Get started as a coach

This guide walks you through coaching with FitnessSyncer in the order you are likely to need it. Each step links to the questions that go into more detail.

1. Start the coaching subscription or free trial
2. Create a coaching program
3. Choose what your clients share
4. Invite your clients
5. Your clients and the coaching inbox
6. Switch between your own data and a client’s
7. Notes and settings
8. Messages and progress check-ins
9. Habits, forms and questionnaires
10. Dashboard templates
11. Plan workouts on a client’s calendar
12. When coaching ends

Start the coaching subscription or free trial

Coaching starts from FitnessSyncer for Coaches, using your own FitnessSyncer account. If you do not have one yet, create a free account first.

• Choose Start your free trial to start the free trial. No card is needed, and nothing is charged when the trial ends. The trial is for accounts that have never had a paid subscription and have not used a trial before.
• To subscribe instead, or once the trial is running, open Coaching subscription from your coaching pages and choose Subscribe to coaching. The Subscriptions tab of your account opens with the coaching subscription offered. If you already pay for FitnessSyncer Pro on FitnessSyncer.com, your subscription changes to coaching and you are charged only the difference. If you pay for it in the App Store or Google Play, cancel it there once coaching starts, since coaching includes it.
• You can also subscribe in the FitnessSyncer app, with a plan for 3 to 100 clients, from FitnessSyncer Coaching in your account; the free trial can be started there too. If FitnessSyncer.com bills your subscription, that screen links to it there instead. See Can I subscribe to coaching in the FitnessSyncer app?

The trial lasts 14 days, for up to 3 clients, with up to 25 invitation e-mails a day. The price and how clients are counted each month are in the coaching subscription. If the trial ends before you subscribe, your client list is kept, and subscribing brings it back to work.

Once the trial has started, the coaching icon in the toolbar opens Your clients, and a short series of e-mails over the first two weeks walks you through setting up.

Create a coaching program

A coaching program describes what you ask your clients to share and how you work with them. You need at least one before you can invite anyone, and you can have several, such as one for runners and one for a weight loss group.

From Your clients or Coaching programs, choose Create a coaching program. The program is set up in eight steps. Move between them with Next step and Previous step, or choose a step by its number. Only the program name is required, so you can choose Save changes at any step and come back to the rest later.

1. The program: the Program name your clients see when they join, a description for them, the coaching focus and your logo.
2. What clients share: the kinds of data you ask for, how much history your clients share, and suggested devices for them to connect. See Choose what your clients share.
3. Joining and permissions: whether people who join from your link wait for your approval, and the permissions you ask for, such as planning workouts on their calendar.
4. Goals and habits: starting goals your clients are offered, such as a daily step count or nutrition targets, and up to ten habits.
5. Check-ins and intake: a regular progress check-in, and an intake form sent to each client who joins.
6. Alerts and weekly summary: the alerts that tell you a client needs attention, and the weekly e-mail summary.
7. Automations: up to ten rules that act for you when something happens, such as a message when a client’s data stops arriving.
8. Training load and dashboards: whether training load is scored, the dashboards your clients see in their own accounts, and the dashboard each client opens on for you, the Coaching Report unless you choose one of your own.

If you choose a running, cycling or general fitness focus for a new program, it starts with a matching dashboard shared with your clients, 12 months of history and the training alerts turned on. You can change all of these.

Choose what your clients share

In step 2, under Data to ask for, tick the kinds of data you want to see. These are only a starting point: each client chooses for themselves, and can share less. Cycle tracking, medications, conditions, allergies and blood panels are only offered to a client when you ask for them here.

Under History your clients share, choose how far back you can see: the 30 days before a client joins, the 12 months before, or everything they have. Each client is shown this before agreeing. Changing it later affects people who join afterwards, not the clients you already have.

Under Suggested devices, you can suggest the devices and apps your clients should connect. Each one is offered to a client as a single step when they join, and they can skip it.

In step 3, under Permissions to ask for, choose what else you ask to do: Adding notes to my charts and discussing them with me, Seeing the notes I write on my charts and replying to them and Planning workouts on my calendar. Each client can refuse any of them, and can change them later.

Invite your clients

Open Your clients and choose Invite clients. There are three ways to invite someone:

• By e-mail. Choose the program, enter one e-mail address on each line, add a personal message if you like, and choose Send invitations. You can also paste a CSV list or choose a CSV file, with one client on each line: e-mail address, name, program and tag, where only the e-mail address is required. Each invitation is listed under Invitations pending, where you can resend or cancel it until it is accepted. Someone you invite by e-mail joins without your approval, as long as they accept with the address you invited and your subscription has room for another client; when it is full, they wait under Waiting for your approval until you make room.
• The join link. Under Share a join link, each program has its own link. Choose Copy link and share it yourself, in a message, on a handout or on your website. Unless you turned approval off in step 3, each person who joins from the link waits under Waiting for your approval until you approve the request.
• The short join link. Once a program is saved, open it again and step 1 has a Short join link field. Choose a short name to give the program an address that is easy to read out or print, such as fitnesssyncer.com/join/amy-chen.

