The One Thing You're Actually Hiring a Coach For
5 Big Ideas, 3 Reflection Questions, 1 Takeaway
We explore what it actually means to be coachable — and why the most valuable thing any coach can offer you isn’t a program, a plan, or accountability.
Using a Chase Club member’s question about whether to take six days off training on a coach’s advice, we unpack the two foundations of any great coaching relationship, why your own perspective is always more limited than you think, and what the science actually says about what happens to your fitness when you rest.
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🖐 5 BIG IDEAS
1. You’re Hiring Their Perspective
When you hire a coach, you’re not really paying for a program or a plan. You’re paying for a view of yourself you can’t get on your own.
No matter how self-aware you are, your perspective is shaped entirely by your experience, your history, and your biases. A good coach has seen dozens — sometimes hundreds — of people just like you. They connect dots you can’t see. That’s the whole point.
2. Coaching Is Built on Two Things: Trust and Experimentation
Every coaching relationship comes down to this: I trust you, so I’ll try it. Both halves matter. If you don’t trust the coach, no experiment is worth running. But if you do trust them — and then refuse to follow their advice — you’re not actually being coached.
Christina hired a coach who has a track record of success with other clients. That’s enough to earn a seven-day experiment. The low-risk nature of the experiment makes the trust equation even easier.
3. The Physiology Is on Your Side
Here’s the good news for anyone afraid to take time off from training: the science says you almost certainly won’t lose a thing. Research shows negligible loss in strength or aerobic capacity from a one-week deload — and in many cases, the opposite happens. Your nervous system, connective tissue, and hormones get a chance to restore.
Work on aerobic capacity from Dr. Jack Daniels (no, not the drink) found that muscle tissue maintains roughly 90% of peak performance for up to 70 days. Seven days is not a risk. Seven days is a rounding error.
4. Good Coaches See the Whole Human
A great coach isn’t obsessed with whether your back squat goes up or down by 5 lbs this week. They’re watching the bigger picture — your mood, your sleep, your energy, your relationship with training itself.
When a coach prescribes rest, they may be seeing something you can’t: that your identity has become too wrapped up in the workout. That training is no longer supporting your life — it’s trapping you. That’s a more important thing to address than any performance metric.
5. Curiosity Over Judgment
When we get advice that challenges what we’re already doing, the instinct is immediate judgment: That’s wrong. That can’t be right. But judgment closes the door before you ever see what’s on the other side.
Curiosity opens it. Instead of this won’t work, try I wonder what she’s seeing that I’m not. That shift — from defending your current approach to genuinely exploring a new one — is what makes coaching (and growth) actually possible.
🤔 3 REFLECTION QUESTIONS
1. When you seek outside perspective, are you looking for confirmation or challenge?
Think about the coaches, mentors, or advisors in your life. When they push back on what you’re already doing, what’s your first reaction? Do you tend to dismiss advice that disrupts your current approach — and what might that be costing you?
2. Is there an area of your life where training (or work, or any habit) has stopped supporting you and started trapping you?
Consider the difference between loving the process of something versus loving the identity of being someone who does it. Where might you be attached to the idea of the thing more than the thing itself?
3. What would you try if you genuinely trusted the outcome was going to be fine either way?
Sometimes resistance to change is just fear dressed up as logic. If you knew the experiment was low-risk — that you could always return to what you were doing — what would you be willing to try?
🔑 1 KEY TAKEAWAY
Perspective is the only thing worth hiring a coach for.
We tell ourselves we hire coaches for accountability, for programming, for expertise. And those things matter. But underneath all of it is something more fundamental: we hire coaches because our own view of ourselves is always incomplete.
We’re too close to the work, too deep in our own history, too surrounded by our own blind spots. A good coach — in fitness, in business, in life — earns their value not by confirming what we already believe, but by showing us what we’ve been unable to see.
The willingness to actually receive that perspective, to sit with discomfort and approach it with curiosity rather than judgment, is what separates people who grow from people who stay stuck. You can hire the best coach in the world and learn nothing if you’re not ready to be coached.