Interview with Chris Burgess, Founder of Lift The Bar: Fitness Mentoring
Chris is the owner of Lift The Bar: Fitness Mentoring and also a very proud Personal Trainer. With Lift The Bar Chris is focused on helping other trainers get the support they need in training, nutrition, and business, in order to have a really happy career that allows them to create a world of happy clients.
Note from Matt: This interview was recorded from a skype call and then written down by me. Some of the sentences may be edited slightly for an easier read. Also, Chris is in the UK so he talks about pounds instead of dollars which is a little weird. Please forgive him because he’s a really cool dude.
Matt: Chris, thank you so much for giving me your time. I wanted to start out by asking you how you first got into fitness and eventually decided to become a personal trainer.
Chris: I first got into fitness around eight years ago when my wife and I were six months away from our wedding. I was a skinny dude, 6’6” and around 72 kilos (~160 lbs). Really tall and skinny. I thought that it would be nice to get one of those 6pack things that people talk about for the honeymoon (laughing), so I did what anyone would do and picked up a Men’s Health magazine. There was an article about how the guy on the front made the cover in six weeks and I thought, “Great! I’ve got plenty of time to do this!”. I kind of knew it was bs, but I still went along and did it anyway. As soon as I started lifting weights I found out that I really liked it. I ended up getting into pretty decent shape for my wedding with more muscle than I had hoped. After the honeymoon I came back and thought about how rewarding the experience was for me. Not only physically did I look better, but my psychology had changed to how much better I felt. I decided to just keep going. It was about another year before I thought I’d get into training as well. I had a lot of people who saw the changes I’d made and were asking for help. Up to this point I had just read magazines, T-Nation, and other stuff. Through trial and error I had found a way of training that seemed to work. I had a pretty good career, but it came to the decision where I realized I wanted to help more people that were like me before I made the personal changes.
Matt: When you first began your new career as a personal trainer what challenges did you have?
Chris: The first challenge that I had was that I already had a good job that paid well, so I had to balance this job with the increasing demands I was getting as a personal trainer. I didn’t realize when I started that I would be working 18 hour days. I would do two sessions before I went to my office job, 3 sessions when I finished my office job, and on weekends I would fit in 4-5 sessions each day. For the best part of two years I barely had a day off. Outside of the training I was trying to keep on learning to continue to get better as well. You can’t be a personal trainer without being passionate about reading more and more and more, especially as a young trainer. Input is everything. It was very tough to balance the time constraints of my old job and what I wanted to do with my new career AND to study on top of that. It was relentless.
I made a lot of mistakes and that’s part of the reason why Lift The Bar exists. I don’t think that there’s any perfect way of doing it, but there’s definitely better ways than what I did.
Matt: So when did it start to gel for you as a personal trainer? What was the trigger that pushed your career forward?
Chris: To be honest, it was two-fold. I was studying a lot, getting some good results with my clients, and very passionate about the career direction I wanted to take. The catalyst came when I realized my personal training revenue was enough to fund my lifestyle, my bills, etc. Because of this it meant that I could grab the 38 hours back from not doing my other job. I had to chose between the job I wasn’t passionate about anymore with a steady income forever or this new path. I just thought about it logically and figured that with the extra 38 hours to redirect towards training I could live comfortably off of the income earned. Not only to live comfortably, but now I could be full-time in the industry that I felt I was meant to be in and focus on helping people change.
Matt: So how many years did you do personal training before you transitioned into starting Lift The Bar and how did that get started?
Chris: I trained for 6 years before I started to work with five personal trainers who had gone through the same courses as I had at the University of Bath. They reached out to me because our Course Chief had said that I was a good example of someone who had “made it” in our industry. I didn’t necessarily think so myself, but he pointed out to these trainers that I had gone from another career to having a pretty decent life as a PT. I was connected with quite a few young trainers, but there were five that I really took a liking to. I started to show them what I had done wrong, what I had done right, which subject authorities to listen to when it came to delivering evidenced-based quality information, and so on. We always focused on looking at this all from a client perspective. We’re very good at knowing what our strengths and weaknesses are as trainers, but our first consideration should always be our clients and what type of experience we can deliver to them to encourage change. So, I kind of helped those trainers start off their career quite nicely.