An invitation is free. A client counts toward your subscription from the moment they accept. Tags you give a client when you invite them, such as Marathon 2027, become filters on your client list.

Your clients and the coaching inbox

Your coaching pages have four tabs, and My own data beside them takes you back to your own data:

• Your clients lists every client with their status, their last data and what they share. The cards at the top count the clients who need attention, what is waiting in your coaching inbox, the invitations pending and your active clients, and each card opens what it counts. Compare all clients shows every client side by side for the last seven days. Choose a client’s name to open their page, with the tabs Overview, Training and zones, Messages with this client, Progress check-ins and habits and Sharing and settings.
• Coaching inbox holds what is waiting for you: Messages with clients, Progress check-ins, Recent workouts and Group workouts. Messages and forms drafted by your automations wait here too, for you to send, change or dismiss.
• Coaching programs holds your programs, your Forms and questionnaires and your Dashboard templates.
• Coaching subscription shows how many clients count this month and, on FitnessSyncer.com, your estimated charge and your spending limit. A plan bought in an app shows its number of clients and where to change it.

A client needs attention when their data stops arriving, a connection needs repair, one of the program’s alerts fires, or they have stopped sending the progress check-ins the program asks for. In the FitnessSyncer app, a client whose message you have not read is listed there too. Every Monday you also receive an e-mail summary of the clients who need attention, which you can turn off in each program’s settings.

Switch between your own data and a client’s

Your own Dashboard, Stream and Calendar carry a band saying that you are looking at your own data. Choose a client under Show a client's data and then Show. You can also open a client’s Dashboard, Stream or calendar from the Overview tab of their page.

While you look at a client, the band names them. From it you can go to the Previous client or Next client, open Notes and settings, go to All clients, or choose Back to my own data. You see only the kinds of data that client shares, from the date they agreed to. You can view a client’s data, but you cannot change or delete it.

In the FitnessSyncer app, the switch at the top of every screen chooses between My data and My clients. My clients has your client list and your coaching inbox, where you can also invite clients, approve requests to join, send an invitation again, share a program’s join link, and pause, resume or remove a client. Programs, forms, automation rules and zone proposals are on the website. The app help describes each screen.

Notes and settings

Choose Notes and settings in the band above a client’s Dashboard, Stream or Calendar to open a panel beside their data. It holds:

• Your coach notes about this client. Write one under New note and choose Save note. Each note can be changed with Edit note or removed with Delete note, and Show older notes pages back through earlier ones. Only you can see these notes. Your client cannot. In an organization with several coaches, the client’s coach, their backup coach and your organization’s owner see them too, and each note says who wrote it.
• What the client shares with you, and from which date.
• A link to the Client page.

The same notes are on the Private notes tab of the client’s page. The Sharing and settings tab has the client’s tags, the permissions they gave you, and the buttons to pause sharing or remove the client. To ask for a permission a client did not give you, tick it under Permissions from this client and choose Ask the client.

If the client allows notes on their charts, you can also click a point on one of their charts to leave a note they can reply to. If they do not, the band offers Ask to allow chart notes. See Can I write notes on a client’s charts?

Messages and progress check-ins

You and each client have one conversation for anything that is not about a single workout. Open it from Messages with clients in your coaching inbox, or from the Messages with this client tab of the client’s page. Only the two of you see it. To write to everyone in a program, or everyone with a tag, use Message a group: each client gets the message in their own conversation with you, so nobody sees who else it went to.

Comments on a workout are separate, and stay on that workout. Open one from Recent workouts, leave a comment under Coaching comments, and your client sees it on the same activity and can reply. Each planned workout has its own comments too, and replies on either come to your coaching inbox.

To ask for a regular progress check-in, open the program, go to step 5, and tick Ask clients in this program for a regular progress check-in. Choose the form it asks, how often it is due and the day it is due. If you have no forms yet, choose A new form with the suggested questions. Each check-in already holds your client’s data for the period from what they share, so they only answer your questions.

Check-ins waiting for you are listed under Progress check-ins. Write your reply under Reply to this progress check-in and choose Send reply, or Send and mark as reviewed to send it and mark the check-in as reviewed at once. Your reply goes into your messages with that client. More detail is in Can my clients send me a weekly check-in?

