you do. If you stall, travel, get hurt or get bored, the plan bends instead of breaking.

Underneath all five is the part that actually matters: someone is watching, and you know it.

What a normal week looks like

With me, a typical week is two to four workouts on the days you picked, two weigh-ins (say Tuesday and Friday morning), progress photos every week or two, and a weekly call where we look at the trend and decide what to change. In between, you message me when something comes up: a question about a lift, a restaurant, a week that fell apart.

That's it. No daily homework, no 5 a.m. ice baths. The job is to make the plan easy to follow and hard to quietly abandon.

Online coach vs. personal trainer at the gym

A personal trainer at a gym stands next to you for an hour, fixes your form in real time and makes sure you work hard for that hour. That's valuable, especially when you're new. It also only covers the hour. The other 167 hours of the week, including everything you eat, are on you.

Online coaching flips that. You get less hands-on time, but the plan, the nutrition and the accountability cover the whole week. If I need to see your form, you send a video and I send notes back.

In my experience, the people who do best online are the ones who can get themselves to the gym but struggle to stay consistent and to know what to do once they're there. If you've never touched a barbell and feel unsafe in a gym, a few in-person sessions first can be a smart investment. Online coaching takes it from there.

Does it actually work?

I can't point you to a study of my coaching. What I can point to is the research on the two things coaching adds: supervision and tracking.

In one twelve-week study, men who did the same program under a trainer's supervision increased their training loads faster and gained more maximal strength than men who trained on their own.¹ In a larger study of 124 beginners, the group with more supervision made greater strength gains, mostly because more of them actually trained hard.²

On the nutrition side, a systematic review of self-monitoring found a consistent link between tracking (food, exercise or bodyweight) and weight loss.³ And a 2022 review of randomised trials found that adding a digital component to a home exercise program improved short-term adherence in seven of the ten trials.⁴

Read the fine print, though: these studies looked at supervision, self-monitoring and digital support, not at "online coaching" as a product. Online coaching is one way to get all three into your week. The research doesn't say a coach is magic. It says people who are watched and who track things do better than people who aren't and don't.

Who it's for, and who it isn't

It's a good fit if you keep starting over, your schedule is unpredictable, you want to understand the plan instead of just following it, and you're ready to do the work between check-ins.

It isn't a good fit if you need hands-on supervision for every session, you're rehabbing an injury that needs a physical therapist, you have a medical condition that needs clinical supervision for exercise or diet, or you want results without changing what you do during the week.

A good coach will tell you which group you're in. I'd rather tell you no than take your money and watch you quit.

What to look for in a coach

Ask how the plan is delivered, how progress is tracked, how often you'll actually talk, and what happens when you stall. If any of those answers is vague, keep looking. I wrote a longer checklist here: how to choose an online fitness coach.

And if you want to see how I do it, the coaching page walks through every part of the process. It works the same whether you're in South Florida or on the other side of the world.