Do you feel like you want one-on-one coaching but you're not "elite" or fast enough? It's a question we get asked often here at Coach Parry - "Will I benefit from one-on-one coaching, even though I'm not an elite athlete?" Coach Parry gives you his answer to this question and also discusses who wont benefit from coaching and what you should look for in a coach.

If you want to hear a little more about our coaches' coaching philosophy then have a listen to this...

 

Is one-on-one coaching for you?

 

BRAD
Welcome on to this edition of RUN with Coach Parry. I am Brad Brown, it's good to have you with us, and we are recording this just as the coach has arrived back from Australia for the Commonwealth Games. It's been a good one for Team South Africa, and particularly the triathlon team who the coach was over there with. Lindsey, welcome back to SA, I know you're probably still in Gold Coast time, but it was a great trip and even better to come back with a gold for team South Africa.

LINDSEY
It was really cool. It's a pity we couldn't back that up with a good performance in the relay but Henry was pretty awesome to watch on the day and Richard kept it pretty interesting until the very end. So it look for a while like we might bag two medals there. But, yes, just really good to be involved with that as always and the rest of the team also did amazingly well. I think it's pretty close to a record wall for us so it was great. It was a good Commonwealth Games.

BRAD
Absolutely. Lindsey, today's question has got to do with one on one coaching. We've been chatting a little bit about one on one coaching here on the podcast and on the videos over the last few weeks and months. Obviously it's something that we offer at coachparry.com. We've got a couple of coaches that work alongside you that do one on one coaching but we get a lot of questions from athletes saying is it just for elite athletes? Or can the average, everyday, working full time 80 hours a week, if you have to, athletes benefit from from one another coaching? Is it just for the elite or is it across the board?

LINDSEY
Look I would argue that it's less for the elites and more for the general population. General population have limited time, they've got time constraints be it work, and or family. So you've got limited time, and then to use that time optimally and get the best out of the time available, so that you can perform the best on on race day. That's really the point of coaching.

So it's about getting the right mix of intensity so that when you run easy, you are in fact running easy enough. It's about running hard enough, when the time comes and it's about putting those sessions in places relative to each other so that you do get the most out of each session. To use a bit of a cliche, coaching is absolutely for everyone.

And the coaches really get a kick out of watching athletes improve. So while it's really fun, and and there is quite a lot of pressure, trying to get people to win races or gold medals and get on the podium, there's also like a seriously good sense of satisfaction when a client goes from an 11:45 to a 10:45 or 10:30 to almost a Bill Rowan and I have had clients that have gone from finishing in the last 15 minutes of Comrades to running an 8:56 Comrades. So days like that are almost as good as watching your athletes winning Comrades. So coaching is for everybody. and for anybody who's actually serious about getting the most out of their leisure time. That really is exactly who coaching is for.

 

What to look for in a coach

 

BRAD
Lindsey, what should someone look for in a coach when they are thinking of going the one on one coaching route?

LINDSEY
That's a slightly tougher question because some of it is linked to personality. You need to ask yourself, what do you want out of a coach, what level of attention do you want out of a coach and how do you want to get that information out of a coach. Those are the kind of questions you need to ask yourself. If you need to have a lot of face contact time, then you've got to look around close to where you are, get a coach that is on track side and is going to spend a lot of time with you on the road perhaps.

If you don't need that level of hand holding but what you're really looking for someone with loads of experience, people that have dealt with a broad range of people and abilities, and you know that that person is going to take a look at where you are now and as you go along, keep having a look at various things. Nowadays we can train with power, heart rate, speed, but you want somebody who's really going to take note of what you have been doing, what you are doing, and adjusting that so that we get the best out of where you're going. Somebody with a good knowledge of running injuries and where to go and how to get running injuries sorted out and hopefully somebody who knows how to help you prevent those injuries, that for me would be a key contributing factor.

Then even though most of us are fairly self driven and self motivated, a coach who knows how to motivate you at the right time, so you don't want a cheerleader, or maybe you do want a cheerleader then that does have a place, but you want somebody who knows at the right times when you need some encouragement, or when you need to basically be told that you are now loafing or taking chances or cutting corners.

 

How important is it to have coaching specifically tailored to you?

