We recently connected with Mark Grevelding and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Mark, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about how you went about setting up your own practice and if you have any advice for professionals who might be considering starting their own?

As a full-time group fitness instructor and personal trainer in Rochester, NY, I decided to take my career to the next level by becoming a continuing education provider for fitness instructors in 2002. That meant creating training materials and workshops to present to other instructors. The gambit paid off and over the next 12 years I started making nearly 100% of my income off the training events, sometimes traveling up to 25 weekends a year. By 2014 I was completely burnt out by the travel and the wear and tear on my body was taking a toll. By then I had moved to Sarasota, Florida and I needed to devise a way to get instructors to come to me, rather than me traveling to them and beating up my body in the process. I wanted to develop a model of residual income, rather than gig work. By 2014 I had already produced 25 aquatic fitness DVDs for instructors that I sold at my training events. Along with my web tech, we brainstormed using those already produced DVDs in a subscription-based streaming video platform, along with a commitment to post a couple of original water fitness videos each month. 2014 was a blur of scary logistics and never-ending high-tech challenges. There is a reason I am in fitness. Much of the technology required was way over my head, but we got through wireframing the site and my web tech did an outstanding job of making it user friendly and easy for me to manage in the back end. We launched the Fitmotivation video platform on November 2014. The initial start-up cost was a few thousand dollars and I honestly felt like I was gambling away the only savings I had. But it worked. Within a few short years the site had subscribers in over 40 countries and was making more money than I ever thought I would make in the fitness field. The trailers for the aquatic fitness videos were also creating a lot of interest from fitness consumers thanks to social media. In 2019, I launched a second subscription site – Poolfit.tv. This site was intended for water exercise enthusiasts who wanted to exercise in the pool along with the videos. We soon discovered that a streaming site was not going to cut it for pool workouts. In 2020 we launched the Poolfit IOS app and followed that up in 2021 with the Poolfit android app. The apps allow a user to simply prop up their device poolside (or cast to a tv) and exercise in the pool without the need of WiFi. I am proud to say that we are the only app on the Planet Earth that features full-length pool workouts.

Mark, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

At this point in my career I guess you could say that I am a glorified content creator.  Fitmotivation Inc includes two streaming video platforms. Fitmotivation.com is an on-demand video streaming platform that features over 350 videos intended for aquatic fitness professionals. All videos are led by top-industry experts and include a class outline/notes that allow water fitness instructors to teach the routines directly to their classes. Fitmotivation Inc also includes Poolfit.tv, an on-demand water exercise video platform that features over 150 pool workouts that feature a wide variety of formatting, including HIIT, deep water, muscle conditioning, mind & body, stretching and more. Poolfit includes an IOS and android app that allows you to prop up your device poolside and exercise without the need of WiFi.

Have you ever had to pivot?

The business was soaring high in 2019, but the good times came crashing down in March 2020 due to a deadly pandemic. Lockdowns closed pools and instructors were out of work all around the world. Fitmotivation took a big hit as a large percentage of instructors canceled their subscriptions. The lockdowns and travel restrictions also made it impossible to fly instructors in for filming. The site largely became “The Mark Show” for several months. I was responsible for creating all of the content myself, forcing me to really dig deep for creativity in exercise design. In the early days, I also tried pivoting towards more land fitness workouts on the platform, to give locked down instructors an opportunity to exercise in their homes. I also offered free subscriptions for a couple months. But it soon became apparent that it was going to take much. much longer to flatten the curve.  By late spring we decided that the best pivot was to put all of our attention in our consumer site. The Poolfit IOS launched in May 2020, which was good timing because people were looking for ways to engage in socially distanced exercise.  

Putting training and knowledge aside, what else do you think really matters in terms of succeeding in your field?

For any fitness professional who is thinking of taking their career to the next level by becoming a “trainer of trainers,” I would say that business skills are as important as professional skills. You can’t just be good at teaching; you also have to be good at running a business. That means you have to be organized and you have to invest time and energy into learning the ropes of marketing, networking, writing and being efficient with your time. And I would always advise doing things for free in the beginning to get on the radar of the people that matter in your industry. Most people don’t know this, but my entire career in aquatic fitness began 23 years ago when I agreed to write a couple of free articles for an aquatic exercise organization. At the time I was a land fitness instructor and personal trainer and had just agreed to teach my first aquatic fitness class. Those free articles turned into a ongoing column in that aquatic fitness magazine, which I also did for free. The column then put me on the radar of some important industry leaders. Thanks to one of these leaders I got a break and was asked to teach at a water fitness conference. Within a few short years I was regarded as one of the top experts in the field of aquatic fitness.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://fitmotivation.com https://poolfit.tv/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/poolfittv/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FitMotivation.Aqua https://www.facebook.com/PoolFit.TV
• Twitter: https://mobile.twitter.com/poolfit
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4mdMT7WXm_DqPcJx0QTE6Q @fitmotivation-poolfit-videos

Image Credits
Ron Klineschmidt