The PFCA Podcast: Recent Episodes
Jenz Robinson
The Podcast from the PFCA where we plan to educate & inspire fitness professionals around the world.
After almost a decade of steady growth as a gym owner, Abi Durrant steps into a new role within The Gym Owners Network: Performance Coach and mentor to others on the same path. In this honest conversation, we explore the real behind-the-scenes journey — growth, doubt, leadership, and the quiet power of doing things well over time.
In this behind-the-scenes conversation, Mass and Jenz unpack what’s changing inside the Gym Owners Network, and why it matters. From the evolution of leadership, to the real-life struggles of gym owners, this episode blends insight with honesty and as usual, a good ol' dose of soul.
In this conversation, Mass sits down with Liam Carmichael — Head Coach at MARCHON Stratford — to explore the pace of life at the sharp end of the coaching profession, the role of reflection, and what it really means to stay present in a performance-driven world. Liam delivers a humble masterclass in coaching with care.
Jade Henderson doesn’t make noise — she creates impact. In this grounded conversation, we explore her quiet rise through coaching, the lessons learned on the gym floor, in leading MARCHON’s women’s program, and the power of growing without ego.
A reflective conversation between Mass and Jenzo on coaching, identity, and the space between performance and presence. From burnout to self-worth, they explore what can easily get lost in the doing — and how we might return to what really matters.
In this conversation with elite performance psychologist Chris Bodman, we explore why the mental game isn’t just an add-on; it’s the foundation.
From self-awareness to confidence, identity, values, failure, and long-term development, Chris shares powerful insights drawn from decades in elite sport and human performance.
Whether you're a coach, athlete, or anyone walking the path of self development, this one will land – deeply.
Mass & Paddy explore a lot in this one; from Paddy's current professional challenges, to his more personal ones; and from excellence in craft generally, to what makes The MARCHON Gym excellent. So much is packed into this hour – as always Paddy is open and honest with his thoughts and feelings, which made for a great conversation.
There's something for everyone in this episode; from the career change coach, to the coach pursuing coaching mastery, to those looking to understand and be inspired by what it takes to be a MARCHON Coach. Rach is not only a fantastic coaching mind, she's a great person first and foremost, which is why I'm sure you'll enjoy listening to her unpack her story.
In my conversation with Alex, we get to look at the world through his lens – where we dig into the difference in challenge between Coaching and Leading, how he upholds the MARCHON values of "The Team is Everything" and "White Belt Mentality" at MARCHON HQ, the pathway towards Mastery, and a whole lot more. This episode will be insightful for coaches and gym owners alike – as The Gaffa speaks to both sides of the coin so well.
Today I had the pleasure of sitting down with Chad. Many of you know him as the head of MARCHON Training – a top coach, and the producer of some quality content. But what sits behind everything you see on the surface? That was the aim of our conversation today...
Formally this Podcast by The PFCA and Gym Owner Network hosted by Jenz Robinson and Craig Massey. Over the last 2 years we have had to focus our attention elsewhere, now, it is time for us to bring this back to life but in our style, better, for you.
Sourced is the podcast for coaching excellence, no matter what business you run, the coaching product is heart, the nucleus, the source of your success.
Join us in getting an inside scoop of what we have been up to and what you can look forward to.
Join us for an intriguing conversation with Matt Connolly. An industry OG who has grown and scaled multiple Fitness Businesses and is an integral part of the MARCHON, PFCA and GON Team
We uncover stories through his time in the police, how far he scaled his coaching business and the things he sees coaches struggle with in the industry today.
This is a stroy of transformation like no other. From insecure imposter syndrome type characteristics to chasing his dreams and becoming one of the best owner operators in Scotland.
Colin aka CMAC is testament to the entire ecosystem we have created for development for both business and coach education.
His rise to the top in just 4 quick years is nothing short of extra-ordinary
Give this a listen and be inspired
It doesnt get more real than - CMAC
This episode left Jenzo a little emotional. Join on this inspiring story as Tom and Chloe share their story tuning their business around from cheap, large group indoor bootcamp to a high-end personal training facility.
They share their frustrations, their fears and their current triumphs.
This episode will leave you inspired for sure.
If you love this episode - please share and tag us on IG
Join Jenz as he interviews Tom Jarret, Owner of Brigade in Kent. Tom joined the Gym Owner Network with the view to maximise his facility, grow as a leader and open up site number 2. Find out how we navigated all those challenges and helped him become the Owner-Operator he is today.
Our aim is for this episode to inspire you to become the best owner, operator, leader and business person you can be.
Enjoy
If you love it, please tag us on socials
With 'Nutrition' being such a massive topic, this conversation will definitely be a 'Part 1'.
