“Personalized coaching.”
I’m not sure there’s a coach or coaching company out there that doesn’t make some version of this claim. We certainly do at QT2 Systems. Personalized training. Individualized training. Coaching built around you. Your goals. Your life. Your physiology.
All good stuff.
But, what happens when the athlete asks the next logical question?
“How?”
How, exactly, is your coaching personalized?
Given the claim, it’s a pretty reasonable question—and one I think every coach should be prepared to answer.
Different weekly training hours, workouts, or training zones? Moving a workout from Tuesday to Wednesday because of a work meeting? Sure, those things can all be part of personalized coaching, but that can’t be the extent of what personalized coaching really means. There has to be something deeper to it.
At QT2, we have a standard that I come back to over and over again with our coaches: At any moment, you should be able to explain to your athlete why they are doing what they are doing when they are doing it.
The athlete doesn’t necessarily need, or even want, the explanation every time. Some athletes want to understand everything. Others trust their coach and the process—tell them what to do, and they will go do it.
Both are perfectly okay, but the coach needs to know which approach works best for the athlete in front of them. To me, that awareness is where personalized coaching really begins.
Developing a framework
I’ve been coaching endurance athletes for over two decades, and one of my most common answers to coaching questions is…“It depends.”
Should an athlete work on threshold or VO2 max?
It depends.
Should we increase volume or intensity?
It depends.
Should this athlete be doing more bike work? More run work? More swimming?
It depends.
This can sound like a cop-out. And for some, it might be.
But there is a big difference between saying “it depends” because you don’t know the answer, and saying “it depends” because you know what factors might impact your answer.
A decision-making framework doesn’t necessarily give you the same answer every time. In fact, I would argue a good one probably shouldn’t. What it should give you is a consistent way of arriving at an answer.
1. Develop your belief system
Before you can build a decision-making framework, you have to define your set of coaching beliefs. What do you want for your athletes, and how will you help them get there?
Try This → Define your core beliefs
- Name your outcome: Beyond “getting fitter” or “getting faster,” how do you define success for your athletes?
- Name the mechanism: What training behavior will bring that outcome?
- Name the requirement: What environment or mindset is needed for the mechanism to work?
How we apply this at QT2 Systems
At QT2 Systems, our answer to that exercise is Consistency + Patience. Consistency is the mechanism; patience allows the mechanism enough time to work.
“Consistency is king” isn’t exactly earth-shattering stuff, I know. You’ll find some version of it on just about any endurance coaching website. But what does that actually mean?
To me, it means fitness is compounding. Fitness begets fitness, begets fitness. I think of it a lot like a 401(k). Saving for retirement doesn’t usually happen by stumbling across massive piles of money and dumping them into an account. It happens through relatively small, routine deposits year after year that compound over time.
Training works much the same way. The athlete becomes what they habitually do. If they habitually train appropriately, recover, come back, train again, and repeat that process over a long period of time, we tend to get pretty good outcomes.
But “habitually” cuts both ways. If the athlete is habitually sore, habitually unmotivated, habitually dealing with little injuries, or habitually missing workouts because the training doesn’t fit into their life, those things also impact outcomes.
This belief guides our coaching decisions at QT2 Systems, and it’s why we will almost always protect consistency over chasing what might look like the physiologically “perfect” workout. The best training in the world isn’t particularly useful if you can’t do it with any kind of consistency.
And patience is what allows consistency to work. I have used this quote by Arnold Glasow for 30 years: “The key to everything is patience. You get the chicken by hatching the egg, not by smashing it.”
So, what’s your belief system?
2. Determine which dials to turn
Once you know your beliefs, the next step is figuring out how they will impact your daily coaching decisions.
For instance, I know I want to help my athletes train consistently, but consistently doing what?
I think of athletes as having a bunch of dials that we can potentially turn: aerobic capacity, aerobic sustainability, durability, strength, technical skills, pacing, fueling, position, confidence, and on, and on, and on…
Our job is to figure out which dial, or dials, offer the greatest opportunity.
But, and I think this is important, the greatest weakness is not necessarily the greatest opportunity.
Let’s say we have a triathlete who really struggles in the water. There is tremendous room for improvement: swim more, get better. But what if that athlete lives 60 minutes from the nearest pool? Every swim requires a two-hour round trip before we even account for actually swimming.
Is swimming still the lowest-hanging fruit? Maybe. But maybe not.
In my mind, this all rolls up into what we refer to at QT2 as Return on Training Investment (ROTI). Of all the things we could improve, where can we get the most meaningful return for the resources this athlete can realistically invest right now?
