Should You Specialize? Go As Wide As You Can Stand First
Behind the Design, Episode 35, with OPEX Coaches Daniel Persson and Brandon Gallagher
What do you want to be known for? Who do you want on your roster? And how early is too early to decide?
This is the fourth episode of this series, Daniel Persson and Brandon Gallagher spent on the start of a coaching career. Certified, now what. You own a gym, now what. Employee or employer. Underneath all three sits the question they close the month with: specialize, or stay broad. Both of them have run the experiment in both directions. Brandon spent five years with no specialization at all, then five years almost entirely on MMA, and has since come back out. Daniel went general, then CrossFit, then masters athletes inside CrossFit, and has since come back out. Neither of them is against specializing. They are against specializing before you have anything to specialize from.
What Coaches Actually Mean When They Ask for Systems
Kandace opened by naming the word she hears most from coaches considering the OPEX Method. Systems. Not efficiency for its own sake, but something repeatable they can stand on while they build the practice they want, deliver results, and still have a life. She asked both hosts whether systems were the thing that changed it for them.
Daniel took it straight to confidence, and then named the version of it most coaches do not think about. It is equally stressful to be doing something that works and not know why it works, because if you do not know why, it can be taken away from you, or it can quietly stop working the moment the context changes. Confidence is not the feeling of having answers. It is being able to replicate a success on purpose. Brandon added the sequence. The system early on is not the destination, it is what gets you to the level of understanding where you can build your own, and from then on the original framework is what you bring new information back to. His worry is that there is now too much information, which is a strange sentence to have to write. Go on Instagram and you can find three videos contradicting each other inside five minutes. Squatting is good. Squatting is bad. Squatting is going to kill you. Which one do I believe? You do not know unless you have done it yourself, and you cannot do that in any organized way without a framework to run it through. The system is a filter.
Daniel put the same idea in terms of what the client is paying for. Your value is not delivering information. The client already has all of it, for free, in a pile. Your value is sorting it. A client brings you a video on squatting and says this really feels like it applies to me, and the professional can see what is missing and why it does not apply to this person, because the professional knows the principles. A lot of information out there is not a reason to skip the education. It is the reason you need it. Kandace closed the segment on the misread that comes with the word method. Coaches assess, consult, design, and operate a practice, and inside each of those four there are principles and frameworks so that a coach can build their own way of working. Not this is the only way you consult. Here is what has to be true, now align your execution against it.
Only Sith Speak in Absolutes
Brandon has a theory about why so much coaching content sounds so certain. To stand out right now you have to speak in absolutes. And, as he pointed out, if we learned anything from Star Wars, only Sith speak in absolutes.
You can hold a position and still leave room for the person listening to create something. Squatting is not always the answer. Strength training is not always the answer. Conditioning is not always the answer. Move your body is always the answer. Be as stress free as you can manage is always the answer. Sleep as well as you can is always the answer. You fill in the blanks around those with the person in front of you.
Which leads to the part that matters for this episode. Frameworks tend to be where people stop. A coach gets a certification, decides they now have the information they need, and parks. The more useful reaction is the opposite one. I have the Method. How do I progress this. Where do my own thoughts and experiences fit, so that eventually there is a BG Perform method, or a Daniel Persson method, or your version of whatever you do. Plenty of coaches say roughly the same things. The difference is whether you have enough experience to say here is what I actually think works and here is why, which is the part that makes it teachable.
Brandon Spent Five Years With No Specialization At All
Brandon was honest about how the MMA work started. He did not plan it. He always loved fight sports, watched them from a young age, thought it would be cool to train fighters one day, and when he left his gym and moved for the first time he decided that was the thing he was going after. He calls it a fate thing.
The part he wants coaches to notice is what came before it. For about five years he had no specialization whatsoever. In his words, his only specialization was that he wanted to train someone and see if it worked, or see if he enjoyed it. Five years of that is what made the next five possible. He thinks his education helped here too, in a backwards way. He graduated with a bachelor's in human biology rather than kinesiology, so he never got handed the weight room curriculum and the CSCS version of what programming is supposed to look like. He arrived without a rigid picture of how it is supposed to be, which left him asking what do I actually believe.
Daniel came in through a different door to the same place. He has his coaching education, but he spent five years at university on business and finance with a master's in leadership and management. Nothing in it showed him how to apply any of that to a client, so he had to work it out. What he brought was a wide perspective and a definition that has stuck. Coaching is leadership and management, carried out in a setting where what you are working toward is fitness.
