My coaching process
There are exercise programs, and then there is fitness coaching.
You could have the best workout program and meal plan in the world (which we aim to deliver) but it won’t make a difference to your overall results if you aren’t able to consistently implement them. That’s where the support and accountability of a dedicated fitness coach could mark the difference between failure and success.ย
But just as a custom workout program and meal plan are well thought through before they are delivered, so too should be the overarching coaching process. Over the last 14 years, I’ve developed a 4 phase process for a comprehensive and smooth experience on my 8 week online personal training program.
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Forensic / Diagnostic Stage
My online personal training service is aimed at offering you a custom workout program, and a maintainable lifestyle framework from which you get to walk around confident, healthy and in the shape you want to be in year-round.ย
In conducting surveys among my clients I discovered that some 87% had worked with other fitness trainers in some capacity before finding me, with another 11% having worked with multiple coaches or diet programs in the past. Unfortunately, these experiences typically yielded disappointing or short-lived results. It wasn’t necessarily that the programs didn’t work as such, but rather that they either weren’t contextually appropriate for the individual or that the program didn’t come with the level of accountability and support that the individual needed at the time to make the new habits stick.
I have been fortunate enough to work with thousands of people over the course of my 14 years as a personal trainer both in-person and online. Understanding not just the methodology that gets results, but also how to deliver it in a way that educates, supports and exceeds expectations is extremely important to me, and one of the reasons my personal training service is so regularly reviewed amongst the leaders in the class.ย
ย Beginning with an initial consultation call and thorough onboarding questionnaire my coaching process starts by seeking to understand both your exercise and health history, where you have seen results in the past, where efforts have felt fruitless and what challenges, impediments or frustrations I might easily be able to help you anticipate, identify and overcome.ย
Some of the most frequent challenges I help my clients overcome are:
Removal of guesswork
Not knowing what type of exercise to do, how frequently or to what intensity can hold us back from starting out or keep us stagnant, feeling like we’re out of ideas. Likewise being advised that the methodology you are using is optimal when it clearly isn’t working for you can be just as frustrating. Iโll help you get to the bottom of this confusion, and remove doubt very quickly by building you a custom workout program using my unique 28-step process of personalisation.
Overcoming conflicting information
The main reason there is so much conflicting information around fitness, especially online is that there are many paths to the same goal. A number of approaches to a given goal would work in theory, and the reality is very few programs are so technically flawed that they simply wouldn’t work if implemented. But getting results is all about finding the right program for the right time, and then developing both the mindset and understanding of the methodology to see it through. Being secure in the knowledge that the path laid out for you will be effective can be the difference between succeeding and falling short of your goals.
End โall or nothingโ cycles
โAllโ cannot be maintained for long, and inevitably leads to burnout, often long before any real progress is made. โNothingโ is where major losses are incurred (loss of muscle, loss of fitness, even encroaching health issues). Crucially, letting activity and healthy eating is not maintenance, it is the beginning of moving backwards, due to the law of entropy. I help clients create a framework that works even at the worst of times helping to deliver not just results, but results that can actually be maintained.
Encourage self-prioritisation
Many of my clients have worked so hard on their careers, business and family lives that their own health & fitness often hasn’t been treated as a priority for years, decades even. I help many of my clients re-establish regular exercise practices, find time to lower stress, and gain back energy and re-establish pain-free movement. Ultimately, I’ll help you gain ground on the best version of yourself, which in turn will benefit everyone youโre close to.ย
Provide accountability & motivation
I coach that motivation is inherent to us all and that we all have it. Part of my coaching process is helping to show you how to utilise what you already have. During the early stages of coaching, Iโll help you gain your initial momentum, which helps build confidence and self-esteem. Iโll also be on hand daily via instant messaging to help you through any challenges, doubts or questions you may have.
First we identify your goal
Working in personal coaching is a very individual process. My personalised approach ensures that we address your specific needs and goals. Here’s what we focus on during our initial consultation call:
Identify objectives:
We start by understanding your primary goal. Do you have multiple objectives? If so, we’ll work to identify their priority and address any potential conflicts between them.
Evaluate goal history:
We explore whether this is a new goal or if you have faced repeated challenges in achieving it. Understanding your past experiences in fitness helps us tailor our strategies to ensure lasting success.
Assess time frames:
We discuss whether the goal has been achieved in the short-term previously and evaluate the your expected time frames. Setting achievable and realistic milestones is key to sustained progress.
We'll discuss what it means to you:
To help you take action and increase motivation, It helps to talk through what achieving your goal means to you and indeed, what it would mean for you to never achieve it.
Then we figure out whats blocking it
Achieving your health & fitness goals can be a complex journey, often hindered by various seen and unseen challenges. We’ll work to pre-empt and overcome them all.