On this call Liam and Mass chat through Liam's career, our scope of practice in nutrition in the fitness space, and the high level principles of nutrition coaching that often get ignored and replaced by unnecessarily complex systems and products.
We circle back – This episode is a re-share from last season. On the back of many enquiries over the last little while relating to this subject, it makes sense to bring this one out of the archives.
I talk about the full career of the coach as we see it; how it progresses, what's required and what's to be expected.
I talk about the nature of the apprenticeship, the definition of success of it, the meaning within it, why it is missing in fitness today, and also why it must be brought back.
This episode will relate to all coaches, no matter their experience, in pursuit of mastery over time.
Join Coach Jenz as he goes through several case studies from gyms within the Gym Owner Network. These aren't your usual 'sold x amount' of trials or 'hit x amount' of turnover, these are the more intangible success stories that make it all worth it.
Listen to be inspired, enjoy!
With audio taken from our latest webinar, Mass & Jenz pick out and unpack 5 key coaching principles that will not only point you towards coaching mastery over time, but will stand you apart as a pro from the crowds of amateurs.
Join us on a deep-dive on sales, this is one not to miss. We will share some of our most valuable tools for handling objections, how to improve your sales performance and even a few golden nuggets we only share within our mentorship.
Luke runs the Sales Coaching Agency. A one-of-a-kind sales mentorship for any type of business.
If you love it, please share and tag us on socials
@coach_jenz
@gymownersnetwork
@salescoachingagency
@lukerobinson_official
Find out just why Mass is such an incredible asset to The PFCA and why he is such an incredible coach and educator. He shares his story in Crossfit, Gym Ownership and everything in between.
Enjoy
Coach Jenz on the mic.
He discussed the success and future plans of their podcast, which aims to share values and lessons to help coaches make a greater impact in their communities. He emphasised the importance of providing valuable coaching services and the role of leadership in making a difference in people's lives.
Jenz also discussed the framework of a gym business, the importance of marketing, sales, and product, strategy and branding, and leadership. He highlighted the challenges associated with servicing new clients and the significance of personalised coaching.
There is loads of gold within and hopefully allows you to move forward this week in your business.
Please do tag and share on socials if you love this episode
On this episode Mass interviews Jenz.
We dig into Jenz’s priorities, personal mission, vision, legacy; where they originate from, his influences and how his essence and personality feed into them.
This isn’t your usual biographical podcast interview – you already know Jenzo, so we hope this pod serves to be more useful, practical, and empowering.
Dates for the diary:
The PFCA L3PT Certification: 22.01.2024
https://thepfca.com/level-3-personal-trainer-course/
The PFCA FFC Level 1: 05.02.2024
https://thepfca.com/functional-fitness-coach/
The world of nutrition coaching is equally as hectic as the world of fitness coaching.
With many nutrition guru’s tabling their way as gospel… evidence based, GMB, genetics, calories, macros, weight neutral, body neutral, intuitive, etc… we can understand the confusion in both how we’re supposed to approach nutrition within our coaching practice, and also the perception and expectations of our clients from the outside coming in.
Most pockets of nutrition listed above are driven heavily by bias and complexity – pushed in relation to a product or system being sold – which is even more confusing for us coaches when trying to gather and understand nutrition coaching tools for use with our clients.
In this pod [which is taken from our most recent webinar] we remove bias, remove emotion, and address nutrition in a balanced manner.
We consider the pro’s, con’s and unknowns of the various approaches in order to upgrade our understanding of for who, at what time and in what setting would each tool be of potential use.
We create a continuum; a sliding scale of lower order to higher order; rather than right or wrong, and we chat through the implementation of these thought processes into your coaching practices and subsequently upgrading the outcome for your clients.
What is the right volume?
What should happen to the volume throughout a progression?
How do I select the volume for my client at any given moment in time?
All questions we're asked regularly.
The answers, as you can imagine, depend upon many factors. Here Mass attempts to sort through them...
Today Mass talks about some of the various influences on fitness over the years, and the perception of it that lead folk today towards short blasts of poorly aligned strength training for their ultimate long term aims.
Mass tables both ends of the spectrum and their differences – Strength Challenges for a Lifetime + Strength training for Sport – along with the difference in intentions and how both play out long term.
Arguably the greatest influence on the outcome for the client is the ability to establish adequate challenge at each step along their progression, as a result of the collaboration in the coach-client relationship.
In today's podcast Mass talks about the potential inputs that feed into these decisions, and how we should facilitate their influence in our coaching practices.
Arguably the greatest influence on the outcome for the client is the ability to establish adequate challenge at each step along their progression, as a result of the collaboration in the coach-client relationship.
In today's podcast Mass talks about the potential inputs that feed into these decisions, and how we should facilitate their influence in our coaching practices.