Last October I was close to burning out again. I was doing close to 50 hours a week of personal training and I reached a point where I had to tell all of my clients that I was going to take a week off. I needed a full week off just to relax, unwind, catch up with some of the articles I was supposed to write for Men’s Fitness, and stuff like that. I just sat in the kitchen and thought about how out of all I’d done in the past year helping those five personal trainers was the most enjoyable for me. Seeing five good guys make a career for themselves out of something I love and they love. It was very rewarding. I thought that there was nothing I’d done that couldn’t be put online so I put out a Facebook status saying that I was thinking about mentoring a group of 10 people this upcoming year. From that one post I got 30 emails in the first 30 minutes. That’s where the realization came that there was a market for it so I started to think about how I could make it really good.
I firmly believe that we shouldn’t overstep our limits as trainers. For example, I’m not a qualified nutritionist, but I work with a lot of qualified nutritionists who I really respect. Maybe I should get some of them to do a talk or seminar and pass along to my trainers. Maybe I should get a business expert to do some business talks. Before you know it, I’ve got 4 years worth of guest speakers lined up to help the LTB members progress and evolve their skills.
Matt: So you saw the market opportunity to build a business by filling the knowledge gaps for personal trainers and accelerating their careers.
Chris: It was a little bit like that. I’ve been to a lot of seminars and met a lot of cool people. I think that networking at these events is just as important as the information you hear from the speakers. Everyone knows that it doesn’t take much time to get a personal trainer certification. There’s not much accountability or morality about it all. I’m somebody who likes to fix things – whether it’s somebody that’s overweight, or if it’s our industry, in terms of morals and ethics. Everybody moans about it, but no ones really doing anything to make the situation better.
I figured that I’d helped five guys, why couldn’t I help ten more? That was kind of it. Luckily I’d networked at a lot of these events and met with a lot of coaches who had the same opinion that personal training education wasn’t good enough. As soon as I said that this is what I wanted to do they were fully behind me. Lift The Bar wouldn’t be here without the support of some really cool people back in the early days.
Matt: I’m not as knowledgeable about the process for personal trainers is for trainers within the UK, but in the U.S. trainers get their certification and hopefully work at a gym that pushes them as they continue their personal education on the job. In most cases there’s still not much accountability to continue to push themselves unless it comes from within. You’re positioning Lift The Bar as the spot to continue to push their education to a higher level.
Chris: Exactly. I don’t know what the U.S. stats are like, but apparently in the UK as many as ⅓ won’t last more than 2 years in our industry. There’s a huge dropoff rate, but courses are rather popular. There’s a lot of interest in becoming a personal trainer, but too many people make too many mistakes. We like to capture people if we can after they’ve finished their course and set them up to make sure they’re following evidenced-based exercise and nutrition protocols. There’s a lot of business stuff in there, actually more than I’d like. I want the trainers to focus more on training and nutrition at some point. The main thing is that I want a personal training industry where a client asks us to justify everything we say, whether it’s a rest period, the removal of gluten, choosing a squat over a split squat. I want our trainers to be able to say here’s why I did it, here’s how it relates to your goal, and here’s how it’s going to take you to where you want to be. I want us to be able to do that and, hand on heart, I don’t think that happens nearly enough anywhere in the world of training. Trainers like to train clients how they like to train themselves. I just want to get to a stage where we’re helping trainers make the right choices for the right reasons with the clients that need our help. As an industry we do good things, but not great things. Obesity rates are going up through the roof. People take more and more days off because of lower back pain and stress. If you look at employer’s statistics stress and lower back pain are still costing billions and billions of pounds in work absences each year. We’re not doing the best and I think we need to get to the point where we can truly justify why our clients should make these choices.
Matt: I think you’re spot on. It’s funny, I’m actually going to Coach Stevo’s unconference Motivate next week. The goal of the unconference is to look at the remaining 167 hours trainers aren’t with their clients each week and work on ways to ensure clients reach their goals. We’re all in this for the same reason and trying to figure out how to ensure trainers get long-term results with their clients.
Chris: We’re an industry that needs more ethics and morality. You get a lot of personal trainers that get into this industry and are just obsessed with money. They’ll be off their course and looking at Facebook ads that are telling them to work less and earn more. How about just work to start with? You can worry about working less and earning more after changing the lives of countless amounts of people. Let’s go for that.
Taking a step back, I want to work more. It sounds bizarre to a lot of people, but I want to work more because the more I work the more I can impact the people I help. The more people I help the more likely I am to have a lasting impact and a legacy. The guys who don’t make it in our industry are more often the one’s get a certification and think that they’re going to earn $50,000 a year in year one and in year two it’s going to be $100,000. They have no idea what they’re getting themselves into.
