During our last affiliate conference call on Sunday 31st January we discussed this at some length.
We all understand that as GST becomes increasingly popular, more students will come through our doors and some of them will be fitness professionals; personal trainers, other coaches and may be even gym owners.
We all acknowledge that it is going to happen, and that it's natural that others will want to 'get involved' with the GST revolution, especially as they witness the growth of GB and affiliates. We discussed the procedure of having new students sign non-disclosure agreements along with liability waivers when they first join, but also understand that this is in practice hard to police.
We spoke about honest dialogue with students that are trainers from the start, making them aware of the Source of the information and that we require them to give credit on social media, to any posts related to things learned from affiliates with the hashtags #gymnasticbodies #christophersommer and #affiliatestudio.
As a note, I have made our students at Forma aware of this through friendly conversation. Most of them are just students who like to post on social media for fun and have no intentions of teaching others. We have more recently been getting more students working in the fitness world. At present we have no known issues, Most of the PT's are so poor, it would be difficult for them to teach anything convincing or even close to the quality of what we are as affiliates and it is here that we collectively agreed is the best way to move forward.
Rather than focusing our energy into the prevention of material being copied, we believe we should focus on making ourselves centres far ahead in the world of GST and bodyweight training, that it would be stupid to learn elsewhere.
Taking this further, we feel that it would be a great idea if we, as the first generation of affiliates in our prospective global locales be used as centres, where other prospective GB trainers come to learn.
This last point will be elaborated upon in separate post.