Commoditized Fitness: What a Machine Cannot Replace in Coaching
Frameworks with Carl Hardwick | CoachRx Podcast Network
Frameworks, Episode 51, with Carl Hardwick and James FitzGerald
Twenty-two coaches in a room in the Dominican Republic, at the end of a full day on program design. Carl had just spent hours on the thing most of them came for. Then he put a definition on the board, a commodity is something interchangeable no matter who produces it, and asked the room one question. Is program design a commodity, or will it become one?
Most of them had never considered it. The discussion ran long. And the conclusion the room arrived at, on the day built around program design, was that it already is one. This episode is Carl bringing that conclusion to James, who has been saying some version of it since before the two of them started working together, and the two of them working out what it leaves a coach to stand on. The reframe is not that your knowledge is worthless. It is that your knowledge was never the thing you were being paid for, and a machine doing it better is the first time you have been forced to notice.
A video from 2024, played back to the man in it
Before defining anything, Carl shared his screen and played James a clip of James. It was from 2024, and it was blunt. Large language models and artificial intelligence are going to take care of all program design issues for your future. Machines will do better program design than we have ever done. So now that we are okay with that and we can get on with it, you are going to have to prove your value, because otherwise an app will be chosen instead of a human relationship.
A second clip went further. Inevitable was the word he used. It is inevitable that the human coach will have no place whatsoever with regards to diagnostics, program design, or any of the machine-like capabilities that are in place for the fitness process over time. What is left to sell, he said then, is reality. The reason I am valuable and the reason we will win is that we are real. This whole thing right now is real. I am offering you an opportunity of touches of reality. His closing instruction was a pun he clearly enjoyed: mesh with the whole thing, do not mess with it.
Carl asked whether anything had changed. Not really, James said. It was an honest projection. If anything, it is happening sooner than he had thought, across all of the areas where technology now sits as a placeholder facade of knowledge and a placeholder facade of a relationship. Carl also pointed out that James had been talking about artificial intelligence and program design since at least 2017 or 2018, when the two of them started. Before that, James said.
What is already a commodity in fitness
Carl's definition is the simplest he could land on. A commodity is interchangeable no matter who produces it. Nobody cares who pumped the oil. Nobody cares who grew the coffee bean from Ethiopia. They want the oil and they want the bean.
Then he asked James not what will be commoditized someday, but what is commoditized in fitness right now. James gave three answers. The first is the chaos itself. The lack of answers, the drama, the entertainment. That is a commodity and it is produced everywhere. The second is a separate bucket he called the therapeutics and diagnostics. Fixing everything. The authority of who can fix what and how we can fix you. The business of fixing humans. The third he offered more carefully. Knowledge is getting there, because inside of that knowledge there are not any real truths anymore, in what he calls a post-fitness world. Carl's summary: chaos, therapy, and knowledge are commoditized. Then he put a frame around it.
Commodity, good, service, experience, transformation
There is a model of the progression of economic value that Carl laid out in five steps. A commodity. Then a good. Then a service. Then an experience. And a fifth layer on top, a transformation. He wanted to put coaching into it in real time, and the two of them built it on air.
Knowledge is the commodity. The program is the good, and this was the step James got briefly lost on, because oil stays oil whether it is in the ground or in a barrel. Carl switched to coffee, since we actually buy coffee. The bean is the commodity. The roasted bean is the good. You take the commodity and do whatever has to be done to it to make it serviceable. Oil in the ground is the commodity, extracted oil is the good you can get to people. In coaching, you take the knowledge and turn it into a program.
The service is the delivery of that good. The program is written, and now someone delivers it. The experience, for a brick and mortar coach, is the environment. The gym itself, the room you create. And the transformation is the shift in the human being. Commodity, good, service, experience, transformation. James signed off on the whole chain.
