Coaching Requires Discretion

I need to keep educating more people about coaching.

Not because I think I know everything.

Because I have seen enough to know that good intentions are not enough.

More people are starting to coach now. Some train on weekends, study online, follow good athletes, collect programs, then begin writing training for friends or clients.

I do not think that is automatically wrong.

A coach has to start somewhere. Wanting more knowledge is a worthy goal. Wanting to help people is a worthy goal. Caring enough to study the craft is a worthy goal.

But there has to be discretion.

Programming for another person is not the same as sharing a workout you enjoyed.

Once someone follows your program, you are making decisions that affect their body, recovery, confidence, and progress. That responsibility should slow you down a little.

A coach is not just someone who writes hard workouts.

A coach is not just someone who knows exercises.

A coach is not just someone who can make people sweat.

A coach has to know when to push and when to pull back. When to add intensity and when to remove it. When the athlete needs more work, and when the athlete needs better work.

Sometimes the problem is effort.

Sometimes it is pain, fatigue, poor movement, poor recovery, stress, ego, or bad judgment.

A program that ignores those things can look impressive on paper and still be wrong for the person doing it.

That is where coaching becomes serious.

Bad programming is not only inefficient. Sometimes it is harmful.

Too much volume for someone who is not ready.

Too much intensity for someone who has not earned it.

Too many movements layered on top of positions they cannot control.

Too much copying from athletes with different bodies, histories, schedules, and recovery capacity.

The internet makes it easy to collect exercises, templates, progressions, and aggressive training ideas. It makes it easy to sound more advanced than you are.

But information is not the same as judgment.

The workout is only one part of the job.

The real work is seeing the person in front of you.

Their training age.

Their injury history.

Their lifestyle.

Their movement quality.

Their stress.

Their consistency.

Their actual goal, not the goal they borrowed from someone else.

That is why two people can need completely different prescriptions even if they both say they want to get stronger, lose weight, compete, or look better.

The exercise may be the same.

The dose may not be.

The risk may not be.

The timing may not be.

I need to remember this when I teach, mentor, or talk about coaching.

The goal is not to discourage new coaches.

The goal is to raise the standard without killing the desire to learn.

There is nothing wrong with starting.

There is something wrong with acting like starting is the same as being ready for every responsibility.

Coach within your current competence.

Ask for help when the situation is outside your depth.

Refer out when the person needs something you cannot provide.

Keep learning, but do not gamble with another person’s body just because you are excited to apply what you learned.

That is not gatekeeping.

That is professionalism.

More knowledge should make a coach more careful, not more reckless.

It should create better questions.

It should create more humility.

It should make you slower to prescribe and faster to observe.

Good coaching is not having the most advanced program.

Good coaching is knowing what is appropriate, for this person, at this time, for this goal.

That takes knowledge.

It also takes restraint.

I need to keep saying that.