Times are changing, quickly! With this in mind it’d be remiss of us to advise you to bury your head until it all blows over – it won’t.
Whilst fundamental principles and elements of how we coached 10 years ago remain today, and may still do in 10 years time, there are many things that have changed over the last decade, with many more changes afoot in years to come.
In this podcast [which is the audio of our most recent webinar] we reflect on what’s taken place over previous years in order for us to make some educated predictions as to where we might be headed in the future.
We dig into how that has impacted our practice as coaches to date, and what we should be considering and putting in to place now in order to position ourselves to be of most use as coaches, and of course, still be in business.
With AI advancing rapidly, we must get ahead of the curve and be ready to work with tech, as opposed to against it.
It’s already happening – battling it is futile, which means we should be positive in accepting it as a part of life going forwards, including how fitness is implemented and played out.
Ahead of the Live SGPT seminar tomorrow in Brighton, Mass shares his thoughts around PD for small group – ideals, benchmarks and ideas for progression towards them for your gym and coaching team.
Jenzo was back in the room for a chat with Mass on this one.
Together they reflected on...the history of the PFCA, our definition of success, impact, the system of education we've created to date, and last weekend's FFC 2.
Too often today young coaches leave our industry prematurely because they're lost and disillusioned.
On this episode Mass tables 2 main reasons as to why this is the case, and what the coach can do to help navigate themselves back on track.
On this week's episode Mass tackles some questions we've had in over the last few weeks, including marketing as a coach, client mindset, olympic lifting program design, beginner functional athlete program design.
Punches are not pulled. Go listen for some tough, truthful, no BS answers.
Do we need to upgrade tracking 'Nurture' – The more subjective side of coaching? Or do we just need to get better at coaching it?
Listen to Mass work through this one in an attempt to reach a conclusion.
The function [in functional fitness] is determined by the exerciser, not the exercise.
Here Mass talks around why as coaches we shouldn't get this mixed up, and the history of 'Functional Fitness' more broadly.
We see the world in stories and narrative, and the coach-client relationship should be no different.
If the systems we’re coaching within do not provide space for the client to tell their story, AND the coach to listen, the reality is that we’ll never connect to the client, or connect the dots between the prescription and what matters to the client most. The outcome; meaningless, thoughtless, transactional exercise.
I [Mass] believe that the misinterpretation/misunderstanding of this word is one of the big players in misguiding intentions in fitness today.
Here I have a stab at unpacking what it actually means, and recalibrating how we use it within fitness.
What makes a great Coach?
On this one Mass reflects on personal experiences being coached, and shares insights into what made each [or all of them] so influential in his life, and relates that back to what we at The PFCA see as what makes a great Coach.
The apprenticeship is dead in fitness!!
Not only is this a crying shame, but it's the reason most coaches don't last beyond 5 years in the game.
As an industry, we must change our perception of this integral phase of the coaches career from one of tedium, to accepting it as a critical element of the pathway towards coaching mastery.
Here, Coach Mass talks through our thoughts on the apprenticeship phase, and what we're doing within the PFCA to revive and facilitate it.
Enjoy
Note:
Link to PFCA Career Pathway: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cnmy2mxM-SA/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=
Coach Mass & Coach Jenz discuss the struggles that PT's face when looking to develop their career and the efforts The PFCA are making in that space.
Coach Mass gives an insight into Form Force and Flow and why it is an important consideration to improve your programming.
Today Jenz is joined by gym owner Sean Parkinson, owner of SPPT.
Sean is an OG on the PFCA Mentorship and has achieved great success by refining his product, growing a great team and showing up everyday.
Jenz and Sean discuss the highs and lows of the journey to becoming a gym owner and how Sean got to where he is today.
Paddy and Jenzo take this opportunity to challenge the thought process behind showing and telling as a coach versus truly guiding and facilitating. The elementary coach relies heavily on absolutes whereas a master coach will utilise their intuition.
This episode is a great snippet of the kind of conversations we have every day within our circle to ensure all of our coaches aspire to this level of mastery.
Enjoy the pod, if you love it please share and tag us.
Paddy and Jenzo are back on the pod. This week we reflect on the most recent FFC live seminar, we talk about coaching standards, exercise selection and the potential silver bullet exercise.
Tune in, if you love it! Please share it on socials and tag us!
To celebrate the imminent release of our new course Mike and Jenz go through a few of the biggest issues personal trainers face when looking to grow their business.
Alongside this episode you can also download an incredible ebook as a resource to work though and uncover some of the other topics not covered in the pod.
This is an incredible conversation with Patrick James, a senior coach at Marchon Stratford. A really good human with a great coaching pedigree.
This conversation flows through many insightful topics from coaching excellence, exercise selection to all things group coaching.
One to enjoy.
