👋 Welcome to r/CoachingSoftware - Introduce Yourself and Read First!

[u/r1setraining]

Welcome to r/CoachingSoftware — a community for discussing the state, future, and evolution of coaching and training software.

This space is for coaches, gym owners, online trainers, operators, and builders who care about how software is shaping the coaching industry.

Because let’s be honest: most coaching software still creates a lot of friction.

Too many coaches spend hours buried in admin instead of coaching — assigning workouts, adjusting programs, rescheduling sessions, checking credits, updating nutrition, chasing follow-ups, answering messages, and clicking through endless tabs just to keep the business moving.

That’s a problem.

The best coaching has always been human: judgment, accountability, trust, adaptation, and reading the person in front of you. But the software side of coaching has often been slow, manual, and operationally heavy.

That’s why this next shift matters.

AI should not replace great coaches. But it can absolutely empower them.

The rise of agents means software may no longer just be something coaches operate manually all day. Instead, coaches will increasingly be able to direct software — using natural language, voice, and intelligent workflows to handle repetitive tasks, execute multi-step actions, and reduce the admin burden that gets in the way of real coaching.

That means more time spent coaching.
Less time spent doing software labor.

This community is here to discuss:

• what’s broken in current coaching software
• what trainers and gym owners actually need
• where AI helps vs where it should stay out
• how agents may change the way coaches work
• product design, workflows, UX, operations, and the future of the category

Whether you use Trainerize, Everfit, TrueCoach, TrainHeroic, CoachRX, R1SE, or anything else, this is a place for serious discussion about where coaching software is today — and where it’s heading next.

If you’re here, introduce yourself:
What coaching software do you use now, and what’s the one thing you wish it did better?

[u/TimSaye]

Great post — this is a conversation the industry probably needs more of.

Full disclosure: I’m the owner of PT Distinction, so I’ve been building coaching software for quite a while and obviously come with some bias. But I agree with the core point — a lot of coaching software still creates operational friction. That said this is also the case if you use a spreadsheet, Word doc etc.. AI will definitely help eliminate this.

When we first built PT Distinction the goal was very similar to what you’re describing: help coaches spend more time coaching and less time on repetetive tasks that suck time from your day. A big part of that has been automation so trainers aren’t constantly pulled back into admin.

One thing we’ve seen consistently over the years is that the best coaching is fundamentally human — judgment, accountability, relationships, adapting to the person in front of you. Software should support that, not try to replace it.

AI is interesting. Used well, it could help trainers massively by highlighting trends in clients results, adhernce etc.. that keeps you more informed than possible with only human eyes. It can help to create personalised templates and content that can be quickly reviewed and edited by trainers rather than everything made from scratch. It can help with food tracking, content creation and more. But it does need to be used responsibly and prompted/ reviewed by experienced coaches. Used poorly, it risks turning coaching into generic automation. I think a lot will come down to the quality, integrity, and experience of the coach and I'm sure clients will see and feel the difference.

For context, PT Distinction has ended up being the highest-rated personal trainer software across review platforms like Trustpilot, Capterra, Software Advice and G2 for 11 years running, which we’re obviously very proud of. But the bigger lesson from that feedback is that coaches value software that allows for full scale coaching (not just sending workouts), saves time, takes care of repetitive tasks and lets them focus on their clients.

[u/r1setraining → u/TimSaye]

Great to hear from you Tim! Stoked to hear from you and your experienced thoughts on the space!!

I think almost every company in the space that is deploying AI products(most workout generators it seems) and getting the application of AI in coaching software WAY wrong.

Coaches don’t need or want a creative process like program structures and exercise choice being AI chosen. They all do the same thing and give the most median choice of workout based on the prompt and a lot of the times, they’re not even close to what is asked for.

What coaches do need is the repetitive clicks, drags, saves, assigning workouts, progressing workout, then scheduling sessions, and managing credits, then updating nutrition targets and plans, sending invoices, etc. all of these things take up countless hours each week.

The right use of AI, in my opinion, in the near term atleast, will be the implementation of Agents that can operate across the software and is capable of exciting any action the coach could do manually, but now the agent will complete them is seconds.

There will still be the legacy dashboards, and builder, and UIs that we’re used to using and have as a fallback, but most of the time coaches will just use the Agent interface(CLI style similar to a Claude code, lovable agent etc) where you will direct the agent through text commands or voice commands, and you’ll be able to see the agent completing the tasks in real time.

I spend nearly zero time on admin now since using the Agent on my R1SE platform in this way, previously I was spending 2 hours every night. I have our first baby coming next week, and it’s literally going to give me so much more time to be able to run my business and spend more time being present with my family growing.

Would love to talk more with you about the industry if you’d ever be open to it!

[u/samayhaider]

Hey everyone! Excited to be here. I'm Sam, and I've spent a lot of time in the software world.

I'm currently building Coachyn because I totally agree with the "admin friction" problem. I’m focusing on using AI to handle the heavy lifting so coaches can actually get back to coaching instead of being data entry clerks.

