Similar to any successful collaboration, it is inherent that coaches and clients work together if they expect to achieve exceptional, long-term results.
There can be a stark difference between working with a coach, and working WITH a coach. The first may involve following a plan that hasn’t been tailored to a client’s physical, dietary, mental, medical, and lifestyle needs. Also, it may lack regular modification, discussion, questioning, explanation, and potentially come across as “following orders”. Ultimately, no matter how good the plan looks on paper, it’s worthless if a client can’t adhere to it consistently.
The latter plan is tailored to an individual’s physiology, psychology, lifestyle, and personal goals. There will be regular input from both the client and coach for discussions, explanations, modifications, clarifications, support, and reassurance. This type of plan allows for flexibility and recognizes that the path to success will be different for everyone. Also, it considers that a long-term plan is never executed 100% based on the original blueprint - therefore, the plan will need to be strategically modified along the way to guarantee success!
As a client, recognise that putting your health into someone else’s hands is a big decision, so make sure you have equal contribution to the plan! This means having the confidence to speak up and ask questions, engage in discussions, update your coach on life changes so the plan can be modified etc. Also, as a coach it’s important to ask clients questions and regularly request feedback and input. This is because it’s easy to fall into the trap of normalising “simple” check-ins when clients don’t provide in-depth details regarding their training and nutrition. However, this is when coaches usually need to start questioning the MOST, because they could be missing vital information that is impacting their client’s progress.
In our experience, the clients who achieve their best results engage with us regularly, ask questions, initiate discussions, and equally contribute to the decisions that are made! As coaches this makes us feel like partners, not dictators - which is the way it should be!