To become a great coach you have to have a good grasp on many different skills, such as listening, emotional intelligence, and speaking, to name a few.
When we think of coaching in the gym setting we think of someone that gives instructional advice on a particular movement and that is what we are going to focus our talk on today- what is good coaching when it pertains to the coaching of good movement. I say this to bring focus to one aspect of coaching, not to say this is all a good coach does.
Coaching is like a three-layer nacho dip. The deeper you go, the better the experience for your taste buds; coaching is the same. The deeper you can go with your clients the better they will understand the movement, which will be a better workout for your clients.
The Three Levels
Superficial Coaching (Looks good)
Superficial coaching is what you would see a lot in group exercise classes and small group personal training. You would hope not to see this in personal training.
What it looks like:
You are working with Suzie, the first exercise of the day is a Goblet Squat. You show her the Goblet Squat, going over some of the familiar cues and mistakes people make.
Suzie then takes the weight and performs what looks to be a great Goblet Squat.
When to use superficial coaching?
Superficial coaching is excellent when you are running a group class and trying to get everyone started or when you are doing small group training and have a client that wants to get started quickly and doesn’t want to wait around.
The one mistake I will see is coaches thinking this is enough. Superficial coaching isn’t coaching; it’s more like exercise demonstration, and the feedback to the client is just “it looks good.”
Outside of the pattern looking good, you have no other information. Where are your clients feeling it? Just because the pattern looks like a squat doesn’t mean they are feeling it in the right place.
This is why you want to move to the second layer of coaching as quickly as you can.
Sensory Coaching (Feeling the movement)
Sensory coaching takes more skill and time to perform. You have to have a better understanding of the movement and why the client might not be feeling muscle effort where they should.
Superficial Coaching: you did what looked to be a good movement.
To
Sensory Coaching: That movement looks good, and you are feeling the work in the muscle group that’s expected.
What it looks like:
You are working with Suzie, the first exercise of the day is a Goblet Squat. You show her the Goblet Squat, going over some of the familiar cues and mistakes people make.
Suzie then takes the weight and performs what looks to be a great Goblet Squat.
You ask Suzie, “where are you feeling it?”
She replies, “I am feeling it in my hips and front of my legs and a little bit in my lower back.”
As a good sensory coach, you say, “It looks like you are locking out your lower back to create stability, we want to use your core muscles to create stability, not our lower back.”
You learn she does not know what it means to brace, so you show her some bracing exercise that put her in a position to feel what bracing feels like so she does not stress her lower back.
Sensory coaching makes sure the client is doing and feeling the exercise. This style of coaching takes more time and may lead down a few different paths than what you had planned for the day, but that is ok because you are coaching to what the client needs to get the most out of a movement.
I believe every client deserves this level of coaching at the minimum. You might bounce back and forth between Superficial and Sensory depending on the day and the client’s needs, but there needs to be more Sensory then Superficial coaching in a training session.
The final layer of coaching is not always needed and will not happen for every exercise and is dependant on the individual client in some cases.
Conscious Coaching (Awareness)
The final layer of coaching happens when you have coached your client to a level of awareness and understanding of how the body is moving in space.
Using the squat as an example: the client is aware of her feet, knees, hips, back, and chest. She is also aware of how she is moving in space and what she should and shouldn’t be feeling.
At this point, the client can self-correct a movement. Conscious coaching comes about after many hours of coaching a client to be aware of different aspects of the movement, so they have a complete picture of all that is going on.
What it looks like:
You are working with Suzie, the first exercise of the day is a Goblet Squat. You show her the Goblet Squat, going over some of the familiar cues and mistakes people make.
Suzie then takes the weight and performs what looks to be a great Goblet Squat.
You ask Suzie “where are you feeling it?”
“I felt it in my back the first few reps, but then I remembered I need not to show off my ribs and after I tucked my ribs it felt fine.”
Not every client is going to get to this point; they might not have the bodily awareness to do it or don’t have a reason to care (you will find people become more caring after a nagging injury).
There is a time for all three layers of coaching. You will want to spend the most amount of time in the middle with Sensory and the least amount of time using Superficial coaching techniques. If you find yourself using a lot of Superficial coaching, ask yourself “why.” Is it that you don’t understand the movement well enough? Do you need a better understanding of injuries? Or maybe you need to rethink your training system if time is the issue.
Your Fitness Sherpa,