The test: can anyone tell who made it
Here is where the model becomes uncomfortable. The roasted bean is worth more than the raw one because a great roaster roasted it, and I can tell. The good carries the mark of who made it. Carl's question was whether the program still does. Will we get to a point, or are we already at a point, where the program is indistinguishable of who delivered it? Because if it is, we have to actually say that it is commoditized.
James said yes before Carl had finished, so Carl made him color it in. Why so fast? Because he has watched it in other industries. The fault that humans have in thinking that their specific design is so unique and so special. Then you get outside that industry and do a large scale investigation of how everyone inside it thinks the same thing, and from the outside they all look, in his word, delusional. From the outside you can see that the answer is available instantly through technology, through language models, through a machine of one kind or another. In the lane he is talking about, which is program design, it is simply done far better, far more efficiently, and it does not require the human intellect.
He added a disclaimer he returned to all episode. He is older and he is not in the seat anymore. It is much easier to reflect from outside the box than from inside it, and you cannot be inside and outside at the same time when you are taking care of so many things. So the empathy for the coach who is in the seat is real, and it does not change his answer.
Why coaches push back: shame, guilt, and the abyss
Carl wanted to stay on the pushback, because he thinks it is the whole episode for most people listening. Why is there so much hesitation, fear, and resistance to what James just said?
James's answer was that it is easy to explain. There is shame built in. There is guilt. And there is what he called the abyss. If my stuff, in layman's terms, can be done better by a machine, where is my purpose? Because every day you wake up and the work is so purposeful, so meaningful, you are helping all these people and transforming lives and building relationships, and then this sits in front of all of that like a brick wall.
Then he went underneath it. His belief, stated as a belief, is that the answers for how people should act in a physical, expressive universe are very simple. And if it is really that simple, what is going on that seems so complex? He always lands in the same place: dependency, power grabs, commercialization, and commoditization. The industry made the coach all knowing and the client the learner, which sounds so purist and so virtuous. Now it is 2026, thirty years into that project, and his word for the result was gross. The simplicity is still dangling underneath it all. Which is why his empathy goes specifically to the good-hearted, well-intentioned coaches, because they are captured inside of that with good intentions, and it is really not that complex.
Free movers, dodgeball, and where the chaos begins
Carl asked what, exactly, is not that complex. The program design, or the concept? James said the idea of people being free movers. Physical expression, willfully done, because you picked it up from your peers or your parents or your teachers or society and understood that this is just what we do. We move in space and we challenge ourselves.
What actually happens is the opposite. You are four, and you play dodgeball in gym class. At five it is basketball, and that gets called physical education. So at five years old you are being educated on physicality, and what you are being taught is a sport. Entertainment. That is where it begins, and after that everyone gets shuffled into the chaos. Hire a coach because you do not want to be fat. James found that funnier than most people will.
30X1, rear foot elevated, eight per side
Carl wanted to get specific, because the abstraction lets everyone off the hook. All we are really talking about, he said, is this: at a 30X1 tempo, rear foot elevated split squat, eight per side, three sets, rest ninety seconds between sets. That is the thing. That is what we are saying is a commodity.
James agreed and sharpened it. That prescription is one small example inside what he is calling simplicity, and it is a perfect example of the industry calling simplicity complexity by the way it languages it.
Carl's goal for the next ten minutes of the conversation was to convince the coach listening to take that off of a pedestal. His argument is that once it comes down, the shame and the purpose crisis go away immediately, because you realize those were never the thing. He was candid that he spent a large period of his coaching career with his value located exactly there. James said to try twenty-five years of it. But the moment you accept that it does not really matter, Carl said, it is like a weight comes off your shoulders. And then you have to deal, right away, with the question it exposes. What does matter?
James added the harder half. You also have to deal with the fact that most of your clients believe it matters, because you told them it does and society tells them it does too. So you are not just handling your own crisis of purpose. You are handling the one you created in the people paying you.
