Two Years, 900 Lives Changed

Kristel Kongas
4 days ago
3 min read

Updated: 3 days ago

Two years ago, I stood in front of my first group of aspiring fitness coaches at Intensive PT. Fifty students looking back at me, ready to learn not just training, but the business of coaching — entrepreneurship, marketing, sales, and how to actually build a sustainable career in fitness.

Since that day, I’ve now taught 18 cohorts. Close to 900 aspiring coaches have gone through those sessions. That number matters not because it’s a metric, but because of what it represents: hundreds of people stepping into a profession where they’ll go on to influence the health, confidence, and performance of themselves or the clients they work with.

Nine hundred coaches. Just a few more lessons to hit 1,000.

Teaching Coaches the Entrepreneurship Mindset

My role at Intensive PT is not about exercise programming or sports science. We have brilliant specialists for that. See all our Doctors and Practitioners here.

My focus is something else: helping coaches think and operate like entrepreneurs.

Most of them don’t realise it at first, but they’re not just learning how to coach — they’re building a business, whether full-time or alongside another job. And in a crowded market, that requires far more than fitness knowledge.

I focus on these core areas:

Entrepreneurship fundamentals. Understanding how a coaching business actually works — pricing, client acquisition, finances, and sustainability.
Positioning and visibility. Because being good is not enough. What matters is how clearly you can communicate your value — your story, your approach, and the transformation you help clients achieve.
Tools and systems. From CRM platforms to data tracking, and increasingly AI tools — helping coaches work smarter, not harder.
Commercial thinking. Turning passion into something sustainable. Not “selling out”, but building a structure that allows you to keep doing the work long-term.

Some students are building this as a side income alongside full-time jobs. Others are going all in. Both paths are valid — but both require understanding how to run a business, not just deliver a session.

How I Got Here

I didn’t plan to become a fitness coach.

And I certainly didn’t plan to teach other coaches.

For years, I dealt with chronic back pain — the kind that makes simple movements uncomfortable. I’d get out of bed by rolling myself out of it. Training tennis didn’t help either; new issues kept appearing — elbow pain, wrist strain, imbalance.

Everything started to shift when I began structured strength training in 2018. I didn’t realise it at the time, but gradually the pain disappeared. My body became stronger, more balanced, and even my tennis performance improved — more power, better precision, and far fewer physical limitations.

That experience changed how I see training entirely.

In 2022, I enrolled at Intensive PT myself. Not to change careers — I already had nearly two decades of experience in marketing and business — but to deepen my understanding of training and performance.

And one thing became very clear: If I train consistently, I stay pain-free. If I stop for too long, the pain quietly returns.

The Ripple Effect

So when Intensive PT asked me to teach business and marketing to their coaches, I didn’t hesitate.

It felt like a natural extension of everything I’ve done — combining two decades of experience in sales, marketing, and strategy with a personal understanding of training, health, and performance.

Because the coaches sitting in front of me aren’t just learning for themselves.

They are the people who will meet clients at important moments — recovery from injury, weight loss journeys, performance goals, or simply wanting to feel better in their own bodies.

If ~900 coaches go through this programme, and each one works with even 50 clients over the coming years, that’s 45,000 lives influenced in some way.

Not all transformations will look dramatic. Some will be small — less pain, more confidence, better habits, improved movement.

But these changes spread. To families. To workplaces. To friends. To communities.

That’s the part that keeps me showing up. Because every coach I help become better at what they do multiplies the impact far beyond what I could ever deliver alone.