subcategory url

I followed the advice in this post
> https://wordpress.org/support/topic/sub-category-pages-error-404-page-not-found

unfortunately while the urls are now working I am getting this structure when I go to a post in a subcategory.

http://WEBSITE/online/barrie-course/%subcategory%/lesson-1/

Unfortunately if I don’t include the subcategory tag in the link structure i get 404 errors on the subcategory pages.

Is there any way I can have subcategories and also not the “%subcategory%” in the urls?