This past weekend, Carissa, Mary, and I attended the Perform Better Functional Training Summit in Providence, RI.
Each year, Perform Better brings together some of the brightest minds and most experienced coaches in the health and fitness industry. The presenters lecture, teach, and then put those ideas into hands-on practice to help coaches improve their knowledge, skills, client results, and businesses.
Across different presentations and areas of the industry, a few themes kept showing up.
1. Progress comes from doing the basics well – over and over again.
Sarah Fischer-Reynolds gave a great presentation titled “Deep Health: The Secrets To Battling Client Burnout & Managing Chronic Stress.” Don Saladino presented “Coaching The Human, Not The Algorithm: Modern Strategies To Optimize Body Composition.”
Their messages were very similar. Sarah summarized hers with her gym’s Rule Of 8s:
- 8 out of 10 training intensity
- 80% diet compliance
- 8,000 steps
- 8 hours of sleep
- 8 out of 10 happiness
- 8 glasses of water
No quick fixes, hacks, or supplements needed. The basics, done consistently, will help people make progress toward almost any goal – from fat loss to performance.
It’s common to get distracted by supplements, red light therapy, saunas, cold plunges, and peptides. None of these things can compensate for neglecting the fundamentals.
If you’re mowing your lawn when your house is on fire, you’re focusing on the wrong thing.
2. If you’re not focusing on sleep, start there.
Robert Yang’s presentation, “Sleep Is Good Medicine,” paired well with Sarah’s emphasis on sleep.
Here are some things that may be interfering with yours:
- Getting less than 7 hours of sleep per night
- Drinking alcohol, any amount
- Blue light from phones, laptops, TV, etc. less than one hour before bed
- Eating less than 3 hours before bed
- Fasting until lunch (or after)
- Drinking caffeine on an empty stomach, or drinking too much caffeine
- There’s more…
If you said yes to all of those, which one would be the easiest to change?
These choices may seem insignificant, but together they can create a cumulative drain that affects not only how you feel throughout the day, but also the quality of your sleep.
We’ve written about the importance of sleep multiple times before, but it’s worth repeating: sleep is free. Before reaching for supplements or energy drinks to help you perform, consider improving your sleep first.
3. Having a coach is about more than accountability.
Nick Winkleman is one of the best presenters I’ve ever witnessed. His presentation “The Language of Coaching 2.0” was superb.
Nick focused on cueing and how coaches communicate to help athletes get the most from an exercise. He discussed internal cues, external cues, and analogies.
This might seem irrelevant if you’re someone who exercises on their own. However, it got me thinking about how much people miss by viewing coaching as nothing more than accountability.
A good coach doesn’t just make sure you show up. They watch, listen, learn how you respond, and communicate in a way that helps you experience movement differently.
For example, Nick used sprinting out of the gate:
“Extend your knees back as fast as you can?” (internal)
“Push the ground away as hard as you can?” (external)
“Pretend a rattlesnake is at your heels. Don’t let it bite you?” (analogy)
The better a coach knows you, the better they can communicate with you and help you get more out of the movement.
That’s one of the real values of coaching: having someone who can see what you can’t, give you feedback in real time, and help you get more out of what you’re doing.
That’s something you simply can’t get from a program on a screen alone.
If you’re going to invest your time and energy into becoming stronger, more capable, and healthier, having the right coach can make that investment go much further.
There were more than 40 presentations from over 20 presenters. The topics were diverse, but the same messages kept coming through: do the things that matter most, be willing to do those things consistently, and you can get better at those things with the right guidance.
That’s what good coaching should do: help you focus on what matters, help you execute it better, and help you stay with it long enough to see the results.