Great Coaching Isn’t Selling the Obvious

Let me save you a ton of time, money, and heartache. Fitness isn’t hard. Sleep eight hours in a cool, dark room each night, try to use strategies that minimize lifestyle stress, drink water, and eat enough real food to sustain your energy.  When you go to the gym, lift heavy a couple of times per week. Do a tiny bit more than you did the week before and get your heart rate up to relative intensity on occasion.

Now, the trick here is to realize that the above prescription isn’t the crux of coaching. Even if I made the above prescription more specific: “Do this many reps of this exercise paired with this other exercise and be sure to rest two minutes between bouts and not a second longer.”

That’s not coaching, either. 

Every program known to man is available for free or almost free on the internet. If the crux of fitness was unmasking the best program, we’d all be ripped and physically remarkable beyond our wildest dreams. If great coaching was about writing the best program, the search would be over. We’d all be tied for first-best-trainer-in-the-universe. The New Yorker cartoon below comes to mind. 

The reality is a fitness journey is an adaptive process where the person on the journey is encountering the challenges of change that have more complexity than what reps and sets to do. In reality, great coaching comes down to the coach’s ability to hold the space required for such transformation. Great coaches can do this with “poor” programs and poor coaches fail to do this with “great” programs. 

Your coach is your sherpa through your own transformation. He/she isn’t your guru.