Current challenges & frustrations:
By understanding and naming the specific challenges, frustrations, or limiting beliefs and habits that are affecting your health and fitness journey we’ll have taken the first step in overcoming them.
Identify primary roadblocks
I help you identify the primary setbacks you face in reaching your goals, whether they are related to knowledge gaps, lack of motivation, time constraints, or injuries. If you can remove the number one impediment to progress, it will be game changing.
Secondary impediments
Often, there are multiple factors at play. We consider all possible impediments, such as chronic lack of sleep, failing to manage stress or having a hectic schedule to provide a comprehensive strategy.
Consequences of inaction:
Recognising the impact of not following through on your personal relationships, career, health, and life options can be a powerful motivator. Emotional anchors often provide more drive than sheer willpower.
Next we optimise & contrast (for the early wins)
Methodology matters. In my view the only real solution to the problem is a solution that can both deliver results and be maintained. If your strategy cannot meet this requirement, its inherently short term and in my view not worth starting. This is a frequent problem with the majority of health & fitness programs. Restrictive and extreme measures cannot be maintained. Which means you create two scenarios, neither of which support your intentions to change for the long term.
Scenario 1 (Pre-attempt)
Basically the lifestyle that has got you into the position you are in at the start of your program. If you are feeling more and more uncomfortable over time it can be tempting to pursue extreme measures, as they seem like your only solution. This is the point where your current internal dialogue, external appearance or account of daily choices reaches the point where change must occur as discomfort has grown intolerable, I.e generally the point of reaching out to a new trainer or starting a new program, like this one.
Scenario 2 (restrictive attempt)
Short-term thinking in dieting and exercise leads to unsustainable habits like excessive reliance on supplements, over-exercise, and under-recovery. This causes low energy, poor mood, muscle loss, and eventual weight gain, perpetuating a frustrating cycle. Each attempt slows metabolism, making it harder to burn calories at rest. Over time, desperation for change increases, leading to progressively more extreme measures and susceptibility to fads and offers of a magic bullet. Preventing the establishment of healthy, maintainable habits.
Often this cycle repeats multiple times over the years, ushered in each timeย โScenario 1โย becomes uncomfortable enough to makeย โScenario 2โย once again seem like a good idea. Each repeated attempt unintentionally leads to a loss of lean muscle thus slows resting metabolic rate (I.e you now burn fewer calories at rest and often have a higher body fat percentage even if you’ve technically lost weight) and provides yet another frustrating reference for failure, despite trying really hard to make a change.
Sadly the longer this cycle perpetuates, the more desperate for change one becomes. Meaning each new attempt become more and more extreme and desperate. The strategy employed gets more and more restrictive, over time this leads to feelings of hopelessness and dismay which for many leads to becoming more susceptible to the next new fad diet plan, 6 week abs workout program or magic bullet supplement promising to be a quick and easy solution. None of which present any realistic long term strategy for change, so maintainable healthy habits are never truly established.ย
Next we create a strategic program
The methodology you implementย MUSTย be able to both deliverย and sustainย results. Or all you have is a short-term solution aimed at cramming exercise into a number of weeks or manipulate your weight through caloric restriction.
So how is this achieved?
Understanding where there is low-hanging fruit and how to make simple adjustments that cost the same units of time, energy and effort is the first place to start. i.e. Are current efforts as efficient and relevant as they could be given the your goal, current conditioning, and lifestyle constraints? If not, we optimise for several variables including Age, gender, previous experience, psychological preference, preferred coaching style, current schedule, recent stresses, movement constraints, nutritional preferences etc and the other elements of my 28 step process of personalisation.
New vs Old โ What are the new behaviours, workouts, and nutritional targets that can be implemented at the beginning of our course of coaching to provide contrast to what went before? Why is this important? Because where there is contrast, there is adaptation and the adaptive response is how you make progressย (providing you allow adequate recovery).
This is then followed by a number of weeks of tracking and progressive overload, until this framework produces diminishing returns at which point we against seek contrast to achieve adaptation.
This combination of optimise & contrast implemented simultaneously allows you to yield excellent results without ever having to do anything restrictive. Efforts are streamlined and improvements are implemented which yields โearly winsโ.
Early wins are important because they build faith in the new methodology and helps facilitate the transition into a non-restrictive and consistent approach to health & fitness.
The nuance here is that an experienced coach can help you choose the right amount and type of contrast to implement to get just the right amount of stimulus and adaptation through your course of coaching. Because being able to get through a workout is one thing (current fitness and/or grit) and being able to recover from it is another (current lifestyle constraints and level of health).
