How Does Coaching Provide You with Better Results Than Just a Training Plan?
If you’re trying to find some guidance to reach your health, fitness, or training goals, you may wonder whether or not it’s worth it to pay more for a coach that provides dynamic, individualized training support compared to a less-expensive (or even free) training plans that can be easily found online.
Whether you’re a beginner or a professional, dynamic, individualized training support from a coach can provide significant advantages over a pre-defined training plan. As you already know, everyone is different and has their own unique abilities, challenges, circumstances, goals, etc. As a result, the optimal support for each person will be different. For example, a beginner may need to learn the basics of how to properly implement a specific exercise or workout while a pro might need an advanced, sophisticated workout in order to produce a desired stimulus. Another example of the many differences is that someone balancing a busy schedule of work, raising children, and other responsibilities may need a plan that sacrifices optimal stimulus in favor of efficiency that reduces the time commitment whereas a high-school or college-age athlete might have the ability to capitalize on their summer break from school in order prioritize their training. Individualized training from a coach can account for these differences in circumstances and needs, unlike training plans that rarely account for more than a distinction between “beginner”, “intermediate”, or “advanced” levels.
Another major advantage of individualized coaching support is that it can be dynamic, meaning that it changes or evolves as you change. If your circumstances change, the support can be adjusted accordingly. For example, if you’re not yet recovered enough from a previous workout to be able to complete a subsequent workout with proper intensity or volume and without elevated risk for injury, a coach can adjust the training schedule to accommodate that, whereas most plans don’t really offer that flexibility. Even plans that do offer some flexibility often don’t produce results that match what a coach can provide because a good coach has the ability to consider many possible adjustments and recommend the best combination of those in order to most optimally meet your needs.
Because everyone is different, there are often significant differences in how quickly or how much people respond to and improve with training. Unlike a pre-defined plan, a good coach can evaluate how well a person is responding to training and dynamically adjust future training in order to maximize the person’s rate of improvement and minimize their risk of injury. As one example, consider a collegiate distance runner. Collegiate distance runners typically have several years of training under their belt starting when they were in high school, and they are typically young adults in their late teens or early twenties. Because of their age and prior training, many of them possess the ability to optimally respond to relatively intense training every other day, or three or four times per week. That is especially true during times when they aren’t burdened by other non-training stressors such as their academic course load, for example during the summer. Of course, some of them thrive with that much training during the school year as well, it just depends on how well they are able to manage their academic loads. Conversely, older adults in their forties and fifties, who often have extensive time commitments for work, family, and other commitments, and whose bodies can no longer physically recover as quickly as they could when they were college age, often need three or four days between intense workouts in order to produce optimal stimulus. How much time a person needs to recover from a workout and how often they optimally need intense workouts are just two examples of variables that a good coach can recognize and use to adapt the training to best fit the needs of that person.
Beyond tailoring your support specifically for you and dynamically creating guidance for you, all of which helps you improve more quickly, more easily, and with less risk of injury, perhaps one of the best advantages of a coach over a training plan is the ability to interact with the coach. A good coach can provide you with knowledge, insight, encouragement, accountability, emotional support, empathy, and motivation. A good coach can utilize conversations and interactions (and even non-verbal cues if the interactions are in person) with you to determine what kind of support will be most beneficial for you, sometimes before you have even realized that you could benefit from such support. If you have a close working relationship with your coach and you are communicating regularly, a good coach can understand and empathize with how you feel and can get a sense of what support might be most helpful for you.
A good coach will also be able to learn things about you that allows them to make helpful recommendations. For example, a good coach can evaluate your injury history, skeletal structure, and lifestyle to make recommendations to help you avoid injury. For example, perhaps you have developed tight hip flexors as a result of having to sit at a desk all day at work and need to regularly stretch your psoas muscle in order to maintain optimal flexibility for avoiding injury. Or maybe the shoes you have to wear for work constrict your feet or place them in unhelpful positions and as a result you could reduce your risk for injury by incorporating some strengthening exercises for your feet. And often a good coach will be able to incorporate these types of things into the things you were already doing with modifications that allow you to do what is most beneficial for you without necessarily having to commit more time or resources.
When you combine the advantages that coaching provides in comparison to mere training plans, it’s easy to see how optimal improvement, lower risk of injury, and better overall support can make you more likely to achieve your goals and be satisfied with your results. A good analogy for thinking about the difference between coaching and training plans is the difference between food prepared by a chef and pre-packaged food. A good chef will create an amazing meal and even tailor the creation to your particular tastes so that your food is as good as it can be. On the other hand, while pre-packaged food can sometimes be good, more often than not it fails to deliver in one way or another, and you end up with an experience that is less than satisfying. That’s why most people are willing to pay more for a fine dining experience than for a frozen burrito.
