Amir Siddiqui has been working with clients as a fitness coach for just over 10 years. In those 10 years he’s picked up on patterns that repeat themselves in each new person, in each new medium, in a slightly unique way, forming a unique impression, creating their own unique signature and something in common at the same time. Having been inspired and mentored by the great minds of fitness expert Scott Abel and professional intellectual, Howard Bloom, Amir likes to think of himself as a Fitness Omnologist.

Note from Matt: This interview was recorded from a skype call and transcribed by me. Some parts may be edited slightly for an easier read.

Matt: What was your motivation was to move from New York and open up a gym in Dubai?

Amir: Taxes. The thing about Dubai is that you can charge a lot more money over here. My currency is like funny money to people from other countries. The problem now is that US citizens still have to pay the US some form of tax no matter where we live. It’s pretty much the exact same. So that whole plan…didn’t really backfire, but the original goal was to save on tax money.

Matt: Did you have any ties to Dubai or were you starting from scratch?

Amir: No ties. I just kept on hearing about this place where people were making very good money from anything they could think of. It was the birthing of a new New York in the Middle East. The idea of religious tolerance sort of emanated from and only exists in Dubai. So I thought that I could come live in a place between New York and the rest of the developing world and dominate the market. I visited 2-3 times for short trips and saw that the competition was shit. Shortly after the visits I opened up my gym and got started.

Matt: How tough was it to open up your own gym?

Amir: Oh, it was very difficult. People shouldn’t assume that it’s easy to open/start a business in Dubai. The systems simply aren’t smooth enough yet. The city and government aren’t old enough to have ironed out a lot of things and they’re trying to make money from a system with no tax. What they end up doing is charging you money for going through every step of the process and then adding 20 to charge 20 extra fees. At the end of the day there are so many extra fees it ends up being just like 12-14% tax anyways. It’s extremely difficult and now that we’re here it’s competitive, so I wouldn’t recommend for anyone to head out here. It took much longer than I anticipated to get our gym up and running.

Matt: While other fitness professionals in the industry seem to be set on whoring themselves out with cheap generic programs and ebooks with short-term returns you’ve gone the other way and priced your services as high as you possibly could. Can you tell me you reasoning behind this?

Amir: I didn’t want to sell anything but the invisible. Number one, because I don’t want to be associated with a product. No single product makes enough of a difference for me to want to sell it. The money is irrelevant. I’m selling an interaction that I can charge an exorbitant rate for. It’s a price that I think we really deserve to charge for. We didn’t just throw it out there. We wanted to make an impact in the market and the easiest way to do that is to be the cheapest or the most expensive. I didn’t want to be the cheapest because I was here to make money.

The thing about charging for the invisible and for a premier customer experience is that you need to wait. You need to wait for it to get into the consciousness of the consumers experience in Dubai. It’s almost like we went completely by gut feeling of what to do. There wasn’t really a plan because whenever you have a plan you always throw it out. No matter how bulletproof you think your plan is nothing will work. You have to be prepared for the possibility that each step you take will result in a failure.

Matt: Do you think the higher price point you’ve set helps with the emotional buy-in for your customers? Do they have a better understanding that this personalized service will be a longer process than the bullshit that is continually sold to fitness consumers by our industry?

Amir: The higher price point is more to put pressure on us to perform which is something that I wanted. I wanted it to be clear to the client that I’m going to charge them a huge fee and give them everything I have. Our plans also come with a 100% money back guarantee. We did this to put pressure on my team, myself, and to help us stand out in the market.

Does it help with the emotional aspect? Yes, because buying something is always an emotional process. It’s like anyone who purchases something expensive and is told that they will be helped every step of the way. That’s just what we’re going to do. We’re going to look them in the eye and make them understand that what they are paying is worth it.

Matt: I was looking at your blog and reading about your Fission-Fusion training model. It seems that what you’re doing is creating a plan that takes in their feedback and combines it with your expertise with the goal of working together to find that point where continual progress will happen. Is that on the right track?

Amir: Sure, that’s one way to interpret it. Fission-Fusion was an idea from my intellectual mentor Howard Bloom who used it to explain booms and busts in economies and how that’s a biological process. It occurs in any complex biological system and I thought that it kind of occurred in training as well. I thought I could manipulate this variable and gave it the name Fission-Fusion more just to clarify it in my own head than anything else. Alex, my manager, just put this up on the website recently. We don’t use it as a selling point. We can’t use it as a selling point because clients don’t even get it. It was, and still is, a clarifying point for me and to explain to my trainers what I was doing.

Matt: When you compare your methodology to other trainers in the industry what do you think they’re missing when working with their clients?

Amir: They’re not willing to have periods of no progress because they don’t have the balls to tell their clients that this isn’t linear. That’s where they slice their own throats with this concept every single time. They don’t have the guts to tell their clients that there will be periods where we will get absolutely no fucking progress and we’re going to deal with it. They don’t tell their clients that they are building up to something. You need to cross a certain threshold of total accumulative volume and hours of work before the next impressive leap with aesthetics or strength. You have to wait. You have to give it time. No one wants to do that. They want to show progress every four weeks which doesn’t happen. We all know that this doesn’t fucking happen! All of us training know that it’s just not going to happen, but they wouldn’t dare to tell the client that.

Matt: Do you think it’s a lack of confidence in their training ability or lack of experience that leads to this situation?

Amir: You know, I don’t blame the trainers too much. I blame them a little bit, but whatever, they’re young. You’ve got to make your money. I’d rather they just told their clients the truth from the beginning. The people who stick with you and can handle the truth are going to be your best clients. My average client stays with me for three years. I think I’ve lost only one true client in ten years. It’s because I have a good screening system. My trainers have a turnover rate that’s only slightly better than the industry average, but it’s because they’re kids and don’t quite get how to do it all yet. I’m brutally straight up about the fact that there could be no progress and my clients fight through this. They end up being extremely happy by the end of the year.

Matt: What else do you focus on teaching your young personal trainers? What are you focused on getting across to them?

Amir: It’s always the shiny new object problem or shiny new idea on T-Nation or some bullshit like that. The things that have worked for a long time continue to work. The understanding gets better all the time. It can be explained better now, but the old stuff will always work. You’re not going to come in and reinvent the wheel. We will have a better wheel, but the wheel is the wheel. Training stress is training stress. The idea of applying load and stress to an organism will cause that organism to adapt and respond. Antifragility is the common word for this right now. It’s always worked. I focus on teaching my trainers not to respond to all the shiny new articles that get put out.

The other thing that’s a big issue for me is the arrogance of being young because that was me. I was 20 years old and I had memorized SuperTraining. I read that whole book three times. I knew every chart and graph in there. The idea of doing a loaded hip thrust? I thought of that when reading Mel’s book. It seemed stupid when I thought of it back then and seems stupid to me now. The important thing is that I thought I knew it all. Every year as I’ve read more and more I learned how iffy I was about what I thought I knew. I’m probably less confident now than I’ve ever been in my career. Right now I’m not confident at all. I think I know nothing. The deeper you get into it, and the more clients we work with, the more you realize that we simply don’t have a good grasp of training philosophy. We don’t have a good grasp of the science. Science doesn’t have a good grasp of reality.

Matt: It seems that what you’re focused on with your clients is trying to create a long-term relationship and filter out anyone who’s not going to buy into that process. How do you extend that to a broader market?

Amir: I’m not in this to help people. I’m in this for the very greedy reason that is the intensification and the accumulation of my own knowledge. I did not get into this to help people, which is why I filter people out. I present my services to people that already have an idea that working with me could be a positive in their life. I’m not going after the mass market because I don’t think that this is a solution to anything. The entire population seems to suffer from anxiety and depression and this isn’t going to cure that. We probably need some form of mass medication or something (laughing). I don’t really care about the masses.

Matt: In the questionnaire for your online coaching services you ask for the applicants last three books that they’ve read and for their favorite non-fiction books of all time. What are you looking to learn from this information?

Amir: Two things. If I’ve read the books then I’ll have a much better idea of what the applicants perceptual framework is. I’ll know how they’re thinking. The second thing is to kind of assess their intelligence level. I’m hoping I can figure out how to communicate with them, and even more important, whether I can help them or not. Like I said, I’m not in this to help the masses. I don’t think that anyone should be in this to help the masses. There aren’t many types of people. I think that there are only two types of people, but I don’t want to get into that here. Find the type of people that you want to work with and help them. Millions of rays of light instead of trying to be a sun. Just be a ray of light. That’s all you can do. The more people you try to go after the more diluted your message will be…unless your fucking Elon Musk or Bill Gates. I don’t even think that they’re out there to help people. I think that they’re after something much more focused. I don’t know…I don’t know these things.

If you’re in it for yourself and have any empathy at all you kind of leverage that desire to improve yourself in a way that as a side-effect can help others. But it’s always a side-effect. I don’t believe that anyone really wants to help anyone else, they just want to help themselves. But can we create tools that as a side-effect help others. Every coach that gets into this is looking for the philosophers stone that contains the perfect training program and the perfect diet program. They want to find it and the more that a trainer puts that idea out there the more information they receive. That’s fine! I don’t believe in not helping other intentionally, but your intention isn’t, or should it ever be, helping others. You can just create systems that can help other people if they want to be helped. People have to make that decision on their own. You know how people talk about creating a certain habit system to eat a good diet? It’s almost fucking trickery to me. If you’re using certain colors or something that gets people to feel hungry for your product that’s trickery. The fitness industry is talking about creating diets in such a way that people want to eat them or having these little habits and tricks that encourage people to eat one way. Why don’t you just ask the person who’s willing to do what it takes instead of needing these little switches or tricks to get them to behave a certain way? To me it’s just manipulative marketing. Even though I believe in creating an infrastructure of training and habits I think that the person needs to birth that in themselves instead of us providing some psycho trickster format.

Matt: One of our advisors, Coach Stevo, talks about creating an environment not where you can help your clients, but where the client is comfortable enough to help themselves. My question is that do you think this limits the market for trainers services? Does it mean as fitness professionals we just have to wait until we work with clients who are really willing to help themselves?

Amir: Yes. The reaching out has to come from them. There has to be enough pain generated inside where they break down a little bit and come to you. I’ll help that person out, but I’m not going to market the idea that someone’s life sucks because they are fat. You can be fat and happy! A lot of people are fat, happy, and don’t even fucking lift. Who the fuck are we to tell them they aren’t happy. I’m only going, and only able to, help the people who have already broken down. They feel as if they aren’t happy and that maybe lifting and eating differently will help. I happen to believe that doing these things can help them live a better life.

Matt: So you do online training yourself. Could you tell me a bit about this?

Amir: Well, I don’t really do too much online training. I only work with a few people that I met through Facebook and happened to like. I started helping them out, but I’m not really good at online coaching. I like to be there in-person, so I don’t really promote or market it.

Matt: Where do you see online training fitting into the market as the industry continues to evolve?

Amir: Jesus christ, I think it’s going to be huge. There is going to be a billion people coming online in the next 3-5 years, correct? Let’s say 30 Million of them want some form of online training. I don’t know where I came up with those numbers, but it doesn’t matter because there will be a lot more people who want some form of fitness help coming online. Cheap cell phones and more widespread internet usage will cause this to be huge. The thing is that the only real way to make money online is to charge a large amount for really specialized individual programming or to do it for a lower price in groups. The people that are coming online in the next 3-5 years won’t have a lot of money, so it will be groups. The issue is that this dilutes specialty, in my opinion. This will continue to evolve as more people come online and someone, maybe it’s you guys, will come up with a system that works.

Matt: The way that I look at the fitness journey for people who have an interest in this is that they should do in-person training first to nail down technique and form. After they’ve built a base they should find something that interests them and the best coach for whatever goal they have might not be within 10-15 minutes of them so that’s where online coaching fits in perfectly. From there it will be a cycle going back and forth between in-person and online depending on their needs at the time. For me personally I’m using an online powerlifting coach right now who’s located in Australia and I’m in Berkeley California, but I don’t think this will ever replace in-person training completely.

Amir: Eventually the internet will provide some sort of interactive format that’s close to in-person training where you, the coach, can see what the client is doing. Whether it’s scheduling one time together a week, or something else, I don’t know. You’re right, in-person training is immensely valuable and can’t be replaced.

Matt: Where do you see the fitness industry going in next 5-10 years?

Amir: Oh goodness (laughing). I hate making predictions. They never are right.

Matt: Well then what would you want to happen in the next 5-10 years?

Amir: I don’t want to to be so easy to be a coach. There needs to be some sort of entrance requirement. I HATE the fact that 500 18-20 year olds inboxing me to tell me about their fucking revolutionary training idea and how the best in the business could be doing their job just a little bit better. If the guy could do that he would. He probably thought about it already and threw it out. All these kids training their brothers and mothers aren’t coaches because they read every article on T-Nation. That is an epidemic. To me that’s a real problem because they are the ones who make us all look bad. They are the ones who don’t know what the fuck they are talking about. When they encounter a smart client the client quickly sees they are full of shit. The logical conclusion is that every trainer is full of shit. Trainers need to realize that just because one trainer gets more views than the other it doesn’t mean that they are a great trainer. No, that trainer just understands SEO better than the other one.

Matt: Do you think it’s going to be some sort of licensure?

Amir: I would go with some form of mandatory mentorship. Licensure is going to happen, but I would trust the guy who’s trained with a common name like Mike Boyle or Eric Cressey. I’m not necessarily a fan of these guys, but I know they are trying to do the right thing so I would trust a kid who trained with them to think about this all the right way. I’d trust them with more of my clients than anyone else. You have someone who has thousands of hours of experience with thousands of clients and that’s valuable.

Matt: Big thank you for Amir dealing with my technical issues and doing this interview from halfway around the world. If you’d like to read more from Amir you can check out the Symmetry Gym website -> Click here.

Are you a Personal Trainer? Check out our software for coaching clients online here -> StrengthPortal