 

BRAD
Lindsey, as far as the type of coaching that people get, obviously, there's one on one coaching and then there's one on one coaching. We see it so often where a coach will take on 100-200 athletes and you know very well that to give someone the attention that they really need and deserve, having that many athletes on your book, it's virtually impossible to really do tailor made packages and sort of tweak programmes for that specific athlete. How important is it as an athlete to have coaching that is specifically tailored for you, as opposed to a cookie cutter approach to get the best out of you as an athlete?

LINDSEY
Once you've got structure in your life, so a cookie cutter training programme will give you structure and structure will see you improve, but once you've got that structure, then the improvements start to come a little harder to come by. Then they really become about the detail. The detail is how well do you handle high intensity workouts? How long do you need to recover between those high intensity workouts? How hard do those needs to be? Are you a person who needs to do a lot of work at or around threshold, or are you a person who needs to do the majority of your work at very low intensities?

Those are the sort of details that you only get in a true monitored one on one environment because those are things we can only learn as a coach works with an athlete. There aren't really simple tests that we can do to say yes, you're a kind of athlete that's going to respond to this kind of training and require this amount of recovery. Those are little things that as we watch you train and have a look at heart rate responses, have a look at recovery times, listen to the way that you speak to us about how you're feeling, we can then figure out where you fall on that spectrum and how much mileage is good for you, when doing too much miles is actually going to start compromising your training.

 

Who is one-on-one coaching not for?

 

BRAD
I'm obviously a huge fan of one on one coaching. Let's be honest, one on one coaching isn't for everyone, who is one on one coaching not for?

LINDSEY
I would say it's really not for people who do not like to be told what to do, people who don't listen and I must qualify that and say that that's not to say you can't question, in fact questioning is good, because anyone who's telling you what to do should be able to tell you why they want you to do what they're doing and help you to understand what you're doing.

But there are people that just don't like being told what to do, they are quite happy to mix and match and change the programme. And if there's, in their mind, a better training option going with their buddies will shoot off and do that, then you're wasting your time and money with one on one coaching. At the end of the day, if the race doesn't work out, you as an individual, and the coach need to be accountable to that and to figure out what went wrong. If you aren't sticking to what has been asked of you, well, then what you're doing is putting the lack of performance squarely in your own lap, you're making it very difficult to try and figure out exactly what went wrong. Besides the fact that you don't listen.

 

The Coach Parry philosophy

 

BRAD
Lindsey, if somebody had to ask you about your coaching philosophy, you personally and coachparry.com as a business, how would you describe the coaching philosophy at coachparry.com?

LINDSEY
Look, so we try to get a high touch, weekly interaction. In other words, you know, once a week, the coach will go through what you have done and where we are trying to go. I believe that, within reason, the more that we can run, the better we will run and one of the ways to allow us to run more in the time that we've got available is to make sure that those sessions are done in the right training zones. That means that a lot of the work is done at quite low aerobic levels. So my base philosophy is that the stronger your aerobic system is, the better you'll be able to perform over range of distances from five K's to ultra marathons. And it will allow you to do your high intensity sessions in a way that they're intended.

BRAD
One thing if I could add there as well, obviously with it being a very high touch sort of one on one coaching, our coaches, yourself included, only have 24 hours in the day, and they can only take on a certain amount of athletes. So it is impossible, we get requests all the time from athletes just wanting to work with you. But unfortunately, that can't be the case.

So we've got a whole bunch of coaches that work for coachparry.com that train and coach with Lindsey and with the same philosophy, and you're in very good hands. I don't know if you want to add anything about the the sort of group of coaches that we've got and the caliber of coaches that they are.

LINDSEY
They've all been hand picked. Markus, in particular, I've worked with for a good number of years and over the last decade, I have mentored and worked with a lot of coaches and Markus, for me, has come the closest to using a very similar philosophy without just being a robot and copy and pasting the programmes. But also the other thing that I really like about Markus in particular is that he does still often pull me in and ask my advice and we problem solve things together.

Then on the cycling side, Devlin's really come a long way and he has got some pretty good elite athletes of his own that are are doing quite well nationally and I've employed a new young triathlete coach, Rudolf Naude who is still doing pretty well and making his way at 70.3, but in terms of qualifications, comes from a very similar background to what I do, and has loads of racing experience. I've been coaching him for almost a decade. So I'm pretty sure that a lot of my coaching philosophies have rubbed off on him.

We don't really want to grow into a 15-20 coach business but we want to make sure that our guys know what they're doing, that I'm comfortable handing anybody over to them and then we need to make sure that everybody's happy in the company.