Fitness blogs and trade journals alike have many articles on ways to improve your coaching, and we’re no exception. There are entire books devoted to the topic as well, focusing primarily on coaches that interact well with all sorts of athletes, despite radically different personalities. However, every personal trainer I’ve spoken with has a story of a colleague or competitor who somehow seems to bumble along with lots of clients, in spite of what they consider ran abhorrent coaching style. Then there are the coaches who connect very well with some types of athletes, but not others. It’s nearly impossible to change your entire personality and approach for an individual, but being entirely unaccommodating isn’t always the best solution either, unless you want to watch your clients leave in droves. This begs the question: how does a well-meaning coach find the balance?

I started thinking about this after trying--and failing--to explain to a friend why I decided not to train at a specific gym. The first reason to come out of my mouth was that I didn’t like their warm-ups, though I kind of knew that my decision had very little to do with the offending exercises. It was actually a complicated combination of things that had rubbed me the wrong way, and it took me several weeks to really understand my reasoning.

What this actually has to do with is agency. The particular meaning of the word I’m referring to is defined as using one’s own capacity to act independently and make choices in the world, despite any constraints of social structure. If you have agency, this means you have some say in what happens to you. You are acting for yourself and not being acted upon.

But how does this fit into gym dynamics? After all, people signing up for training have say in what happens to them—they signed up for sessions or classes. They willfully decided to fork over cash to an expert or team of experts in order to benefit from that very expertise. If they wanted to run the show, they’d be writing their own programs, right? In this specific scenario, a trainee is a bit like a child. What they want may not be what they need, and it’s up to a responsible party to use their expertise to make some decisions that will be beneficial in the long run.

This brings up an inevitable conflict. How do you utilize the expertise you’re being paid for to get trainees to do what they need to do—which isn’t always what they want to do—without taking away their agency? How do you work with your clients as a team towards a common goal instead of being at odds with one another?

Some coaches take the “my way or the highway” approach. Others may err on the side of accommodation, basically letting their clients run the show. But there are a million gradations in between these two extremes, and that’s what I’d like to analyze.

Them forms

Picture this common every day scenario. Someone steps foot into your gym for the first time, ready to sign up for a group class or for personal training. You or your admin person hands them a stack of forms to fill out: some kind of contract asking for their bank or credit card details, an indemnification form agreeing not to hold you or your gym liable for their own accidents, and some kind of questionnaire asking for health information, injuries, goals, that sort of thing.

What do you do with those forms? Do you actually read about client injuries that you made them fill out in tiny boxes, or just expect them to bring those up to you? And do you look at their training goals, and maybe discuss those with them? Ideally, you’ll make some accommodations when writing your programs, or during group training, coming up with modifications as needed. If you’re working off of pre-written programs, you can use the information to direct clients to the appropriate classes, and maybe even give them some suggestions for what they can be doing outside of the gym. Your knowledge of these individual participants and their unique needs should have some affect. Otherwise, why would you make them fill things out?

Dreaded exercises

One time, a friend of mine wrote me a workout plan and I asked for a replacement exercise. He was understandably miffed. I told him I wouldn’t do the workout as prescribed, so I thought I’d just be upfront about it, rather than pretend I was actually doing the exercise I hated. We ended up coming up with a compromise we could both live with, and he started programming more alternative exercises that would have the same affect in future months.

So what’s the point, other than that I’m a really terrible client? It has to do with two things: first, there is compliance. If you’re coaching someone in the gym and they really hate an exercise, they can’t just skip it. If they bring it up to you and you ignore it, they’ll either rebel by not giving it their all, or they’ll quit. Instead of getting into a power play with the athlete, you can make a decision to explain to them exactly why you are prescribing that thing they hate. The level of detail you need to get into will be different for each person you’re interacting with, but knowing that there’s a method to your madness can only help. And if you don’t really have a reason for picking that one specific exercise, you can replace it.

This is also where goals fit in. If a client is training for a competition or a game, or has a specific injury, that RX’ed exercise is something you’d definitely want to fight to keep in. If, on the other hand, they’re training for personal health goals or for fun, it’s probably not a huge deal to switch something up or even give them a choice of activities. In any case, no matter how thought-out your plan is, communicating with the client about it is key. Otherwise, they may well assume you’re following the same cookie-cutter approach you use with everyone else.

Explaining Your Reasoning

I wrote about why women quit Brazilian jiu-jitsu a few months ago, and one of the examples I gave was when women are constantly being re-partnered, usually with other women. There are a lot of good, legitimate reasons for doing this. Perhaps it’s a size issue—it’s always easier to learn a new technique on someone your size before trying it out on someone bigger. Perhaps the person a female student tried to partner with originally was a bit on the spazzy side. And women training for competition may be better off pairing with other women, since they’ll be competing against women, and there are variations in flexibility and movement as well as size.

It can be a little awkward to explain one’s reasoning in front of an entire class, but consistently repartnering, especially without explanation, can be negative in two ways. First, it deprives a student of agency. You’re basically telling them, in their mind, that everyone in class is capable of picking their own training partners, except for them. Second, the decisions you make may actively be working against their goals. Someone training for self-defense may make different decisions about who to partner with than someone training for competition.

There’s always going to be a bit of compromise when working with groups—and again, it is the coach’s final call. So how do you find a balance between what you need to do and what your student may be looking for? Again, actually reading the forms they fill out, and perhaps even having conversations with them explaining your decision and asking what their goals are or if their goals have changed on a semi-regular basis can prevent a lot of conflict and assumptions. Having an open door policy doesn’t always cut it in these instances. Far better to initiate the conversation yourself.

Tying it all together

To summarize, here’s what things look like when you’re helping your athletes retain agency while still using your expertise to run the show. A client walks into your door. They fill out forms, including one listing their goals and injuries. You actually read these forms, and discus with them and even with other coaches they may work with. Whether you’re giving each client an assessment, writing their workouts, directing them towards classes best suited for them, or coaching them individually or in a group, you keep their injuries, goals, and any other relevant factors in mind. If you include an exercise they can’t stand, you explain why, and either come up with a reasonable alternative or emphasize the specific reasoning in a way they can understand. If you make any type of decision they may not understand in class, you find a way to explain that reasoning to them as well. And you check in with your clients regularly to see how things are going and if anything has changed.