Try This → Calculate the ROTI
Before prescribing a new training focus or rushing to fix an obvious weakness, ask yourself:
- What is the potential magnitude of improvement?
- What’s the likelihood we can produce that improvement given their current skill and environment?
- What’s the total cost required to pursue it? (training effort, recovery, time, injury risk, logistics, the athlete’s life)
If the costs outweigh the benefits, it might not be the lowest hanging fruit afterall.
3. Balance physiology with practicality
Naturally, some of the dials are physiological, and this is where testing comes into play. However, I am less interested in testing as a report card than I am in testing as a decision-making tool.
Did the athlete get fitter? Sure, I want to know that. But I am much more interested in understanding where the athlete is now. What is their aerobic sustainability? What is their aerobic capacity? How do those things relate to one another? What does that relationship tell us about where the greatest physiological opportunity may exist?
Testing helps tell us where we would like to go. The athlete’s practical context tells us whether or not we can go there now.
Let’s say I am coaching someone who wants to perform better in mountain biking. Testing tells me there is a tremendous opportunity to develop their Critical Power.
There’s just one problem: the athlete is relatively new to mountain biking, and their technical skills don’t support their ability to use more fitness on the trails. Because they struggle with bike handling on technical terrain, they are unable to effectively express the fitness they already possess.
Do we spend our available training resources raising Critical Power if it comes at the expense of time spent improving those technical skills? Probably not.
It doesn’t really matter how fit the athlete is if they can’t express that fitness in the environment in which they want to perform. So we work on riding the mountain bike first.
Try This → Find the “burnt-out bulb”
I think of an athlete’s development like an old-school string of Christmas lights wired in series: if one bulb goes out, everything downstream goes dark. Our job is to find that bulb.
- Identify the goal: What does testing or performance data tell us about the athlete’s physiological opportunities?
- Check downstream blockers: What practical constraints (durability, injury risk, fueling, pacing, physical resilience, emotional stability, rest and recovery, technical skill, performance under stress) currently prevent them from reaching that goal?
- Prioritize the blocker: Fix the practical constraint first. Until that bulb works, adding more power to the other bulbs won’t light up the wire.
The physiological need tells us where we would like to go. Practical context tells us whether we can go there today.
4. Stop carpet bombing your training plans
Without this kind of decision-making, endurance training can very easily turn into a carpet-bombing approach.
Do a little bit of everything: threshold, VO2 max, tempo, long stuff, short stuff, strength, speed. Drop enough bombs, and you are bound to hit something.
To be fair, this method can work—but it’s not efficient.
Some of those bombs are landing in places where there isn’t much left to accomplish. Meanwhile, an area of tremendous opportunity isn’t given adequate attention.
Training resources, time, recovery capacity, and an athlete’s ability to absorb stress are all finite. So, if we have the ability to pinpoint the opportunities, why wouldn’t we direct our available resources there?
Try This → Run a training session audit
Look at an athlete’s prescribed training for the upcoming week. Pick a high-intensity session and replace your default question with a precise one:
- Scrap: “Is threshold training good?”
- Ask: “Why is threshold training the best use of this athlete’s training resources right now?”
If you can’t answer the second question with a defensible reason (why they are doing what they are doing when they are doing it), it might be time to scrap the session and adjust the plan.
Taking “personalized coaching” from buzzword to action
Two athletes might end up doing remarkably similar workouts on a given day. That doesn’t mean the plan isn’t personalized.
Individualized coaching doesn’t mean every athlete needs different training. It means every athlete deserves individualized consideration and a defensible reason for why they are doing the training they are doing.
Maybe two athletes have the same physiological needs, but one has an injury history that changes the decision.
Maybe one can sleep nine hours each night and the other has a newborn.
Maybe one loves swimming and the other lives 60 minutes from the pool.
Maybe one is six weeks from their most important race of the year.
Maybe they really do need the same thing. Again, it depends. But with a decision-making framework in place, you can move past “it depends.” The belief system provides structure to your thinking. A methodology can grow from it, decision-making frameworks can grow from that methodology, and data can inform those frameworks. But, in the end, you still have to coach.
The framework gives you information, the athlete gives you context, and you make the decision—a decision you should be able to explain.
The next time an athlete asks you, “How is my plan personalized?” be ready to answer:
- What do you believe makes an endurance athlete better?
- When two perfectly reasonable training choices compete, how do you decide between them?
- What information about an athlete would cause you to override the plan?
- And, maybe most importantly, can you explain why they are doing what they are doing when they are doing it?
Your framework does not need to give you every answer. But, it should give you a defensible way of arriving at one. So, yes…personalized coaching. But, how?