Matt: Tell me about the program has grown since you started. I’ve taken a look at the Facebook group you have and it’s crazy how active the community is.
Chris: Yeah, it’s a bit crazy. People talk about business and strategy, creating funnels and whatever. The process to initially get signed up for Lift The Bar started with that FB post and I made every trainer who passed along their email send me a Word document to apply. Out of the 30 emails I originally received I actually got 32 emails back with the Word Doc because trainers were telling their friends about it. I set myself a year one target of having 50 people before I had a website, company name, logo, FB page, or anything. Once I started to add the pieces to complete the business – the name, the website, the logo – trainers kept on coming in. It just spread. I don’t know how we got to what we are. I do daily emails, which is great. I do a few FB ads here and there to promote the speakers we’ve got, but more than anything I think people realize that we’re here to improve the quality of trainers across everything. We’re not just nutrition, we’re not just training, we’re not just business. I want to create an army of trainers who give a shit and do really well. When you tell enough people you want to do that other people buy into it. We gave them their own forum, which I try to stay out of, and they just go for it. I’ve tried to harvest a place, a private place online, where these guys can get in a room together and say, “I don’t know how to do this.” If more trainers said that we’d have a much better industry. These trainers go into our forum and say, “This is going to come across as really stupid, but I don’t know how to do this.” What ends up happening is that 15 other trainers comment back saying that they didn’t know how to do that either, then two others say they know the answer but are actually wrong, then another 3 who say here’s a good way to think about finding that solution who really know what they’re talking about. There’s no right or wrong. Of course we have a group of mentors and guys I absolutely idolized 3-4 years ago who help my career who are in this group I created helping as well. That’s really rewarding to see. It’s grown into a really strong community that sells itself.
Matt: What are you focused on improving with Lift The Bar from here? What’s the next step?
Chris: The next step is that I want to bring in some guest speakers that I originally never thought I’d be able to get on. I just didn’t think we’d ever get the profile for it to happen. Alwyn Cosgrove, Martin Rooney….Joe Defranco is coming up on the 4th of November. It’s just great news for us. So, I want to continue to get some of the elite industry people out there who have built their business on the right ethics and morals.
On top of that, next year I want to launch a Lift The Bar certification of sorts. I want to make it one of the hardest processes to pass for personal trainers, not for Strength & Conditioning coaches or nutrition coaches. So, they’ll need to submit a training case study, a nutrition case study, they’ll have to watch a series of videos and add audio on top of it showing what they’re learning and how they can apply it to coaching. The nutrition program we set for a case study will need to be scrutinized by Joseph Agu, who in my opinion is one of the most difficult guys in nutrition to impress. He is so, so hard to impress. Because of that I want my guys to have to justify and prove to him that they can write a good nutrition plan and have him say pass or fail. If he says that you fail then you don’t get the certification. They’re going to have to jump through some serious hoops. And you know what? In the grand scheme of things the certification won’t mean jack to their clients or business, just like any other certification out there. What it will mean is that this personal trainer can go out into the world and have the confidence that they’ve passed a really challenging assessment test. They deserve to be able to stand up and tell the world that they know what they’re talking about. We’ll go into their area and do a social campaign to help them saying that this trainer is awesome because they know this, this, this, and this. I want Lift The Bar to have this certification and do a few events as well. We’re talking to some guys about doing a 4 day event with workshops and speakers that will be included in the price for Lift The Bar. 95% of the revenue I’ve made so far has been reinvested into LTB. As much as I want to have a great career and be rich and famous like we all dream of, I’d much rather focus on my legacy first and foremost. Last year I delivered just about 2000 hours of training. That was 2000 opportunities to influence and help someone get better. This year, because of helping other trainers through Lift The Bar, I’ve had influence over 150,00 opportunities to help someone get better. That’s all I want. I want to try to influence as many people as possible so I can have a little bit of influence about how my society lives their lives. If I could make it 300 thousand, 400 thousand, or one day have influenced a million opportunities of people to improve in a year than I’m doing what I think is important. Earnings in our industry have a direct relationship with how good your are with people and how many people you actually help. I’m pretty sure when I’m able to help a million opportunities of influence my bank statement will reflect that, but that’s a long ways off. In the meantime I’m just going to focus on ensuring that people get better the rest will take care of itself.
Matt: If you’d like to check out more from him and check out the awesome work he’s doing with Lift The Bar you can click on the links below: