Best Book for Online Personal Trainers and Hybrid Coaches
The best book for online personal trainers is The Wealthy Fit Pro’s Guide to Online Training by Jonathan Goodman and Alex Cartmill. It covers the four things that decide whether going online works, the coaching skills required at a distance, how to price and package, the tech you actually need, and how to get and keep remote clients.
Early starts, late finishes, and a body that has been aching for months. Somewhere in the gap between clients you have searched for the best book for online personal trainers, half hoping the remote version of this job is real and half suspecting it belongs to people with better lighting than you.
The hesitation makes sense. From the outside it looks like online coaching demands a following you do not have, a course you have no idea how to build, and a comfort with cameras you have never wanted.
Almost none of that turns out to be true. What follows is a clear look at what going online actually asks of you, and the skills worth learning first.
Can You Actually Coach Someone You Never See?
Yes, and the honest answer is that you coach differently. Everything you rely on in the room disappears the moment the client is somewhere else. No hand on the bar, no read on how someone walked in, no adjusting the session because you can see they are running on nothing.
What you lose is immediate. What replaces it takes more thought:
- Video review instead of live cueing: They film the set, you watch it properly, often twice, and you catch things you would have missed at full speed on the floor.
- Questions instead of observation: You cannot see the fatigue, so you learn to ask better. How did the last set feel compared to week one? What is your sleep doing? Precise questions get you the information the room used to hand you for free.
- Writing instead of talking: Your instructions have to survive without your tone or your hands. Clear, specific writing becomes a core coaching skill rather than an admin task.
- Structured check-ins instead of the drop-in chat: The casual midweek conversation gets replaced by something scheduled and deliberate, which many trainers find catches problems earlier than the floor ever did.
None of this is a personality trait. Online coaching for personal trainers runs on a specific set of skills you can practise the same way you practised cueing a deadlift, badly at first and then well.
The Wealthy Fit Pro’s Guide to Online Training opens on exactly these foundations, covering the skills successful online trainers use daily (page 3), because the rest of the business depends on being able to do the actual job at a distance.
The Hybrid Model Most Trainers Should Start With
A hybrid personal training model means coaching some clients in person and some remotely, or splitting a single client between face-to-face sessions and online programming.
You keep the floor work that pays your bills today while building the remote side that gives you room to breathe later.
This is where the transition to online personal training usually should start, and three things make it the sensible route.
You Never Face an Income Cliff
Quitting the gym to go fully online means walking away from a schedule that works before the replacement exists. Hybrid removes that gamble. Your in-person income continues while the remote side finds its feet, and if the first few months are slow, nothing catastrophic happens.
Your Existing Clients Are Your First Remote Clients
You already have people who trust you, which is the hardest part of selling online coaching. Offer a client who trains twice a week a version where they see you once and train the other days on a program you write, at a lower price than two sessions. They save money, you free a slot, and you learn remote coaching with someone who already knows how you work.
A Hybrid Week Is Manageable
The schedule stays recognizable. Your in-person sessions sit where they always have, and the remote work fills the gaps you used to spend waiting around, an hour of video review in a mid-morning lull, check-ins written over coffee, program updates on a Sunday. You are monetizing time that previously paid nothing.
Start with two or three remote clients alongside your floor work. That is enough to learn the job properly and small enough that a mistake costs you very little.
What Should You Charge for Online Coaching?
Most online personal trainers charge between $100 and $300 per month per client, with high-touch or specialized coaching running $300 to $600 and above.
New coaches building a track record sit at the lower end, and the $150 to $300 band is where most sustainable practices land. These are US benchmarks, so adjust for your own market.
The bigger shift is how you think about the number. Hourly logic falls apart online, because there is no hour.
You might spend forty minutes reviewing videos, twenty minutes writing next week’s programming, and fifteen minutes on messages across a fortnight, none of which fits neatly into a session slot.
Trying to price that by the clock leaves you either undercharging or explaining an invoice nobody understands.
Package by what the client receives instead. Their program and how often it updates, how much access they get to you, what happens at check-ins, how quickly you reply.
Those are the things a client is weighing when they decide, and they are things you can price honestly at three tiers so the question becomes which one rather than whether at all.
Underpricing is the mistake almost everyone makes first. Run the numbers before you launch a rate.
Estimate the hours a single client will genuinely take you each month, multiply by what you need to earn per hour, and check whether your proposed price survives contact with five clients at once. Plenty of coaches discover their $99 offer pays them less than the gym floor did.
The Wealthy Fit Pro’s Guide to Online Training gives pricing and packaging its own chapter (page 67), covering how to structure your services so the rate reflects what you actually deliver.
How Much Tech Do You Actually Need?
