A 6-Step Process to Keep You Current and Grow Your Niche

If you want to grow your business your way — where your favourite clients drive your style and lead you to your natural niche — this is the process for it. I started building it in 1994, and it's the key to being wanted, appreciated, well-rested and paid properly in this industry.

The four skills a career rests on

Everything below sits on four primary components:

• Question development and research skills
• Technical skills — biomechanics observation and delivery
• Communication skills
• Business skills

Get the processes in place, and every session with every client becomes another step towards building a niche from your truth.

The 6-step process

Here's how those components play out in practice.

1. The client arrives with a perception of their goal

Take it as a starting point, not the finish line.

2. Find the real goal

Use an open-ended questioning system — why-why-so-so — to get past the surface and find the client's real purpose, then build a genuine long-term goal. While you're here:

• Make diagnosed injury a hurdle, not a goal.
• Refer undiagnosed injury and pain.
• Recognise that pain is a feeling, based on emotion in the context of when they experience it.

3. Hit the research

Take the long-term goal and the client's current status to the evidence. If you've already researched the topic, this is quick.

• Use high-quality studies.
• Refine your question as you search.
• Read both sides of the argument.
• Conclude from the best science — no science, and opinion, is not competent evidence.

4. Apply the studies to the programme

Bring the technical skills to bear:

• Apply HMAC eyes — seeing every movement, in order, and its effect on every muscle.
• Apply the "big eight" of movement creation to make any combination of movement happen.
• Use the FASTER Exercise generator to build skill and performance clusters.
• Define loading strategies.
• Design story-based programming for optimum biomechanics and energy-system development.

5. Coach it well

Delivery is where programmes succeed or fail.

• Give every component — every beat of the story — a proper delivery.
• Make the client's experience one they talk about and share.
• Coach so the client doesn't interpret training emotions as pain.

6. Market and share

Take what you've learned and add it to your developing story online.

Your niche builds itself

It's the stories from running this process again and again that build your niche. And your niche informs your voice, your marketing, your delivery, your price and your long-term success.

You'll get there faster with a community to guide you through the bumps — one that motivates you, shares knowledge and keeps you developing as the individual you are. That's why our FASTER Mentorships aren't really courses: we keep asking you back without asking you to keep paying, because people keep coming back.

The advice I'd give every trainer I meet: learn to find your clients' questions, ask those questions of the research, devise a plan, communicate the solution, and tell other people. And to tell other people well, find your style, develop your story and your delivery — then deliver it consistently.