Habits, forms and questionnaires

Habits are set in step 4 of a program, up to ten of them, each in your own words and asked every day or on a number of days a week. A habit can be done by the data the client shares (such as 8,000 steps), by doing the day’s planned workout, or by the client checking it off. Fill the empty habits with suggestions adds common habits for you to change. Each client’s Progress check-ins and habits tab shows their last two weeks day by day.

Forms and questionnaires are written once and used again. Open Forms and questionnaires under Coaching programs, choose Write a new form, or start from a suggestion such as a fitness baseline. A form can be:

• a program’s regular progress check-in;
• a program’s intake form, sent once to each client who joins, chosen in step 5 under Form sent to each client who joins;
• sent to one client when you need it, from the Progress check-ins and habits tab of their page.

Tick This form is an assessment: show each client's figures over time to follow a client’s results over time. Answers come to you under Progress check-ins, kept with the questions as they were asked. For a test you run in person, you can record the client’s results yourself; the client is told, and can correct them.

Dashboard templates

A template is one of your own dashboards, which each client sees filled with their own data. Open Dashboard templates under Coaching programs:

• Choose Create a new dashboard to build one, or Copy to my templates to start from one of the Starter dashboards, such as running, cycling, sleep or body composition.
• Choose Share with clients to give it to your clients, or select it in step 7 of a program under Shared dashboards.
• A client who changes a shared dashboard keeps a private copy from then on. If you correct the template later, Replace edited copies gives everyone your version again.

To give a template to another coach, choose Share with another coach and send them the link it makes. When they open it, they see the dashboard’s charts and can copy it into their own templates, with none of your clients’ data. Turn the link off under Shared with other coaches when you no longer want it used. More about building dashboards is in Dashboard.

Plan workouts on a client’s calendar

You can plan for a client who allows Planning workouts on my calendar. Open their calendar from Training calendar on their page, or choose them in the band above your Calendar. You plan with the same buttons, library and file import as on your own calendar, one workout at a time or as a saved plan of several weeks, and FitnessSyncer sends each workout on to the services that client trains with. While you coach them, the client can skip a workout you planned but not change or delete it. Once coaching ends, or your subscription lapses, the workouts are theirs to change.

To give the same workout to a whole program or tag, open it in your library and use Add to a group. Only the clients who allow planning get a copy, and the others are named so you can ask them; leave the training days unticked to use each client’s own. Group workouts in your coaching inbox then shows how each client did. You can also add races and training phases to a client’s season plan. Each completed workout is compared with the plan, step by step. The training calendar page explains planning in detail.

If a client has not allowed planning, ask for it from the Sharing and settings tab of their page.

Coach with other coaches

Your coaching account on FitnessSyncer can have many coaches working with it. To add a coach, open your organization’s settings on FitnessSyncer.com, go to Add a coach, and add them; each coach after the first costs $10 a month. Adding coaches becomes available once you pay for your coaching subscription, and your coaches can coach for as long as it and your organization’s subscription are running.

Each client is looked after by one coach, and can also have a backup coach who steps in when their coach is away. A new client starts with the coach and backup coach their program names for new clients, or with the coach who runs the program. To change a client’s coaches, use Clients and coaches or the client’s own settings tab; to choose the coaches for a program’s new clients, set Coach for new clients in the program’s joining step. Tick Also give these coaches to the clients already in this program when you save the program to give the same coaches to the clients already in it. The client’s notes, messages, check-ins and plans stay with them, so their new coach picks up where the last one left off.

A coach sees only the clients assigned to them and the clients they back up, and a client you back up is marked on your client list. Your organization’s owner sees every client. An administrator can choose who coaches each client but does not see the clients’ data. Read How do several coaches share clients? and Running Your Organization on FitnessSyncer.

When coaching ends

On the Sharing and settings tab of a client’s page you can:

• Pause sharing with Pause sharing. You see none of their data until sharing resumes, they are not counted after this month, and the FitnessSyncer Pro your subscription gave them stops. Choose Resume sharing to start again, unless the client paused it, in which case only they can resume. A client can ask you to resume a pause you made: their page then says so, with Approve and resume sharing.
• Remove the client: tick Yes, remove this client and choose Remove client. The client is told by e-mail, and still counts for this month.

A client can also pause or stop sharing from their side. Either way, nothing is deleted: the client keeps their account and all of their data. What happens when I remove a client? says what stays, what is hidden, and what comes back if you work together again.

For everything else, see FitnessSyncer Coaching, which answers the common questions from coaches. Your clients have a guide of their own: Get started with your coach.