Principles of Success -A Coaching Reflection
Consistency is magic
Stimulus is king
Recovery is necessary
Patience is essential (and peaceful)
Mindset is crucial
A decade deep into coaching and 1-year of motherhood under my belt and look at me go… I’m distilling life advice into easy to read lists (Oooph! Look at me now! - John Candy). But seriously, if I had to summarize the truths of what I have learned from coaching thousands over a decade and seeing common pitfalls and common traits of those that succeed, this is a pretty solid summation. Let’s dig in:
1. Consistency
You will get nothing without this. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Forget about innate talent or the even more debilitating quest for “the perfect ____ program” (insert any training, nutrition, strength, mobility program” to the blank). I’ve seen people fail on an excellent program because they were inconsistent and I’ve seen wild success on generic and average programs because they maximized the hell out of it. Consistently showing up to do work will always trump inconsistently adhering to the world’s best program. We should all take relief in this, as it means everyone has the potential to build consistency into their lives; There are no barriers to entry like money, skill, or experience - there are simply priorities and logistics to arrange.
Pro-tip: Zoom out.
The effects of consistency are compounding and exponential. Start measuring your consistency in quarters or years, rather than weeks or months.
2. Stimulus
When you go to train, each day of programming is designed to elicit a specific stimulus. It is in many ways easier to build a highly customized program for an individual than it is to build an effective group program for a global audience (or in my case a gym of 400). So in a group training environment such as at my gym, it is imperative that clients prioritize achieving the stimulus of the workout over adhering to any specific X’s and O’s written on the whiteboard.
If you follow the whiteboard description without the requisite strength, skill, speed or capacity, you may in fact elicit an entirely different stimulus than the program intends, and in essence are not following the intention of the program even though you’re following the program… wait… what? Yes, you read that right; it’s as if the whiteboard was telling you “do as I say (intend) not as I do (write)”. My suggestion? Focus on understanding what the programming is trying to elicit and overlay your individual performance history, skill, and current capacity onto that to customize reps, load, distance, or time of work. In doing so, you will create a more individualized program and achieve faster results. Doing what your neighbors are doing is fine-and-well 20% of the time. 80% of the time you should be ensuring that you are getting what you NEED, not just what everyone around you is doing.
Pro-tip: Necessary customizations are often small
Achieving the right stimulus is a very thin line to walk. A few reps, a 10% weight decrease, etc.
3. Recovery
The magic sauce. Training (in itself) doesn’t make you stronger. Lifting weights tears muscle fibers. Conditioning makes you less capable of recreating that power or speed the following day by taxing your CNS and muscles. Recovery is where the body rebuilds and restores to a stronger state than before training, so recovery in actuality is the other half of the equation that makes us stronger and fitter. There is a sweet spot balancing training and recovery - it constantly varies. This is a lesson I feel particularly close to in the past year of adjusting to parenthood. With far less time and energy for training and recovery, I have been forced to have greater awareness to maintain balance in the training-recovery equation - which means sometimes an extra 60-minutes of sleep is more vital than the benefit that would come from a training session. American societal ethos and capitalism will sell the “work harder/sleep when you’re dead lifestyle”... but it won’t get you far for long - leave it to a year of parenting (when you actually feel like you won’t sleep until you are dead) to teach a stubborn athlete that lesson. Even though I’m training less this year, by better balancing my training-recovery equation I’ve managed to maintain a majority of my performance (albeit not a whole lot of PR’s). It’s an interesting experiment in discovering the lower limits of necessary stimulus.
Pro-tip: Recovery is not just rest
Recovery is comprised of sleep, nutrition (timing and volume), restorative movement, stress reduction and state control. Start valuing and quantifying your recovery as much as you track and value your “work”.
4. Patience
People often overestimate what they can accomplish in 3-6 months, and under estimate what they can accomplish in 1-3 years. Thinking far into the future can be scary but it allows us to reverse engineer logistical and comprehensive plans. Take for instance Invictus Athlete Brittany Weiss’ journey. She came to Invictus in 2018 as a regionals athlete with a goal of going to the games. She achieved that goal in 2022 and again in 2023 on a team. It was 4-5 years of ups and downs for her - injuries, successes, near-misses. Her new goal? Qualify for the games as an individual. What’s her timeline for this goal? 2-3 years. YEARS, kids, YEARS! This is an athlete that just won the CF Games Team Competition, and her new goal is a 3 year journey. When setting goals with yourself, be practical in how long it will take you to achieve it, and however long you think… probably double it. Make peace with that before you start the journey and let it guide your mental and logistical approach.
5. Mindset
The mind will amplify or nullify our potential; Make it your superhero and not your super villain. I’ve seen mindsets hold people back or propel them to achieve wild things that they didn’t think they could accomplish. In my 10 years of coaching, I’m convinced that the mind is the greatest asset and biggest differentiator in achieving most goals. As a coach, I used to have a heavy focus on very technical coaching - cues, positions, technique. While I still value that technical focus, I now facilitate greater programming decisions and guidance around harnessing mindset and state-awareness given its influence on performance when all other things are equal. Mindset is a skill that is easily developed hand-in-hand alongside physical pursuits.
Thanks for reading!
Hugs & thrusters, Meatheads!