What my coaching is built on.
The manifesto says how I coach. These are the six ideas underneath it: three about the person, three about the body.
Training is a vehicle for self-mastery
Most athletes don’t struggle for lack of discipline. They’ve learned to equate effort with worth, fatigue with progress, and suffering with seriousness. Done well, training exposes the patterns underneath: impatience, avoidance, control. Working on those is the job, and the principles carry well beyond sport.
In practice: patience and restraint are skills you train, not personality traits.
Feedback should increase autonomy, not dependence
My job isn’t to make every decision for you. It’s to teach you how training actually works, so you can make better decisions when things are uncertain. Part of coaching is knowing when not to adjust the plan, and being clear about why.
In practice: when I change something, or choose not to, you hear the reason, so you can make the next call when you need to.
Consistency matters more than motivation
I can’t do much until you’re consistent. Even when you can’t control what’s going on, there are choices that keep you healthy. Staying healthy keeps you consistent, consistency builds confidence, and confidence facilitates performance. The fulfillment comes from commitment, not intensity.
In practice: when sessions start slipping, the goal is to find the rhythm again: a shorter session, or sometimes a full day off to reset.
Adaptation requires exposure to a broad spectrum of speeds, forces, and efforts
The body adapts to the range of work it’s exposed to, whether or not the athlete believes it.
In practice: if every day feels hard, nothing is hard enough to matter.
The body can only absorb a limited number of true quality stimuli per week
Fitness doesn’t come from the stress itself. It comes from absorbing it, and that happens later: you feel a session right away, but the adaptation comes after. So a week holds no more than three true quality days, and the days around them are planned to protect them. Good plans don’t avoid fatigue; they schedule it.
In practice: a session is judged by whether you can show up for the next one, not by how tired it left you.
Training is dose management across the three M’s: musculoskeletal, metabolic, mental
Every session draws on all three: your muscles, tendons and bones; your energy systems; and your head. I aim for the minimal effective dose. Fatigue builds quietly across all three, so the athlete who waits until they feel run down before backing off is already late.
I think of load as a budget: a daily allowance inside the week and the month. Overspend and it goes on credit, and the currency is fatigue: the balance grows with interest until recovery pays it down. The older the athlete, the higher the interest rate. And the budget is yours alone: it depends on your training age, your life stress and your recovery, not on what someone else can do.
In practice: on an aerobic day, your heart rate ceiling is the limit. Under it, slower still counts.
My role as a coach is not to extract more from you. It’s to protect you long enough for progress to emerge.