Good, fast or cheap: you only get two.

In fitness services/products, as with all businesses, there will always be tradeoffs. A very smart way of conceptualising this is with the ' good / fast / cheap ' venn diagram.

First let's define these terms and how they relate to the fitness industry.

Good

A 'good' fitness service/product is one that actually gets us to our goals. However, most people will also care that this includes:

• An enjoyable process

• Sustainable results

• Great customer service and coaching

Fast

Fairly straightforward: the service/product gets us to our goals quickly, or as quickly as is possible.

However, this is where fitness differs from many other businesses, because results are not permanent. For example, it's easy to compare two carpenter's abilities to build you a table. Once the thing is made, the job is 100% done, and so long as the quality is the same, you'll want the guy who can build it in a week as opposed to a month.

Fitness on the other hand, tends to have a strong correlation between permanent results and longer time periods permitted to reach them. A faster result is not inherently better if we got there in an unsustainable manner. After all, most of us want to still have the result in a year's time.

Therefore when we say fast, we really mean as fast as is possible for a fitness result. Usually we are talking weeks, months or even longer (depending on the goal).

Cheap

The most straightforward of all. How much dough did you have to shell out.

The key thing to remember for this point is that 'cheap' is specific to the fitness market itself, and the type of product you are looking at. €100 is expensive for a gym membership, but standard for a couple weeks of coaching.

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Now, a principle that is always the case in fitness, is that you cannot have good, fast and and cheap all in one service. If both the seller and the buyer are to be sufficiently compensated, only two can be provided.

Let's look at intersections to see how this plays out.

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Fast and Cheap

Services that get you less than good results, but quickly and at minimal expense to you. By less than good, we mean that you have achieved less than you wanted to, and/or getting some shitty service and unsustainable results.

This is where we find things like most fitness classes, 6 week transformations, 'detox cleanses' etc.

This is also home to those dumb little fitness gadgets that give you quick placebo effects, but fail to actually provide long term or permanent fixes for your problems (massage guns, ice baths, foam rollers, etc.).

The argument for these products is they 'meet people where they're at', in the hopes they may decide to choose a more sustainable approach. That may well be true, but we also need to keep in mind that there are some very unsafe methods residing in this category.

Good and Cheap

A good and cheap business is slow at getting you where you want to be. Not in the 'slow and steady wins the race' kind of way. More like 'I'm paying to make no progress' kind of way.

Coaches in this category are spread thin, because they don't value their time and expertise, so they have to work with a lot of people at once to make a living. Most coaches can't provide a good service upon exceeding 20-30 one-to-one clients. To make a living with this model, you'd need to train double that amount. This means a lot of lazily programmed workouts not uploaded on time, messages not responded to, cancelled check-in calls etc.

Buyers who look for this type of service ironically also contribute to the slowness of their results, because they have not invested enough to really justify the investment with hard work. (See: the results of any programme you've ever gotten for free). In other words, they have no skin in the game.

Good and Fast

This is where good coaching services reside. I'm going to finish this article with an apocryphal story about a plumber and his customer:

A man called a plumber to his home to solve a problem with one of his pipes. The plumber looked around and listened for about 10 minutes. He then grabbed a pipe wrench and hit a pipe three or four times in the same place.

The problem was solved.

The plumber then handed the man his bill. The man was shocked to see an invoice for €200.

“How on earth can you charge €200 for simply banging on a pipe three or four times with a pipe wrench? I demand you itemise this bill.”

The plumber took the invoice from the man, recalculated it, and handed it back. The invoice read:

Item one: Hitting the pipe with a pipe wrench €2.00

Item two: Knowing to hit the pipe with the pipe wrench €99

Item three: Knowing where and how to hit it €99.

Coaching is expensive because you are paying for the expertise needed to give you a simple and fast solution to your fitness problems.

There are loads of cheaper options that promise faster results, but you will often end up spending more money and time in the long run than if you'd just asked a professional.