I know this may be sacrilege here, but here goes. I’d like to try a real person coach for a while. I’ve never been coached before but have been stagnating using apps and coaching myself. I think now is a perfect time to start to be race ready next summer. But I have no clue where to start looking for a coach or even what I should look for.
I’ve been racing for 4 years or so, mainly crits, and some CX in the fall. Only a few points away from my cat 2 road upgrade, so I’m not a top racer but decent enough and I’d be happy to push up into the higher cat this year.
you’re on reddit, i believe, don’t you follow the teachings of our lord and savior 347 on r/velo? (that’s me btw) but also I highly value Rory and Kolie with empirical cycling and would trust them wholeheartedly and of course kurt here is excellent as well
i charge $50 a month, i only have one client at the moment lol if it was just about price I’d be loaded with clients! people trust kolie for good reason and if they feel he’s the one to help them achieve their goals, cool. i know kolie and i know he cuts deals for a variety of people, including students
Figure out your budget, your goals, how long you’d like to have a coach for and start doing some research. When I took the plunge I had a goal event in mind, a budget and some things I wanted to achieve along the way. I picked a company, did some research, and picked a coach. After onboarding, I’d be communicating with my coach every so often and we plan things out roughly a month in advance. I was fortunate to find somebody that I gelled with pretty well and I felt like it was money well spent. I advise you to figure those things out and see who you find and connect with.
You need to interview some coaches make sure they will give you what you want out of coaching. Some are great at communicating, some are not. ie i had one that never looked at my workout feedback until the day of our phone consult….yeah bud, im paying you to be a coach, not a monthly plan maker.
Also, just be aware that there are a huge amount of inexperienced coaches out there that all charge like $300 a month-often they are part of the bigger coaching companies. Just do your homework and make sure they know what they are doing, mistakes are expensive.
It’s definitely worth a try. I think it depends a lot on your personality and how you click with the coach. IMO, you can do a very good technical job self coaching and with apps, and a coach can provide basically the same thing, but the difference comes with adapting plans and workouts to your psychology and varying state of mind. Also, for many, it helps their motivation to have somebody else they’re answerable to helping them adhere to plans in situations where they might otherwise flag.
Here are a few things, I would consider important:
Figure out why you want a coach? Is it your lack of knowledge, for accountability or something else? Compared to self-coaching, what are you missing?
Your relationship needs to be based on mutual trust. That means if your coach tells you to do X and you second-guess them or you do Y, it is a waste of money and time.
Different people with different personalities need different coaches. E. g. are you a data-driven person who always wants to understand the why? Or do you want more emphasis on simply “being told what to do”?
I’d talk to the coach and pick a few (2, 3) concrete aspects for improvement. E. g. if the two of you determine, you should work on your nutrition, then focus on that and give it time.
Once you get into the groove, coaching should look simple, almost as if you could do it yourself
From my experience, I’d be skeptical if the coach just has a single training philosophy that they try to replicate with everyone (e. g. polarized vs. sweet spot). The basics of structured training (periodization, progressive overload, etc.) will ultimately be at least an order of magnitude more important than whether you do your rest intervals at 40 % FTP or 50 % FTP. Some flexibility in how you implement these key principles would be a plus for me.
Great riders need not be great coaches. (Just look at any sport, only a few top players became good coaches. And some coaches never made it as a player in their chosen sport.)
The first reputable place I’d try if I were you is FasCat Coaching. Their human-powered coaches start at around $200/month. Prices can be much higher. If you want to support the forum community, @kurt.braeckel would definitely be someone I’d pm first, though. (I think I owe him a check from all the advice I have received from him over the years.)
Where I started - pay a coach for a detailed assessment of / consultation on your training data and training history and for them to make a 1-time recommendation and training plan for you. Realized it was a fit, immediately transitioned into one on one coaching.
Do your research for experience here, mixed bag. Certainly some with good experience, and some with minimal experience. Worked with one, and know some outside of coaching, one of which is not worth $200 a month. People have to start somewhere, so if they are doing solid mentoring , maybe it all good. But i dont know how much internal training/mentorship they do.
All of the above? I’ve hit a plateau and don’t think it’s my genetic limit, more so my training. I also wouldn’t mind having somebody keeping me accountable and on track. I’m finally in a spot financially as well that I can afford coaching and since coaching myself hasn’t been getting me faster, I say why not try it?
You misunderstood what I wanted to say. I wanted to you to prioritize and ask what area is the one that holds you back the most. You cannot “focus on everything”.
Why prioritize? Those things aren’t mutually exclusive. I can want somebody more knowledgeable than me AND get accountability. One doesn’t preclude the other.
$200/month is really the lower limit for a coach I’d say, unless they are doing this (partially) as a hobby or are located in a lower-cost-of-living place. So variability is to be expected. The advantage of a reputable place like FasCat Coaching is that you can change coaches and/or appeal to the higher-ups if things go awry. FasCat Coaching also has higher tiers where surely the coach’s experience and time budget increases accordingly.
For comparison, the team captain of my Japanese team paid about $700/month and the former World Tour Pro that did my last bike fit took $150/hour.
I imagine they’d have to in order to ensure quality.
Mentoring people is a core part of my job and I have briefly coached someone, too. Focussing and prioritizing is a key aspect of mentoring/coaching someone effectively. It is very easy to lose track if you have to pay attention to more than two things at a time.
Moreover, it will be illuminating if you go to the coach and tell them what you think your number one problem is, and compare that with their assessment. Even and especially if the two disagree. A few years back, I had problems with my weak (right) knee and went to a physiotherapist. I asked “What are we going to do about my knee?” He asked me to walk up and down in front of a mirror, and then said “We have to work on your shoulders.” Turns out, my shoulders were asymmetrically loading my spine (likely due to a cycling accident), which placed asymmetric loads on my knees.
Point being, what you think is important/wrong need not be what actually is important/wrong. In your case, one question I’d ask that is not on your list is race craft. That is something no online platform can help you with.
For almost everyone but a small group of people, your life places the limits on your training, not your genetic potential.
That makes sense. But I still don’t get why I should prioritize more training knowledge vs accountability like you stated. I don’t see those as mutually exclusive. I think I can get both with a real person coach, unless I’m missing something. I want a coach because I haven’t improved in the past few years, and thought that somebody with more training knowledge could give me some insight, along with keeping me more accountable than just myself. I thought those things work together, rather than needing to prioritize one of those over the other.