At no point in the program will anything be suggested or even tacitly approved that could not be maintained or recovered from adequately, because it would be a false economy and completely against the long-term intention of this coaching style.
This means that a great baseline energy level can be maintained, which makes it easier to make good food choices, which gives you more energy to exercise, which promotes better sleep, which improves mood and so the virtuous cycle continues.
The intention is that we establish a framework such that the day after the program ends nothing needs to change because the whole process has been non-restrictive, so it can be maintained as an ongoing habit.
Of course, we'll face some challenges
Something that few consider when investing in a workout program is that any and all programs will eventually suffer from diminishing returns when the body (and mind) are conditioned to them. It’s just how fitness works. The body is only going to adapt to a stimulus worthy enough, i.e it’s asking enough of the body to warrant getting bigger, stronger or fitter to perform more efficiently if you do it again (which you will, and that’s why repetition, tracking and progressive overload is crucial)ย
For this reason, no one program is ever going to be a permanent solution. Because before long your body will be conditioned to and will stop responding.ย
The solution to this conundrum is a sustainable ‘framework’, with a controlled set of variables, i.e. macronutrient distribution, exercise protocols, eating windows etc.
Controlled variables are useful because they are what allows you to chase that elusive adaptive response. Without this, all training programs will run aground soon enough and stop delivering results. Again, itโs the framework that allows sustained success, not the workout program. To be clear, the workout program including reps, sets and exercise selection will need to change over time.
Once you get to your ideal level of health and conditioning (by your own standard) you may wish to loosen the control on your framework, moving into more of an โexpressionโ of being in shape, rather than a program built specifically to get you from A to B. In the early stages, I suggest a linear approach as it will be the most direct route to change and as such take you out of the discomfort of not being where you want to be sooner.
A fitness program of any length is going to encounter challenges. Whether a challenging schedule, stress outside of the program or hitting a sticking point in your progress. This is where the power of accountability coaching shines. Knowing someone has oversight on your progress and is available for encouragement and motivation allows give you the support you need to reach your initial cruising altitude. Working through a plateau is one of the most rewarding parts of coaching and enlightening parts of being coached, as re-establishing a vein of progression and results without the common solutions of simply eating less or training more allows you to keep energy levels where you want them and feel in control of your health & fitness all without breaking the form of the long-term habit framework you’re looking to establish.
Often these course corrections and plateau breakthroughs need comprehensive coaching and support to avoid knee-jerk or emotional regressions to what I call โweight loss mathematicsโ or the โmore must be betterโ fallacy, as it’s been my experience that more often than not in fitness it’s the mind that fails us rather than the body.
How this works in practice
For those that lead a life of travel, meetings and a schedule subject to last-minute change, Iโve created a very responsive fitness service that allows me to adapt your program to keep you on track no matter how chaotic life gets.
Here are some of the scenarios we might tackle:
- Send me a picture of your new hotel gym and Iโll rapidly re-tool your program to accommodate it
- Only have a small space to train? Iโll create a workout that can be done in a hotel room, no problem
- Need a program that works across multiple locations with different equipment? I can build you multiple co-ordinated training programs
- Rebuilding workouts at short notice to accommodate less time available for exercise
- Send our nutritionist Dr Katie Turianytsia restaurant menus to keep your nutrition on track when traveling or entertaining clients
- We'll review your food logs for feedback and low hanging fruit when not following our meal plans
- Daily instant messaging accountability to keep you on track
Delivering results you can keep
The ultimate goal of my coaching process is to render myself redundant to the individual.
At the point where you feel fully equipped and confident to move forward on your own, my work is done. Of course its often good to touch base at a later date for fresh inspiration and support. Though for the most part though by the end of an initial coaching program I’ll have fully equipped my clients to be in control of their weight, body composition, activity level and dietary intake whilst having gone a long way to establishing a bulletproof mindset, which sets you up for long term consistency with exercise.
Of course, a number of my clients choose to work with me year round. But I ensure the decision is based on preference and enjoying the accountability, oversight and outsourcing of decision making, rather than the necessity of not knowing how to move forward alone.
At the end of a course of coaching, we go through a handover or โoff-boardingโ call to discuss what has been achieved, and what variables and protocols need to continue to be varied in the future to achieve ongoing results.
What happens at the end of the program?
End of program 'off-boarding call'
To discuss your plans moving forward and address any lingering questions about how to plan your future workouts or move to maintenance after what we’ve achieved.
Maintain access to your program
I ensure you maintain access to both the training app and your meal plan. So that you’ll always have it as a framework and jumping-off point.
Get exclusive access thereafter
Following your initial 8-week coaching program, you will have the option to extend our coaching relationship on a month to month basis as a lower continuity rate.