One Year as a Fitness Coach

It has been just over a year since I quit Google, and almost a year since I started working as a fitness coach. There is one belief under all of it, and it came from my own experience rather than a textbook:

Everyone should get to experience, at least once, what it feels like to have a body that looks like sculpted art and performs like an athlete.

I’ve coached around 20 people so far. That is not a huge number, and I’m still early in this journey. But it has been enough to realise how different this work is from the software engineering work I did for nearly ten years.

It also feels like the right moment for an honest report card, so just below I’ve included some of what has changed for the people I’ve coached, in their numbers and in their own words.

Building Slowly, Through Results

Getting the first few clients was hard. Over time, what has helped most is the work itself. Fitness coaching seems to grow largely through word of mouth. Once people can see real progress, clients are more comfortable referring other people. I now have visible results from the people I’ve coached, and new clients have started coming more organically.

Weight on its own is not the full picture. It is easy to lose weight and end up a smaller, weaker version of yourself, which is not what anyone signs up for. So I watch strength just as closely: if someone is losing fat while their lifts keep going up, the weight they are losing is the right kind. Here are some strength progressions from their logged workouts:

I have intentionally not tried to take on as many clients as possible. I want to give each person proper attention, and I am also building software for fitness coaches alongside this work.

The money is not remotely close to what I made at Google. That was expected. I didn’t start coaching because I thought it would replace a senior software engineering salary in a year.

For me, this is a long-term game. Money matters — any sustainable profession eventually has to work financially — but it has intentionally been secondary at this stage. The first goal has been to become good at the work, help people get results, and build trust one person at a time.

People Are the Work

In software engineering, the product or the technical system is usually at the centre. Of course you work with people — your team, PMs, designers, other engineers — but the thing you are trying to change is still the product.

In coaching, the person is the centre of the whole thing.

My job isn’t just to write a training plan or calculate someone’s calories. It is to help a person do the things that move them towards their goal. That means first understanding what the goal actually is, and then understanding the person well enough to know what might help them act on it.

Every new client is different. One person may respond well to numbers and clear targets. Another may need more flexibility. The same message that motivates one person may make no difference to someone else.

The technical knowledge matters, but knowing the theoretically correct answer is only part of the job. You have to translate it into something this particular person can follow in their actual life.

Much Closer to the Outcome

In a large technology company, there can be many layers between your work and the person using it. You may build one part of a feature, which becomes one part of a product, which eventually reaches users you will never meet.

As a coach, I am about as close to the person I’m helping as I can be. I see their weekly check-ins. I review their workout videos and meal photos. I see when something clicks, and when life gets in the way.

That closeness is deeply motivating.

Seeing someone become stronger, healthier, or more confident because of changes you helped them make is a very rewarding feeling. A physical transformation also tends to affect much more than someone’s body. It can change how they feel, how they carry themselves, and how they approach other parts of life.

You don’t have to imagine whether the work mattered. You can see it happening in front of you.

Here are some excerpts from my clients’ weekly check-ins, exactly as they wrote them:

The Body Is a Very Large Subject

The knowledge required for coaching has surprised me too.

We have been studying and reverse-engineering the human body for thousands of years, and there is still a lot we don’t completely understand. Nutrition and exercise are only the obvious parts. They connect to anatomy, biochemistry, sleep, stress, recovery, the immune system, supplements, and many other things.

Everything is tied together, and every person brings a slightly different body and set of circumstances.

Software is also an enormous field, and no engineer knows all of it. But you can often draw a clear boundary around the part of the system you need to understand. With the body, those boundaries feel much less clean.

There are still days when a client asks something and I don’t know the answer. I don’t think the solution is to pretend otherwise. I read, research, and try to understand it well enough to give them an informed answer — and when something is outside my scope, being clear about that matters too.

I expect learning to remain a permanent part of this job.

Same Standards, Different Job

One thing has carried over from my engineering years without any effort on my part. I was always fairly disciplined at work: I took deadlines seriously, and I cared a lot about delivering what the people relying on me expected. That has not changed with the job.

My coaching has a structured weekly check-in. I have response-time expectations for reviewing those check-ins, workout videos, meal photos, and other client updates. In engineering language, I have an SLA for myself — and I take it seriously.

I cannot guarantee that every client will reach every goal on a fixed timeline. There are too many variables for that. But I can make sure I don’t miss something from my side. I can reply when I said I would, pay attention to the details, and keep the process dependable.

In a job with uncertain outcomes, being rigorous about the inputs I control feels even more important.

The Outcome Is Not Mine to Control

There is another side to being this close to the outcome.

Software is deterministic. If something breaks, you inspect it, find the cause, change the code, and test again. Coaching is not like that. I can give someone a plan, make it fit their life, and support them through it. I cannot do their workouts, eat their meals, or sleep on their behalf. And some weeks the plan does not survive contact with life, for perfectly valid reasons.

This is the hardest part for me. I get attached to a client’s progress; their goal starts to feel like mine. That attachment is why I care about the work, but my job is the guidance and the support. The outcome is something we work towards together, and it is not mine to control.

Almost a year in, I still have a lot to learn. But I like this work: close to the person, close to the outcome, and impossible to reduce to a predictable system. The uncertainty that makes it difficult is also what makes it human.