An absolute cracker of an episode. Over reaching in all senses of the term. How can we as coaches do better? Find out in this pod
We are excited to have Coach MASS - Craig Massey join us as him and Jenz go deep into what they have been building, what does elevate the coach mean? -- and -- a little inspiration for all you coaches out there.
You'll love this.
Join us on the great discussion with Coach Jenz and Sensei Mike Lee as we dive deep through all things weightlifting and where does the line start and finish for the introduction to weightlifting for your clients.
Is it purely for a novel experience?
Is it progression for them?
Is it sport specific?
Join us through the chat.
If you'd like to find our more about our upcoming seminar at WIT please drop us a DM to secure your place
Enjoy
Energy Systems but not how you know it. Join the boys as they dive deep into all things energy systems and the practical application of developing better work capacity.
If you love the podcast please tag us on socials and share it with your friends.
@the.pfca
@mikeleept
@laujkb
Access to the weightlifting seminar can be found here:
https://thepfca.com/product/weightlifting-for-functional-fitness/
or in the bio on @the.pfca instagram.
Join us on the first episode with top coaches Mike & Jamie as we unpack competing in functional fitness.
The boys unpack lessons for coaches prepping their clients ahead of a comp.
Key lessons going into competition
and so much more.
This is perfect ahead of NFG this weekend and all the comps ahead of the summer.
If you love the episode please share it on socials and tag us all as we hope to grow the community.
@the.pfca
@mikeleept
@laujkb
@olliemarchon
@coach_jenz
We are joined by 2 legends as we dive deep through cancel culture, programming and why they created a programming platform to better serve coaches in their service delivery.
This is a proper juicy conversation.
As always, If you love this please tag us on socials.
@the.pfca
@olliemarchon
@coach_jenz
@compoundperformance_
@mattdomney
We were so fortunate to spend time with Sonny Webster. He hosted his seminar at MARCHON and then followed by a weekend at PerformX.
This chat on the Podcast sofa was one of the most powerful conversations to date.
There is so much more than meets the eye about this man.
A serious legend.
This is a great opportunity to understand who is Mike and Jamie. What are key areas of interest and influence that coaches can learn from.
Key takeaways are:
The values that guide us
What coaches should look for
What separates the coaches at the top of their game
Enjoy the episode.
We hosted a webinar last week. "Level Up" - The Guide to Running a Profitable Fitness Business. The content was so powerful we felt it was best to share it on the podcast channel for a limited time.
In addition, a lot of the principles are taught in-depth in our latest course the CPC - The Certified Professional Coach Course.
This course starts Tuesday 1st Feb. We are giving our podcast listeners £150 OFF if you get in before we go live on Tuesday. Use "lastchance" at checkout.
If you love the episode, we appreciate you tagging and sharing it!
becomemore
In this episode we answer the questions that you guys posed through IG last week. A chance to get insight and advice from OM himself on all things business, growth and success.
There is so much to take home from this episode.
This is the last episode of season 1. We trust you get a lot of "take-home" gold that you have been able to apply.
Stay tuned for season 2 where we dive deeper through some educational episodes.
Tom Foxley, A mindset Coach and founder of Mindset Rx'd brings us an incredible list of tools to improve our mindset practice & those of our clients.
Tom has worked with Crossfit Games athletes and has seen his practices influence thousands of athletes in the world of functional fitness.
This will be a powerful episode for anyone who is looking to understand how subtle changes in language & your intention can transform your mindset.
In a world where mentors are competing for clients and pretending that they have a hidden secret to success, there is a few who recognise we all have a duty to raise the standards, collaborate and share our best practice.
This talk is an incredible insight into some of the best lessons learnt between Ollie, Jenz, Nik & Ant. There is gold for each of you.
Join Ollie Marchon & I on a journey with Mike Lee, an incredible coach who has been on a very challenging ride to get to where he is today. Having to redefine his role and identity multiple times.
Mike is the guy you go see when you actually want to get better. Fin out how you can be the same to your people in your community.
Join us on this fantastic discussion and discover who is TGJ, what helped her become the powerhouse she is today, and a lot of contextual coaching conversation to inspire you to be the best coach you can be.
Join us on an exploration with Jamie Lau, an incredible coach, ex-regionals team athlete, father and overall great human.
This podcast will clarify some things that most coaches struggle with and truly allow you to grow.
If you love this podcast please tag us on socials and send it to your friends who might need to hear this.
Join us on this incredible conversation with ex-regionals and international powerlifter Jesse Akister. Jesse is a phenomenal coach who now specialises in empowering women through various methods of strength & emotional development.
Incredible episode diving deeper into one of the smartest minds in the fitness industry.
Find out how Tim made a huge impact on Ollie's life, what does skin in the game even mean and what dynamic shoulders is all about.