Becoming a professional fitness instructor, a health and wellness coach, or both requires you to put in the work required. Most importantly, it requires you to have a deeply embedded passion for the career. It is a career that requires a high level of dedication, an open mind that is always willing to learn, and a heart that accommodates and personalizes the client’s needs. It is more like what Molly Buster has made it to be.
Who is Molly Buster?
Buster is a seasoned fitness trainer and wellness coach from Kansas. The 30-year-old has grown a brand in the fitness industry, rising from a curious college graduate to becoming one of the best trainers there is. She has worked for various training companies before starting her own business, Molly Buster Coaching. She runs an online business to help people achieve their health and wellness goals with tailored programs to meet individual needs.
How Did It Start?
While growing up, Buster always liked being up and about. She grew up in a small rural community in Kansas, allowing her to indulge in all the activities she wanted. She played volleyball, basketball, did summer weights, show choir, music theater, dance team, and cheer leading. Buster joined college in 2009 and studied professional dancing.
However, throughout her stay in college, Buster had professional fitness training at the back of her mind. She always thought of it as something she would do after retirement from active dancing. She decided to take up a job as a front desk operator at a corporate gym. Her thirst for fitness training led her to learn as much as she could from the in-house trainers. She earned her certificate while working in the gym. After graduating, Buster and her husband moved to Los Angeles.
In LA, Buster worked with an athletic dance company, but she had to find a supplementary source of income. Again, she found a job at a gym and took the in-house personal training manager’s advice to jump into her training career at the age of 23 for Equinox.
The Transition from Athletic Dancing to Professional Training
Over the next two years, Buster juggled the job at the gym and being a professional dancer. She says that some of the things she enjoyed about dancing were the hard work, constant challenges, being pushed beyond her limits, and the sense of accomplishment for being able to do what she had always dreamt of doing. However, she was still not settled. Over time, she started being pulled more to the gym than the dance floor. She says that she dreaded dance rehearsals and looked forward to going to the gym. She knew that the gym had become her new happy place.
In 2016, Buster left the athletic dance company and became a full-time gym trainer. She has seven years of professional development under her belt and says that her love for coaching has only grown and evolved. Buster says that over the years, she has spent hundreds of hours educating herself. Some of her most significant accomplishments have been”
- Coaching over 10,000 one on one clients
- Mentoring and teaching within her club
- Training a team of trainers as a fitness manager
- Running the training department as a personal training manager
Buster says that her most outstanding achievement yet has been starting her own fitness business online. She says that in the wake of the Covid 19 pandemic, she realized that her position at the company she worked for did not align with her values as a person or as a professional health and wellness coach. She started Molly Buster Coaching at this time. Her business is centered around personalizing each client’s journey to fitness and health. She aims to make her client’s fitness goals attainable.
Buster’s Creative Process
As a personal fitness coach, Buster says that her trick is working with each client as an individual. She uses specific programming to help her clients achieve their goals. Here are the questions she asks herself when creating a program for a client:
- How can we efficiently tackle this client’s goal while simultaneously helping them feel and move better?
- And importantly, how can I make all of this feel manageable and doable for them so they can continue it?
Buster also considers the client’s wants, goals, preconceived beliefs, health history, and injuries and combines them with the needs she has identified with their professional expertise to develop a customized program for each client. Buster then moves to identify the most urgent, important, and biggest dial movers for each client. This becomes the foundation of each client’s journey, and they can work on it for months or even years to avoid plateaus or expand as the goals change.
Buster’s Source of Inspiration
Molly Buster says that her greatest inspiration comes from the values that her parents instilled in her as a child. These are honesty, integrity, hard work, empathy, and perseverance. She says that you can get a lot from mentors, but nothing shapes a person more than the values they have in them.
You can follow Buster on her Instagram, here.
