Why Expert Coaching Could Be Helpful for You

Not everyone needs a coach. But there are a number of situations where it genuinely helps.

Where coaching earns its place.

• Accountability – if you struggle adhering to plans on your own, a coach can make sure that you stick to your training. You’re much less likely to not complete a session (for no reason) if you have a coach contacting you to ask if there was a reason for the incomplete session.
• Time-poor people – a plan is even more important for those short on time. It helps you still hit those goals based on your commitments. This then also helps remove the daily decision fatigue of planning your own training, which can often be the real barrier.
• Avoiding wasted time on approaches that are unlikely to work – both experience and the coach’s prior training all provide valuable evidence for a client’s programming.
• Injury prevention – through programming that accounts for your history and current capacity, not a generic template.
• Faster progress – from having an expert set of eyes on what you’re doing.
• Multi-sport / hybrid training – especially important if you are training multiple sports and have goals that may not overlap entirely. Coaching can help you identify what is required and prioritise hitting those most important goals.
• Future independence – for a lot of people, coaching is often the fastest route to eventually not needing one – a coach can help you understand why a programme is built the way it is and help you build the knowledge to manage your own training well, and long after the formal coaching relationship ends.

As mentioned, a coach isn’t always required – if you’re already training consistently, making steady progress, and enjoy the process of planning your own sessions, a coach may add relatively little beyond what you’re already doing well. Coaching earns its place when one or more of those things isn’t quite true – not as a default for everyone regardless of situation.

A fairly typical starting point for a new client: a complete beginner (either in training entirely or just covering strength and conditioning), someone who knows the basics but progress may have plateaued, someone who keeps having the same injuries turn up or the more advanced athlete who’s looking for that extra 1%.

Covering multiple bases at once. There’s also real value in having one person covering multiple sides of your training – strength, mobility, cardio and sport-specific work all built by someone thinking about how they fit together, rather than a generic gym programme sitting alongside separately-planned running or golf work with nobody joining the two up. In my coaching, this is built on significant experience and qualifications – Level 4 personal training, TPI golf fitness and power qualifications, a number of other courses, and years of actually racing, playing, and training as a serious amateur myself.

What working together actually looks like. An initial assessment to understand your goals, history, and constraints. A personalised strength and mobility programme delivered through Everfit, and endurance training built and tracked through TrainingPeaks – I use TrainingPeaks for cardio specifically because it syncs directly with your watch, and Everfit because it makes strength and mobility instructions genuinely easy to follow, with video demonstrations for every exercise. Check-ins and programme adjustments are based on the level of plan you choose, but each plan will be built around your schedule and commitments.

The overall aim, regardless of starting point, is the same: build a training approach specific enough to actually work for your life and that allows you to achieve the goals you really want to hit.