# How to Avoid Burnout as an Online Coach
## Lessons from Menno Henselmans
Most people approach burnout prevention the same way: push hard for weeks or months, then book a holiday and hope the damage undoes itself.
According to Menno Henselmans — researcher, coach, and someone who hasn't taken a conventional day off in over a decade — this model is fundamentally broken.
Here's what actually works.
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### The Holiday Model Doesn't Work
The logic seems sound on paper: work hard, take a break, recover, repeat. But Menno points out a critical flaw in this thinking.
If you're burned out and your next holiday is three months away, the thought of that holiday isn't helping you *today*. You're not experiencing the benefit of future rest in the present moment. The relief you're imagining isn't accessible to you right now — which is when you need it.
Taking one extended holiday per year, sandwiched between months of overwork and sleep deprivation, doesn't address burnout. It just keeps you from completely falling apart.
> "You cannot prevent burnout if you're chronically overworked and sleep deprived by taking an extra holiday every year. That really doesn't cut it."
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### Burnout Is Managed at the Moment Level
This is the core insight that most productivity advice misses: burnout and energy recovery happen on a *daily* timescale, not a weekly or monthly one.
Menno's approach is to balance effort and recovery within a single day — more like yin and yang than a calendar of work weeks and holiday weeks. The goal is to finish each day feeling like things are in balance, rather than running a deficit that you plan to settle later.
For online coaches, this is actually achievable in a way it isn't for people in traditional employment. You control your schedule. You don't have to commute. You're not locked into an eight-hour block in an office. The flexibility that makes online coaching attractive also makes this kind of daily balance genuinely possible — if you use it intentionally.
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### Your Morning Hours Are Irreplaceable
Sleep functions as a near-complete reset for your mental and physical systems. But that reset comes with a catch: the productive capacity it restores — especially for creative and intellectual work — has a hard daily ceiling.
If you waste your peak morning hours and plan to "catch up" later in the week, it doesn't work that way. That window is gone. Future brainstorming sessions or longer working days next week won't recover what you lost today. The productive output you didn't create on Tuesday simply doesn't exist.
This makes protecting your most focused hours one of the highest-leverage habits available to any knowledge worker or coach.
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### The Problem With Checking Emails First Thing
One of the fastest ways to erode your mental state — and by extension your burnout resistance — is checking work emails the moment you wake up.
For most people, this immediately pulls their attention into reactive mode before they've done anything intentional with their morning. It's a small habit with an outsized effect on how the rest of the day feels and functions.
Unless your work involves genuine emergencies (Menno's example: being a doctor on call), there's very little that can't wait until you've completed at least some focused, self-directed work first.
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### Intrinsic vs Extrinsic Motivation
One of the reasons Menno's approach works for him — and why it might work for you as an online coach — is the nature of the motivation involved.
When you're intrinsically motivated, meaning you'd do the work regardless of whether you were paid, the standard burnout rules change dramatically. Creativity flows more naturally. The distinction between work and leisure becomes less meaningful. Hours spent on the work feel different to hours spent on something you'd never choose to do.
Extrinsically motivated work — doing something purely for the salary, with no underlying interest in the craft — requires more external scaffolding to sustain: deadlines, management structures, performance reviews. It's harder to balance and easier to burn out from.
If you've chosen online coaching because you genuinely love fitness and helping people, you're starting from a significant advantage. The challenge is making sure the business side of things doesn't gradually erode that intrinsic motivation.
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### The Hedonic Treadmill
Economists use the term *hedonic treadmill* to describe a specific trap: as income rises, lifestyle expectations adjust upward, and subjective wellbeing stays roughly the same. You're running faster, but not actually getting anywhere in terms of happiness.
This becomes particularly dangerous when lifestyle inflation outpaces income growth. Menno and the Propane team both observed this pattern in finance — junior employees driving cars they couldn't really afford, gearing up their monthly expenses to the point where they couldn't quit even if they wanted to. One missed payment away from the whole structure collapsing.
The result is a form of financial burnout that compounds the professional kind: you're trapped in work you may not enjoy, unable to make changes because your expenses have claimed all your financial flexibility.
For online coaches building a business, this is worth taking seriously from the start. The freedom you're building toward is only meaningful if you haven't already sold it to fund a lifestyle upgrade.
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### What This Means for Online Coaches Specifically
Menno's framework isn't about doing less. He works consistently, across all days of the week, and has done for years. The difference is *how* that work is structured and what surrounds it.
For online coaches, the practical takeaways are:
**Build daily balance, not weekly recovery.** Every day should contain things you enjoy alongside things you don't. Don't defer recovery to weekends or holidays.
**Protect your peak hours.** Identify when you do your best creative and strategic work and defend that time. Don't let reactive tasks (email, admin, social media) colonise those hours.
**Use your schedule flexibility intentionally.** The ability to design your own day is one of the biggest advantages of running an online business. Most people squander it by replicating a traditional working structure out of habit.
**Monitor the threshold.** On days that feel like too much, treat that as data. Understand where your limit is and adjust before you cross it repeatedly.
**Be careful with lifestyle inflation.** Keeping your fixed costs low preserves optionality — the ability to make decisions based on what you want rather than what you need to pay for.
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### The Bottom Line
Burnout isn't a problem you solve with more holidays. It's a problem you solve by building a daily structure that doesn't generate burnout in the first place.
As Menno put it: *"It's quite hard to beat someone who just enjoys doing the thing that's also generating them an income."*
For anyone building an online coaching business around a genuine passion for fitness, that's the foundation everything else should be built on.