Both of them landed in the same place on what the early years are for. Reps. Reps with people who barely talk. Reps with people who talk too much. Reps with people who have beautiful body awareness, and reps with people you are surprised are still breathing, given that it is involuntary. Brandon also named the phase most coaches go through early and few admit to. You peacock. You feel you have to seem confident, so you feel you have to have the answer, the next step, and the whole plan, and you have to sound smart delivering it. A broad start is what gets you out of that, because it shows you coaching is rarely about those pieces. More often it is about being someone who can care about a person, lead them, manage the process, and then put the program design in.
You Are Not the Star of the Show
Daniel brought a conversation he had with a weightlifting coach who has been to the Olympics, and it is the cleanest statement of the tradeoff in the episode. If you want to win things and be the best coach, pick one system, learn it really well, deep dive it, and hope you find the athlete who fits it. If you want to be a really good coach but maybe not the greatest, learn a lot of systems and you will be able to help a lot of athletes.
He does not judge either direction, but he does ask coaches to be honest about which one they are choosing. His own line, half joke and fully meant, is that as a coach you are not the star of the show, so deal with it. There are people who enter this profession wanting their own system, their own name on it, and a reputation as a rock star coach. For that person early specialization might be exactly right, because the system is the point. Daniel has never been driven by that, and he would rather a coach decided than drifted. He connected it to leadership theory, where seven recognized styles suit different people. Most coaches approach it by deciding in advance which leader they want to be. The better question is the other one. Look at the individual in front of you and ask what leader do they need me to be.
Brandon's version came from watching who actually gets to the top. The best people in the world at what they do very rarely set out for that. The ones who have inspired him went out for the love of the game and ended up excellent at it. What bothers him in sport right now is young people being touted as experienced and accomplished when they are not there yet. Confidence needs to be there. Underneath it there still has to be a humbleness that says I am here to learn and absorb, not prove me wrong.
Daniel thinks the humility problem has an address, and walked the stages of competence to find it. You start unconsciously incompetent, where you do not know what you do not know. The step to consciously incompetent is the uncomfortable one, and it is also where clients bail, because being exposed as consciously incompetent is what triggers the flee response. Then consciously competent, where you have to be fully present and put in the reps. Then unconsciously competent, which is as close as most people get to mastery. The humility usually goes missing in that first stage, and what brings it back is that competence works like expanding circles. Every time you reach the next one you see how much more there is inside it. The further you go, the more clearly you can see how much you do not know.
Accumulate Before You Intensify
Daniel's analogy for the whole question is one every coach in the audience already uses on clients. Accumulation and intensification. Early on you want volume and variety. Broad, general, a lot of different stimulus, a lot of reps, building a base you can eventually peak from. Then you move into a more intense phase where you go after something specific. Coaching development works the same way, and most coaches would never program a client the way they program their own career.
He also widened what specialization can mean, because coaches tend to hear it as sport. You can specialize in a sport or an athlete type. You can also specialize in lifestyle, in nutrition, in program design, in delivery, in the communication side of the relationship.
His own path shows how it usually arrives. He came from a CrossFit background and ended up specializing toward masters athletes, not by design but because he genuinely enjoyed program design, and precision in program design turns out to be a real competitive edge with that population. He sees the same pattern across the community. Coaches who are deep into program design tend to accumulate masters athletes. He did not pick that. He found it by being in a position to find it. Which is the argument for going broad in one sentence. Brandon found MMA partly by chance. Daniel found masters partly by chance. Narrow before you have been exposed to much and you never meet the thing you might be unusually good at.
What Peak Specialization Cost Brandon
Brandon has a specific worry about coaches who specialize straight out of school, and he named the group. Strength and conditioning coaches who go from a degree directly into a collegiate or professional setting. That is not normal fitness and those are not normal people. It is a fixed, curated environment, and if it is all you have seen it can convince you that coaching is that. Coaching, in the grand scheme, is teaching someone to learn to love to move, introducing better lifestyle habits, and in a lot of cases changing the trajectory of a life. The athletic sphere is a loud, flashy subset of that, which is why so many people start there.
