How My Coaching Differs from What Other Coaches Provide, Part 1 - Adaptive, Individualized Training Suggestions

If you’re reading this, you might have already seen on the website some of the descriptions of the successes that my teams and athletes have achieved over the years, but you might be wondering how my coaching is different from that of other coaches.  So I decided to describe some of those differences in this post along with some upcoming posts.

            The first major difference is that I provide individualized training suggestions to my clients and that individualization is not limited to training paces or intensities. All of the training that I suggest for each of my clients is adapted to account for each client’s individual constraints (e.g. time for training, injury history, goals, resources, and preferences).  The suggested training also differs in the sense of being adaptive to how each client responds to the training such that if training is going really well and the evidence suggests that the client can benefit from a greater stimulus provided by more progression, then the training suggestions reflect that.  That is why, unlike many coaches, I typically provide training suggestions in small batches, like a week or 10 days, rather than an entire training cycle, which could be months leading up to a goal event.  The flexibility that using adaptive training this way also provides the benefit of making it much easier to accommodate the inevitable unexpected circumstances that must be accounted for as they arise, which can be anything from illnesses (of the client or a family member that the client has to take care of) to emergencies at work (I have had clients who had to pull all-nighters at work or the myriad of unexpected work-related conflicts that arise for my clients in the military). 

            Because of the adaptive and individualized nature of the training suggestions that I provide to my clients, I don’t have or use cookie-cutter training plans or workouts that are cut-and-pasted from one client’s suggestions to another client’s suggestions.  While some individual workouts between clients might occasionally look similar, that is because the rationale for those workouts is still guided by the same underlying principles and because for most workouts there is an optimal range of parameters outside of which the workout is less-effective, more difficult to execute or recover from, more risky for injury, or sub-optimal in some other way.  And just as I don’t use cookie-cutter training plans or workouts, I also don’t take shortcuts and use AI.  All of my communications with my clients, and even all of the content on this website, is written and edited by me. 

            Now, you might be wondering how I am able to provide individualized training suggestions to each of my clients (in addition to all of the direct communication).  First, I purposely choose to work with fewer clients.  Even though coaching is how I primarily use my time, it is not my primary source of income.  As a result, unlike most coaches, I am not trying to maximize the number of clients that I coach in order to maximize coaching income.  I purposely choose to work with no more than a dozen clients at any given time because it’s more important to me to provide impeccable, personalized service so that 100% of my clients achieve their goals and are extremely satisfied.  Secondly, when I provide training suggestions to my clients, my goal is to provide those suggestions with such detail that it proactively addresses any questions that my clients might have.  That means my clients don’t have to waste time texting me for clarification, and means I spend less time clarifying my own ambiguous suggestions and more time providing support, analysis, feedback, and accountability, in other words the communications that build the connections with my clients.  Third, because I’m focused on providing the best possible service to my clients as opposed to maximizing the number of clients I work with, I spend minimal time on producing content for the website, and almost no time producing or posting content to social media. Obviously I spend some time on those things, but it is insignificant and does not come at the expense of serving my clients.