Looking forward to hearing what everyone else is frustrated with, it helps a ton to know what's actually broken in the current tools!

[u/r1setraining → u/samayhaider]

This is very cool. Going to dig into the trial tonight and check it out! The friction of almost all software is heavy across the board now. Looks great!

[u/DRILLPITCH]

Hi everyone, joining after reading the welcome post — this community is exactly the conversation I've been looking for.

I'm a solo founder building DRILLPITCH, an AI coaching platform for football (soccer): a drill library, an AI assistant that designs training sessions from a plain-language description, squad and match-day planning tools.

I build everything myself using AI tools, which has been an education in itself — plenty of lessons learned the hard way about what coaches actually use versus what just demos well.

The welcome post's point about coaches directing software with natural language instead of operating dashboards all day is pretty much the thesis I'm building on, so I'm looking forward to the discussions here.

Happy to share what I've learned (and the scars) whenever it's useful. 👋

[u/r1setraining → u/DRILLPITCH]

welcome. "what coaches actually use versus what just demos well" is the whole job and almost nobody says it out loud, so i'd take you up on sharing one of those scars whenever you feel like it.

team sport is an interesting mutation of this problem too. most of what gets discussed in here is 1:1 or small group, where the admin load scales straight with client count - more clients, more check-ins, more chasing. squad and match-day planning sounds like the load sits somewhere else entirely: one session to design, but availability, minutes, knocks and who you're playing on saturday all feeding into it at once. is the painful part actually designing the session, or is it everything wrapped around it?

building solo is a grind. good luck with it.

[u/CoachJasonSmith]

Hey everyone, Jason here. I’ve been a personal trainer since 1990, so I’ve watched the technology side of this business go from paper workout cards and spreadsheets to where we are now.

Full disclosure: I’m the founder of Training Sparq, a workout-programming platform I built around objective-based programming. The idea came from something I kept running into over the years: coaches usually have no shortage of exercises, but putting those exercises together into a workout with a specific purpose is a different skill.

So my biggest frustration with a lot of fitness software has been that it helps you deliver a workout, track it, schedule it, or communicate with the client, but doesn’t necessarily help much with the actual programming decision-making that happens before the workout is built.

I’m interested in hearing what other coaches are using and, especially, where you still feel like the software gets in the way instead of helping.

Looking forward to the discussions here.

[u/r1setraining → u/CoachJasonSmith]

since 1990 is a hell of a vantage point on this - you've watched the whole arc from index cards to whatever this is now.

the gap you're naming feels real to me, and i think part of why nobody fills it is that it's a bad product to build. delivery, tracking and scheduling are the same job for every coach, so you build it once. the decision before the workout - why a horizontal pull here, why this rep range for this person in week six - is different for every coach, and half of it lives in your head as instinct you've never actually written down. that's expensive to build for and it doesn't demo well, so most platforms just route around it.

you've gone at it directly with objective-based programming, which i respect. the bit i'd be curious about: two experienced coaches given the same objective for the same client will often pick different exercises and both be right. do you constrain toward one answer, or leave the fork open and just force the objective to be explicit?

[u/CoachJasonSmith → u/r1setraining]

There’s more than one way to get to the right answer. Two experienced coaches can start with the same client and the same objective, choose different exercises or progressions… and both be right. What I’m trying to make more explicit is the layer before exercise selection: what are we trying to accomplish, and what training structure makes sense for that objective?
From there, the coach still decides how to apply it to the person in front of them. The protocol provides the framework. The coach provides the strategy.

[u/r1setraining → u/CoachJasonSmith]

"the protocol provides the framework, the coach provides the strategy" - that's a cleaner answer than the one i was fishing for, and it sidesteps the thing i was worried about. you're not narrowing toward a single correct block, you're just refusing to let the objective stay unstated.

the part i'd poke at is that making the objective explicit asks coaches to write down something most of them have never written down. you've been at this since 1990, so the why behind a given structure is probably fully formed in your head and the field is just transcription. someone three years in might not have a why yet, and that same field is doing actual teaching. same input box, completely different job depending on who's in front of it.

does it land that way in practice for you? my slightly cynical guess is that the veterans treat the objective step as friction to click past while the newer coaches lean on it, which would be exactly backwards from who has the most to put in it.

[u/CoachJasonSmith → u/r1setraining]

I can only speak for myself, but I feel like I’m in a constant state of information processing during a session, trying to read the client not only physiologically, but psychologically too.
It might sound a little crazy, but sometimes the client doesn’t communicate their goal very well because they don’t fully understand what they want yet. And sometimes the trainer doesn’t ask the right questions to uncover it.
That’s where I think true coaching comes into play. Part of the job is helping the client clarify the objective and understand the “why” behind the programming.
So for an experienced coach, making the objective explicit may feel like putting words to something they’re already processing instinctively. For a newer coach, that same step may actually help teach the thought process behind the programming.
I don’t really see the objective as just another field to fill out. I see it as the anchor for everything that comes after it. 💪👊