Then he said the part most coaches would not say out loud. During what he calls his peak specialization era, he felt like he was getting worse as a coach. Slower on certain things. His programming went a little stale, and so did his thinking, because he was in one mindset all the time with a couple of individuals who wanted a specific outcome, in a setting where you do not mess around with what works. And when he posted those athletes on Instagram, the honest read on why was that it would look good, not that he had gotten better that day. He did not like that about himself.
His underlying position is simple. Athletes are humans, and the only difference is they are playing a sport. You learn the principles by training people who are not training for a sport, and then you specialize those principles outward. So the question he puts to a coach considering an early narrow path is whether true mastery and autonomy is the goal, or whether playing the role of coach is more important. If it is mastery, you have to step out of the fixed environment eventually anyway.
Go wide first, as wide as you can stand, for as long as you can. Then inch your way deeper, and the refining happens on the way down. A lot of coaches carry unchecked thoughts around for years. This definitely works, because I did it once, on one person. Then it goes into a different setting, it does not work, and the conclusion becomes it must be them. That is a hole you have to climb back out of.
When Specialization Is the Right Move
Both hosts were clear that specialization is a good thing at the right time. You become an expert people come to. You get to hold something deeply enough to explain it. And if it arrives after the broad years it is far more fulfilling, because you found it rather than forced yourself into it because you thought it was supposed to be the thing.
It also feeds backwards. Brandon's five years in MMA gave him training tools he now uses with ordinary clients, plyometrics and conditioning approaches that make people more athletic and make sessions more fun. Going deep on one thing until you reach the principles underneath it is as educational as going broad, as long as the principles are what you are after. Go straight into a system and never question it and you will not get much out of it in either direction.
Specialization has a communication advantage too, and Daniel named it as a real strength rather than a side effect. It is much easier to say than I coach everybody. A prospective client trying to work out whether you are the right fit has a hard job when your answer is everyone. Against that, he laid out the business math honestly. Go very specific at the start and the pool of clients is smaller. It can work, and you may get to a limited roster at a high rate, but you may need something on the side until the brand and the name exist. His suggestion is that the something on the side should be coaching other kinds of clients, because those reps serve the craft and there is far more in common across clients than coaches expect. Getting to full time faster matters, because the development you get from doing this as your career is much faster than doing it alongside something else.
One more line worth keeping from Daniel. Program design is eighty percent principles and twenty percent creativity. Your specialization may end up living in that twenty percent, the personal touch that makes you unusually effective with a particular kind of person. You will not find out what yours is by deciding in advance.
And both of them have come back around. Daniel is broader than ever in the type of training his clients do and more specific than ever in the type of client, the people he does well with on reshaping a relationship to fitness. Brandon has settled into a specialization in how he coaches rather than who he coaches, for people who want to be better at health and fitness and want the process to get simpler as they go. Whether someone is training for a world championship fight or training to wake up feeling better about themselves, it is the same set of domains.
What To Do With Your First Five Years
Brandon's instruction for the newly certified coach is the most concrete takeaway in the episode. Take the methods you just learned and try them on every single possible person you can get your hands on. Pressure test everything you think, including the things that are not programming. The way you speak. The way you dress. The way you communicate. The way you run a session. The way you handle a situation you did not see coming.
The reason is the timeline. You are doing that now so that in five years, when the next step becomes necessary, you are ready for it. The specialization route does not go anywhere while you wait. It waits better than you do.
Where to Go From Here
Everything in this episode assumes you have a system worth pressure testing. That is what the OPEX Method Mentorship installs: assess, consult, design, and the business behind the practice, taught as principles you build your own way inside rather than rules you follow. Ten weeks of live lecture, lab with your own clients, office hours, and a final project you build as you go. The October 13 cohort is the last one of the year and enrollment closes October 9. Book a call with a coaching advisor, who is a graduate of the program rather than a sales rep.
Behind the Design releases weekly on the CoachRx Podcast Network. Next episode starts a new month on the client side of the work: how to set goals with clients, how to handle progression and regression, and what to do when it is not working.
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For the full pathway into this kind of program design, look at the OPEX Method Mentorship.
Connect with the coaches
Brandon Gallagher:Brandon’s Instagram (@bgperform_)
Daniel Persson:Daniel’s Instagram (@danielcapersson)
Join us live on Tuesdays mornings 11:30am EST on the OPEX YouTube Channel
Start your free 14-day CoachRx trial and bring principled programming, habit tracking, and high-touch communication all in one seamless coaching command center.