Three things. A way to deliver programs, a way to talk to clients, and a way to get paid. You can have all three running by this evening, and every coaching platform beyond that is a convenience you can add once you have people to serve.
A Way to Deliver Programs
A spreadsheet works. So does a shared document with linked exercise videos. Dedicated coaching apps are cleaner and worth the money once you pass a handful of clients, though your first three will not notice whether their program arrived in an app or a well-built spreadsheet.
A Way to Communicate
Whatever your clients already use. WhatsApp, email, voice notes, a weekly video call. The channel matters far less than your consistency on it, and picking the thing your client already opens twenty times a day removes friction they will otherwise use as a reason to disengage.
A Way to Take Payment
A recurring payment link through any standard processor. Set it monthly, automate it, and stop thinking about it. Chasing transfers manually eats your goodwill and your time.
The Delay That Costs You a Year
Trainers lose entire years to this decision. Comparing platforms, watching demos, waiting for the perfect stack before taking a single client.
Meanwhile the coach who started with a spreadsheet and WhatsApp has twelve months of real experience and knows exactly what software they need, because their clients showed them.
Pick something adequate this week. Learning how to become an online fitness coach happens through coaching, and your tools improve as your understanding of the job does.
The Wealthy Fit Pro’s Guide to Online Training devotes a chapter to the tech question (page 103) and reaches the same conclusion, that the setup required is far simpler than most trainers assume.
Where Do Online Clients Come From?
Two things change once your coaching leaves the building. Your market stops being everyone within a twenty-minute drive.
That sounds like pure upside, and it comes with a catch, because a stranger three time zones away has never watched you coach, shaken your hand, or seen you correct someone’s setup.
Trust has to be built through what you publish and how you show up, over a longer stretch, before anyone sends money to a person they have only read.
What that means in practice:
- Pick a group you can actually reach: Geography stops narrowing your audience, so something else has to. Coaching desk workers with back pain gives strangers a reason to recognize themselves in your work.
- Let your writing and video do the handshake: People decide about you from what you have already put out, so publish things that demonstrate how you think rather than what you sell.
- Give proof a stranger can weigh: Client results, specific stories, honest detail about how you work. These carry the load that a face-to-face meeting used to carry.
- Protect the clients you have: Online income lives on monthly retention, and a client who stays eight months is worth four who stayed two. Losing people quietly is the fastest way to stall.
The Wealthy Fit Pro’s Guide to Online Training splits this across two chapters, on getting and keeping your ideal clients (page 109) and on marketing and sales for an online business (page 125).
Why This Is the Book Online Trainers Keep Coming Back To
Most online coaching advice arrives in fragments. A thread about pricing here, a video about software there, none of it connected to the rest of the job.
The Wealthy Fit Pro’s Guide to Online Training runs the whole thing end to end, from the coaching skills you need at a distance through to the marketing that fills your roster, which is why it holds up as a reference rather than a one-time read.
Jonathan Goodman wrote it with Alex Cartmill. Goodman founded the Personal Trainer Development Center, one of the largest education resources for fitness professionals anywhere, and has spent close to two decades studying what separates trainers who build something from trainers who burn out.
Search for a Jonathan Goodman online trainer resource and this is the one that keeps surfacing, because it treats online coaching as a profession with its own craft.
Here you’ll learn:
- The foundational skills successful online trainers use daily (p. 3)
- How to price and package your services to get what you’re worth (p. 67)
- The tech needed to deliver world-class online results, which is far simpler than you think (p. 103)
- Insider secrets for getting and keeping your ideal clients (p. 109)
- The truth about marketing and sales for a big-time online business (p. 125)
Where to get it: The Wealthy Fit Pro’s Guide to Online Training on Amazon
Conclusion
Online coaching is a skill set you learn, the same way you learned to cue a squat badly before you cued it well.
The trainers thriving at it studied the craft, priced it honestly, and kept showing up for people they cannot see.
For the best book for online personal trainers to work through, start with The Wealthy Fit Pro’s Guide to Online Training.
People Also Ask
How do you become an online fitness coach?
Start with three things, a way to deliver programs, a way to communicate, and a way to take payment. A spreadsheet, WhatsApp, and a recurring payment link will carry your first few clients. Take one client with that setup and let real coaching teach you which software you eventually need.
How much should an online personal trainer charge?
Most online coaches charge $100 to $300 per month per client, with high-touch or specialized coaching reaching $300 to $600 and above. Price by what the client receives, their program, their access to you, and your response time, rather than by hours you cannot easily count.
Is online personal training worth it for trainers?
For most trainers, yes, particularly through a hybrid model. Keeping your in-person clients while adding remote ones removes the income risk, turns the dead gaps in your schedule into paid work, and eases the physical load of standing on a gym floor from early morning until night.
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