Who is a coach, anyway
Before getting to what matters, James wanted the age of the coach on the table. It takes a lifetime to become a life coach, which is what he used to call the flip-flop theory, and it makes the current arrangement an evolutionary mismatch. For most of human history the elders did the life coaching in the tribe. Now a twenty-two year old is handed the role and a book that tells them what to say.
Carl's reason for needing many examples here instead of one is structural. There is no authority, no licensure, and no certifying global body of coaching. So who is a coach? Well, anyone, really.
Is it easy for us to say this because we already went through it
Carl turned the lens on the two of them. Is it easy for them to sit behind their computers and be this clear and resolute, because they went so far down the road of putting program design on a pedestal that they came out the other side? Once you go far enough, he said, you start to see the light, and the light is actually behind you.
James did not take the easy yes. He gets this question constantly when he talks about the Vitality Project: James, don't you feel that all those struggles, CrossFit, the injuries, all of it, led to this? His first honest reaction is that he feels more ashamed than grateful. He used a term he knows sounds strong and said it is not: he feels like a victim to the digital information movement. Pulled in with good intentions, then captured and trapped. He does not find the conversation easy, because he does not want millions of people to go through that same thirty-year process only to arrive where he is and say, ah. Inside of that process there are billions of people still stuck in dependent fear, chaos with no purpose.
Carl's read was that wisdom came through those experiences and James does not recommend them to anyone, and that both of those things can be true at once. It is parenting. You teach your kids not to do the thing you did because you know how it ends. James agreed and widened it: if he could go back, he would hope someone told him to go the other direction. Be a radical. A radical health activist, on a soapbox, talking to anyone who will listen about the freedoms in front of people to challenge themselves physically, learn about themselves, and become good people through that, rather than scrolling and getting lost in the entertainment of the fitness industry. He also went on record as being against community sport, since he sees the whole of sport as entertainment, and said his own view of what education should look like resembles nothing that exists today. He flagged both as separate episodes.
But what about the performance coach
Carl raised the objection he knew was coming. Most of this show is aimed at the person next door who wants a vital life. What about the coach who says, in my world, program design ought to be on a pedestal, because it is the means to the end? I work with athletes so they can win. Does the performance population change the conclusion?
James filed it under what he calls the sports medicine paradigm. It is either performance or it is therapy, and they are the same group underneath: dependency, payment, and so on. His answer is that it is the same thing in different language. He speaks to these coaches constantly, and in January he will be in Sweden talking to a large audience who think they serve regular people but whose entire model is performance.
He gave a recent example. An argument with a coach of a high level sport, unnamed, over James's belief that off season or off field training could follow the vitality model and would actually make the athletes better at their sport. You could watch it take down fifteen years of weekend certifications and specialty courses in real time. The aha he is pushing them toward is the same one: it really is all entertainment, and I am caught in a cycle of making my supplement regime and my off season program look really important to you, because I did this weekend course and I have the secrets to your career. He invited every listener to try that argument on a performance coach they know. There could be fists.
The barbell in the Dominican
Carl told a story from the trip that is the whole episode in miniature. He walked into the gym with the coaches who were hosting, grabbed a barbell, and started doing Romanian deadlifts. Added weight, did more. Added weight, did more. By the fourth plate change there was a good amount on the bar and he was doing sets of six. The next day he got under a bar and did the same thing with squats.
A coach stopped him. What are you doing? That is not in the booklet. Why did you go from there to there in four minutes and you are doing working sets at that load? At your age, does it hurt? Are you going to pull something?
Carl's answer was the one he and James have had a hundred times. If you have to prep for it, that is a personal assessment that you should not be doing that today. Have a pattern in mind, pick an exercise, start doing it. If your body says no, the standard response is to go roll out in the corner for fifteen minutes and come back. What if your brain just said, let me pick a different exercise within this pattern, one I am capable of today?
