The Top 9 Best TED Talks for Gym Owners

As a gym owner, your work mainly entails helping other people achieve their health and fitness goals. But, you also have to attend to the business side of things such as sales, marketing, customer service, and operations, just to name a few. And for your gym business to continue running successfully, you need to be constantly enhancing your expertise in all these different areas.

The problem is, you may not have the time to read an entire book or watch an hour-long video, due to your busy schedule. This is where TED talks come in. Assuming you've already listened to all our recommended podcasts, ofcourse. TED talks are a collection of hundreds of short videos from expert speakers, drawn from almost all industries, including the fitness industry. They provide an easy but powerful means of learning something new, within a few minutes.

However, digging through the hundreds of these videos can be extremely time-consuming and laborious. To make things easier for you, we’ve compiled a list of the top 9 best TED Talks for gym owners.

1. The Power of Passion and Perseverance – Angela Lee Duckworth

Running a gym business is not easy. You will encounter plenty of challenges along the way, to a point of even feeling like quitting. If you are in such a situation and you need some motivation, then you should listen to the Power of Passion and Perseverance.

In this TED talk, Angela Lee Duckworth talks about passion, grit and perseverance for long-term success. She provides tips on how to stick to your goals day in day out, week after week and month after month. Whether you’ve launched your gym or you’ve been running your gym business for several years, this talk will provide you with the motivation you need to pursue your business goals.

2. Why Some People Find Exercise Harder than Others – Emily Balcetis

As a health and fitness professional, you may have probably noticed that some people tend to struggle with exercise more than others. And working with such clients can be challenging. The question remains, why do some people find exercise harder than others?

Well, Emily Balcetis tries to answer that question in this TED talk on exercise motivation. Having spent years researching this topic, Emily provides insights into how an individual’s internal motivation, body make-up as well as how they consume information, all affect how they perceive fitness.

She then goes ahead to provide simple but effective solutions on how to overcome such fitness-related perceptions. It’s, without a doubt, one of the best TED talks on exercise motivation.

3. Try Something New for 30 Days – Matt Cutts

Hosted by Matt Cutts, of Google fame, Try Something New for 30 Days is a powerful TED talk for gym owners who need an extra push or motivation. While Matt Cutts is a Google engineer, the insights he provides in this TED talk can go a long way in helping you to grow your fitness business.

In this TED talk, Matt talks about forming healthy habits. If there’s something, you wanted to achieve but are yet to start, Matt suggests committing to it for only 30 days. It’s all about making small, sustainable and achievable changes instead of trying to accomplish one huge goal.

While there’s nothing wrong with setting a lofty challenge, achieving it will be much harder compared to smaller goals. For instance, if you’ve been planning to purchase some additional equipment for your gym, you can commit to purchasing one, every 30 days, instead of trying to buy all of them at once.

4. A Simple Way to Break Bad Habit – Judson Brewer

Working with clients to help them achieve their health and fitness goals goes beyond spending long hours in the gym. You also need to push them to break some bad habits, which may be hindering their success. Judson Brewer has the details on how to go about it.

For instance, someone may join your gym with the goal of losing a certain amount of weight. But after leaving the gym, that same individual spends the rest of the day stacking hundreds and hundreds of calories. Therefore, regardless of how much effort they put at the gym, losing weight will almost be impossible, due to their bad eating habits.

Hence, you will need to find a means of helping them to break their bad eating habits so that they can achieve their weight loss goals. And this is where this TED talk comes in. In this TED talk, you will learn how to spot bad habits in your fitness clients and the best approach in helping them to break them.

5. Why Dieting Doesn’t Usually Work – Sandra Aamodt

According to Sandra Aamodt, the brain has an important role to play when it comes to losing weight. So, focusing on dieting only may not be a long-term solution for losing weight. Besides, it can do more harm than good. In this TED talk for mindful eating, the speaker provides tips on how to maintain optimal weight, without focusing too much on fancy diets.

While this TED talk on health and wellness may be a bit longer than what you are used to, it’s worth listening to the end, for every gym owner, personal trainer or other fitness professionals. You will learn invaluable tips on how to help fitness clients that may be struggling to accomplish their weight loss goals.

6. Sleep Is Your Superpower – Dr. Matthew Walker

As noted earlier, gym owners have to wear different hats. Apart from training their clients, they also have to attend to sales and marketing, bookkeeping, operations, and social media management.

And to keep up with all these tasks, some gym owners end up sacrificing their sleeping hours. But according to Dr. Matthew Walker, the consequences of insufficient sleep can be dire.

In this health and wellness TED talk, the speaker delves deep into the importance of sleep, what happens to the mind and body when you sleep, what happens when you don’t get sufficient sleep and the various stages of sleep. He also provides tips on how you can improve your sleep.

So, if you have been getting insufficient sleep due to long working hours in your gym business or for whatever reason, this TED talk is highly recommended. It will completely shift your mindset about the importance of adequate sleep as well as how you can improve your sleep.

7. Want to Help Someone? Shut up and Listen! – Ernesto Sirolli

People visit gyms for different reasons. Some are looking to build muscle, others are looking to lose weight while some simply want to become healthier. Hence, you need to come up with a customized workout regime for each client, depending on their fitness goals. And that’s why it’s important to listen to every client, who comes to your gym.

If you fail to listen to them, you wouldn’t know their fitness goals. Besides, someone may also have an underlying health condition. Consequently, you may end up creating a workout program that may end up worsening that health condition, as opposed to helping them achieve their fitness goals.

In this TED talk by Ernesto Sirolli, he highlights the importance of listening to someone, before you can even suggest a solution that may address their problem. While the examples it uses have been drawn from the international aid community, the lessons it teaches are perfectly applicable to gym businesses.

8. How to Make Stress Your Friend – Kelly McGonigal

Most people view stress negatively. But according to Psychologist Kelly McGonigal, stress may only affect you negatively, if you believe it will. Simply put, stress doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing. And as the name of this TED talk for health and wellness suggests, you can make stress your friend by converting it into a beneficial part of your life.

In this TED talk, the speaker provides strategies and tips on how you can change your mindset on stress and turn it from something negative to positive. And from there, you can use it to build resilience and perseverance, which will come in handy, especially when running a fitness business.

9. Forget Multitasking, Try Monotasking – Paolo Cardini

Most people have been made to believe that multitasking can boost productivity. However, Paolo Cardini argues that multitasking may not be as efficient as most people believe it is.

Instead, the speaker urges people to focus on one task at a time. For example, you may have set aside a day to market your gym business. On such a day, you may have planned to do some SEO as you attend to social media marketing. Instead of trying to do these tasks simultaneously, you should do one task at a time. By focusing on one task, you will be more efficient and your productivity will be higher, as opposed to attempting to attend to these two tasks at the same time.

10. Wrapping It Up

TED talks are a powerful means of improving yourself, both professionally and personally. They can also help you to get inspired and inspire your fitness clients to take the next step. Whether you are looking for inspiration, business ideas or simply want to expand your knowledge base, these TED talks will do the job.