Living with no regrets: What thrills me about coaching?

Friday, March 23, 2007

What thrills me about coaching?

I love to solve puzzles. Since i was young I loved them and I still do. When I have a client or athlete come to me and say "I need to run faster" or "I need to lose 5kg of fat" I don't make any judgments right away. I go into problem solving mode. Of course I'm not perfect all the time with my solutions, but as time passes i get more and more ideal solutions sooner and sooner.

I have more experiences and more education because I read/write/watch information on fitness, health and performance each and every day for an at least an hour (or up to 10-15 hours on some days when I'm really on a roll...).

But lately I have realized that I have many tools in my knowledge box of fitness. Now its time to master these tools. So with each client, I analyze the problem (the fitness problem not the person as an individual) pick a tool, and adjust that tool to the client's situation.

Lets take fat loss as an example. I watched a presentation by Alwyn Cosgrove (a very successful fitness coach) and he says 100 billion on fat loss products will be spent in the US next year alone. Wooo and most of those are scams... this means I had better be thinking of fat loss as a key problem (among others) that many of my clients will need to be solving.

There are several methods to use for fat loss and as a coach I need to adjust which one to use for each person. How much training experience do they have? How much TIME do they have? Do they play a sport that requires certain attributes to be maintained above others? Its all fun to figure this stuff out:)

BTW Great news, my formerly "golf only" dad has decided to get serious with fitness (I think he also likes the cute Kettlebells...)...