The coach's brain was working visibly. But what if you are in a progression and it is week three and week three needs a little more? Then you do not do that exercise in week three. There are literally millions of exercises. Pick one in the same pattern that you can do today. But what about progression? Carl's reply: why does any of that matter? Is the goal to challenge yourself today? Then why can the plan not be pick a pattern, pick an exercise within it, challenge yourself, and do it again, and again, and again. It was a sixty minute conversation compressed into three, and the coach walked away approaching his own programming differently.
Right there is your value
James was quiet through the story and then made it the thesis. All he heard in it was lifting, or squatting. All he heard was that Carl did not need all of this experience to know that he could just go squat. This is what you need to pass on to humans. This is the point of the conversation. Right there is your value. That is your value. It is the human relationship around the principles.
The principles are still there, and he is open about the fact that they are socially constructed, willful physical expressions rather than laws of physics. But a squat is a squat, bending is bending, pushing is pushing. He understands why some coaches hear this and think it sounds a little woo-woo, especially coaches who can point to a 30X1 tempo as an objective measure. It is not woo-woo. It is just not complicated, and it does not take a whole lot of experience, which should give coaches something to hang their hat on.
He also described the list he keeps of what a free mover should be able to do. It is somewhere in the fifties or sixties now. One entry: when you finish exercising, you should be able to go be a father within thirty seconds. Go for a run within thirty seconds. Sit down and write a book within thirty seconds. Every item on it quietly deletes an industry. That one deletes post-workout strategies. Carl's conversation covered readiness. There are fifty more of those conversations to have with that coach.
The truth surfaces when the system is stressed
Carl interrupted to add a point that rescues the argument from sounding subjective. Principles and truths always surface. If you go against the ought, it surfaces sooner or later. The exercise scientist knows there is a time under tension window where optimization happens. Fine. If someone who has never heard of it goes to the garage and tries back squats at 61X1 for thirty-eight reps across ten sets, the truth is going to come out when they try to do that. The principles bubble up even if you do not know them, as long as the system is stressed enough to expose them.
Which brought him back to the question he keeps circling: how do we get to a point where we can self-regulate? The rest of the barbell conversation in the Dominican was about exactly this. Self-regulation means using your brain, listening to your body, being honest with yourself about your capabilities and incapabilities, and playing within them. It goes far beyond fitness. James's addition was that it starts in the home and in school, and his assessment of anyone who missed it there was bleak enough that he was clearly half joking.
What a coach should lean into in 2026
So Carl asked the practical question. The coach has had the realization. Program design is commoditized. They love coaching, they love helping people, and they have to reposition themselves in their own head. What is not commoditized, and what should they lean into today?
James's answer started earlier than Carl expected. You cannot lean into anything until you believe this conversation, because if you do not truly believe it, you will never actually ask the question. So the first step is awareness, and it does not have to be as dystopian as he makes it sound. Hold it as an idea or a theory. Start there. Then move into what he has called practical realism. Be practical and realistic in how you approach every client interaction from here.
Then he gave the script, and asked Carl to bear with him because it can land a lot of ways. Lisa, I have had this epiphany, and I would like our relationship to move further and further toward your dependency on me for the knowledge you need to progress in movement and nutrition getting to zero, and the behavior realm of our relationship opening up to a hundred. What are your thoughts on that?
And then see what Lisa says, because for some Lisas that is the end of the world. The warning attached to the script is the important part. You cannot fake it until you make it here. If you do not believe it is possible for someone to become a free mover and a free thinker, your clients will smell that on you the moment you try to say it.
Lisa does not actually care about the program
Carl pushed on Lisa. He does not think most Lisas believe program design is everything. He thinks coaches believe Lisa should feel that way. Remember the top of the value chain. Clients care about the transformation, and whatever gets them there is what they are on board for. If anything, Lisa thinks she should care about program design because she has been told to.
