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I know many readers of this blog appreciate all the free actionable content that I put out here and on my newsletter on a weekly basis. I try my best to essentially give away as much information as possible to allow you to reach whatever health, wellness, or performance goal you may have.
While free information that you can put to work for you is great, often times people can struggle with putting that information to work in the context of their specific situation.
For example, you know you should be strength training 2-3 times a week, doing 1 session of high intensity exercise a week, and 2-3 easy cardio days a week, but how do you actually fit that in to your schedule and continue to make progress over time?
You know you should be eating 1g of protein per pound of body weight but how do you do you actually get there when you are currently eating half that amount?
What should you do when your kids keep you up all night and you have a terrible night of sleep?
How do you navigate eating when you are on a business trip and won’t be eating at home?
These are all situations that I can’t really outline precise answers to for you because I need to know much more context about your specific situation. I can provide guidelines but sometimes people want more, they want someone to give them the specific answers they need to navigate these types of situations.
The Magic Of 1 On 1 Coaching
This is where 1 on 1 coaching can be of value. When I work together with someone in my 1 on 1 coaching program I can deep dive into their specific situation and help provide clean actionable answers based on their specific situation.
Now I know 1 on 1 coaching is not for everyone but in this week’s blog post I wanted to give you a peak behind the curtain of what it is like working with me as part of my 1 on 1 coaching program.
One of my now former 1 on 1 coaching clients, Kyle, graciously agreed to sit down with me for a conversation on his experience working with me over the past year.
To give you some background Kyle is a 37 year old father to two young children. He is a stay-at-home dad who’s main job is managing the household and children. He has a long background in endurance events and came to me with a pretty decent knowledge of nutrition. Needless to say he had much more knowledge about health and fitness than the average person.
Despite his extensive knowledge he needed some additional help working towards some goals he did not have as much knowledge of.
He desired a shift in his workout routine, moving away from emphasizing endurance and towards prioritizing strength. Additionally, he aimed to transform his diet to align with his strength training objectives, transitioning from a low-carb background to adopting a more balanced approach to eating.
While I am pretty confident that with enough time and effort Kyle could have done this all himself, he knew that with all the other demands in life and complexities that come with being a parent to 2 young children that it would take him much longer to figure it all out.
That is why he decided that 1 on 1 coaching would be a good fit for him and why we started working together.
You can watch the full interview with Kyle here on YouTube, however I have broken out some key insights from our conversation that really highlight the benefits of 1 on 1 coaching in the sections below.
Exercise: Meeting You Where You Are At
I am sure you have gone through multiple iterations of trying to find the best exercise protocol for yourself. There is not shortage of suggestions out there, each of them with their own twist on exercise that is supposed to get you to “the promised land”.
Unfortunately if you take someone’s magical protocol from the internet and try to implement it verbatim in your own life most times you will find it will not work. The intensity might be to high, you might have certain limitations in your current skill set that prevents you from doing some of the exercises, the duration of the workouts might be too long, the type or amount of cardio might be inappropriate, or any number of other mismatches might get in the way.
One of the benefits of 1 on 1 coaching is that your coach knows at a high level what you need to do and can design a custom protocol for you to meet you where you are at. Kyle found this intensively beneficial because he was just starting his journey into strength training so he did not have a lot of knowledge on what the best protocol would be. In addition could not go to a gym because he was a stay at home dad, but yet did not yet have a lot of gym equipment at home.
When we started working together he provided me a list of what equipment he did have at home. One of those things he listed was a suspension trainer (or what people commonly refer to as a TRX).
Being so new to strength training and with the inabbility to go to a gym the suspension trainer was a perfect fit for when when we just started working together!
He could easily get a very effective workout in at home with the suspension trainer because it allows you to make all kinds of exercises as difficult or as easy as you need them to be by leveraging your own body weight.
By leveraging the suspension training for the first few months we worked together it also gave him time to get some more equipment that we could then leverage later on in the year as his skills and strength progressed.
Navigating Road Blocks
We all know that the best laid plans are just that, they are plans and they are not set in stone….plans never go the way we think they will.
Life has a sneaky way of throwing a wrench in our plans and that is a big problem for most people when it comes to their health, wellness, and performance goals. As soon as something unforeseen happens it is tough to know what to do and most people just revert back to their old behaviors.
For example, your diet is going smoothly and you have been doing great, but then your boss tells you that you need to travel for work. Now what do you do? You will no longer be able to eat the same meals, you will be eating out at restaurants, you might not even have control of the meals you are eating when eating out.
If you do a poor job navigating this situation you might come back from the trip feeling pretty bad about your diet and then suddenly all the momentum you had before you left is gone. You figure whats the point, might as well not even try…where is the ice cream?
Kyle faced these types of situations all the time. Except his problem was not work throwing him a curve ball it was his kids and social obligations.
Kids get sick, they don’t go to daycare when they should, they then get parents sick.
With family and friends spread out across the country travel was also a frequent occurence for Kyle.
In addition there were plenty of times over the course of the year where Kyle wanted to loosen the reigns on his nutrition for example where him and his wife had the rare weekend away by themselves.
All of this can be tricky to navigate. But when you have coach you can adjust your plan on a day by day basis and help guide you through these tricky situations so you are no worse off on the other side.
Personalized Nutrition: Finding Your Unique Path
Just like with exercise, there are no shortage of diets out there that promise to make all your wishes come true. And just like with exercise there is no one diet that works for everyone.
It is incredibly frustrating to keep trying different diets, or in some cases the same diet that “used to work”, over and over again only to keep falling right back to where you started.
I wish as a coach I could easily prescribe a diet that I knew would work for all my clients but the truth is that I don’t have that answer.
What I do have is experience and an open mind so I can make suggestions and WORK WITH YOU to find a diet that works for your goals.
One on one coaching is not a dictatorship, it is a partnership, we need to work as a team to find the approaches that are going to work in all areas of lifestyle but this is especially true with diet.
The good news is that with 1 on 1 coaching is that I have seen what has worked and has not worked in the past for people in similar situations as you so I can make an educated suggestion as to what to try. Many times it will work out, sometimes it won’t and when it doesn’t we try something else. The one thing to keep in mind is that when working with a coach you should have some say in what your diet looks like because that is the diet that you are more willing to stick to.
Kyle embraced this part of 1 on 1 coaching. Kyle very much wanted to use a pro-metabolic diet to reach his goals, and I was open to that. We worked together to formulate and tweak his diet over the course of the year to compliment whatever goal he was working towards and we always had an open line of communication on the topic of diet.
There are a ton more insights that you can gain into the benefits of 1 on 1 coaching in the full interview which you can watch below.
Nothing can compare to 1 on 1 coaching when it comes to reaching your goals. If you find yourself frustrated, confused, overwhelmed or just too strapped for time to effectively reach your goals I would urge you to look into 1 on 1 coaching. It doesn’t matter if it is with me or with someone else, but the investment can literally be life changing.
The reason is because, as you will hear Kyle say in the full video, he has learnt so much from our coaching relationship that he now has the skills to continue on his own. This is in fact how I became a coach myself. After working with a coach on my own health journey I learnt so much that I wanted to share it and help others so I decided to be a coach.
Will you learn everything you will ever need after working with a coach?
No.
But you will certainly learn enough that navigating your own health, wellness, and performance goals does not seem like an insurmountable task! If you are interested in getting some help I would be honored to spend some time talking with you about how we might be able to work together. Fill out the form here an I will reach out to you to schedule some time to chat about how we might talk together free of charge.
Not ready for 1 on 1 coaching just yet?
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