He also wanted to revisit something James said earlier, the natural setup where the coach is the teacher and the client is the learner. Carl does not think that is a bad thing, especially in the Lisa example, because the coach is the one challenging the thought that the program is everything, and the only way to move Lisa in a new direction is to give her context she did not have before. That is teaching. The question underneath, the one the two of them always return to, is when the relationship stops being teacher and learner and becomes parallel. When Lisa becomes capable of being the teacher. What happens to a teacher-learner relationship when the learner becomes able to be the teacher?
James answered in two words. It ends. Then clarified: she becomes the teacher of herself. Independence. Which is next week's episode, picking up the thread from two weeks ago on what the ideal, and the graduation, actually look like. They settled on a working title, the optimal experience, and then noticed what the capital letters spell.
What CoachRx is and is not building
Carl did not want to end without naming the obvious. OPEX is actively building software that lets coaches commoditize some of these actions inside their own practice. That is CoachRx. The idea of the platform is to take care of coaches so they can express their value, whatever their value turns out to be. Anyone who uses it already knows how OPEX thinks coaching should be done, because the features that get prioritized, the way the platform is shaped, and the language inside it all say so. The assistant that is going into the platform is the 2024 video arriving on schedule. The machine is here to do these things, so maybe start reallocating your value somewhere else. Those tools exist in many places now, not only in CoachRx, and Carl did not want to beat around the bush about deploying them.
James's version of the same point was about what the company is not doing. We are not doubling down on how important program design and nutrition design by a human is. We are not traveling the world trying to grow social media exposure to sell weekend courses on why our specific method of program design is the one. We are doing the opposite. Moving away from dependency on the complexity inside program design and nutrition, and going deeper into being as human as possible as your highest value, with CoachRx as the medium for that.
Carl said this was the aha in the room in the Dominican, and the reason he was so energized after it. OPEX taught them all of these principles and how to implement them, and then at the end told them that none of it is that important. There is utility in understanding how far you can take it so you know where it stops. Teach you many things, then say, and this is not where your secret sauce is. What he watched for was the temperature of the room when he said it. It was not pushback. It was huh. We are all onto something here.
Why behavior day was everyone's favorite
The live Method ran three days, and day one was all behavior. It was everyone's favorite day. In the past, Carl said, day two would have won, because day two was program design. James said behavior always was the favorite in his CCP courses too, probably because that is where they nibbled at the third rail conversations: purpose, what people do away from the gym, what is meaningful to you as a person.
Carl's theory is that people find things interesting that challenge the way they think, and that the two kinds of content use different parts of the brain. Logical, analytical, sequential material puts you in calculus class, trying to remember step one and step two so you pass the test. Behavior and relationships and purpose put you in philosophy class, where you sit back and think with no pen in your hand. People who have been on this earth for fifteen or twenty-five years do not get asked to use that side very often, and it is interesting to watch when they are forced to.
What to do with this before next week
Next week is the ideal, and what graduation looks like. This week leaves you with a question that costs nothing to run. Take your best program, the one you are proudest of, and ask whether a client could tell who wrote it. If the honest answer is no, you have your answer about where your value has been sitting, and it is not bad news. It is the weight coming off.
Then take the sentence James gave you and decide whether you believe it enough to say it to a real client. Your dependency on me for knowledge going to zero. The behavior side of our relationship going to a hundred. If you cannot say it yet, that is the work, because the knowledge is already a commodity and the machine is already a better roaster.
All he heard in Carl's story was squatting. Right there is your value. It is the human relationship around the principles.
Frameworks is part of the CoachRx Podcast Network, alongside Marketing for Fitness Coaches and Behind The Design. New episodes weekly.
If you want to learn the principles well enough to know exactly where they stop mattering, that is what the OPEX Method Mentorship is built to do, across assessment, consultation, design, and business. The next cohort starts October 13. Book a strategy call with a coaching advisor who has been through the program.
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Frameworks is part of the CoachRx Podcast Network, your hub for principled, purpose-driven coaching conversations.
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