“Personalized coaching.”
I’m not sure there’s a coach or coaching company out there that doesn’t make some version of this claim. We certainly do at QT2 Systems. Personalized training. Individualized training. Coaching built around you. Your goals. Your life. Your physiology.
All good stuff.
But, what happens when the athlete asks the next logical question?
“How?”
How, exactly, is your coaching personalized?
Given the claim, it’s a pretty reasonable question - and one I think every coach should be prepared to answer.
Different weekly training hours, workouts, or training zones? Moving a workout from Tuesday to Wednesday because of a work meeting? Sure, those things can all be part of personalized coaching, but that can’t be the extent of what personalized coaching really means. There has to be something deeper to it.
At QT2, we have a standard that I come back to over and over again with our coaches: At any moment, you should be able to explain to your athlete why they are doing what they are doing when they are doing it.
The athlete doesn’t necessarily need, or even want, the explanation every time. Some athletes want to understand everything. Others trust their coach and the process - tell them what to do, and they will go do it.
Both are perfectly okay, but the coach needs to know which approach works best for the athlete in front of them. To me, that awareness is where personalized coaching really begins.
Developing a Framework
I’ve been coaching endurance athletes for over two decades, and one of my most common answers to coaching questions is...“It depends.”
Should an athlete work on threshold or VO2 max?
It depends.
Should we increase volume or intensity?
It depends.
Should this athlete be doing more bike work? More run work? More swimming?
It depends.
This can sound like a cop-out. And for some, it might be.
But there is a big difference between saying “it depends” because you don’t know the answer and saying “it depends” because you know what factors might impact your answer.
A decision-making framework doesn’t necessarily give you the same answer every time. In fact, I would argue that a good one probably shouldn’t. What it should give you is a consistent way of arriving at an answer.
And before you can build a useful decision-making framework, you have to know what you believe.
1. Develop Your Belief System
Before there was a QT2 decision-making framework, there had to be a set of things that we believed to be true. What do we want for our athletes? What do we believe actually makes them better? What are we trying to protect? What kinds of things are we willing to sacrifice in order to protect those priorities?
Try this - define your core beliefs
- Name your outcome: Beyond “getting fitter” or “getting faster,” how do you define success for your athletes?
- Name the mechanism: What training behavior will bring that outcome?
- Name the requirement: What environment or mindset is needed for the mechanism to work?
How We Apply This at QT2 Systems
At QT2 Systems, one of the most foundational answers to that exercise is Consistency + Patience. Consistency is the mechanism. Patience allows the mechanism enough time to work.
“Consistency is king” isn’t exactly earth-shattering stuff, I know. You’ll find some version of it on just about any endurance coaching website.
But, again...What does that actually mean?
To me, fitness is compounding. Fitness begets fitness, begets fitness. I think of it a lot like a 401(k). Saving for retirement doesn’t usually happen because somebody occasionally stumbles across a massive pile of money and dumps it into an account. It happens through relatively small deposits that fit within the framework of a person’s life, over and over again, for a very long time.
And then those deposits are allowed to compound.
Training works much the same way.
The athlete becomes what they habitually do.
If they habitually train appropriately, recover, come back, train again, and repeat that process over a long period of time, we tend to get pretty good outcomes.
But “habitually” cuts both ways.
If the athlete is habitually sore, habitually unmotivated, habitually dealing with little injuries, or habitually missing workouts because the training doesn’t fit into their life, those things become information. They are not just isolated inconveniences. When they keep happening, they are telling us something about the system we have created for that athlete.
This belief guides our coaching decisions at QT2 Systems, and it’s why we will almost always protect consistency over chasing what might look like the physiologically “perfect” workout. The best training in the world isn’t particularly useful if you can’t do it with any kind of consistency.
And if we find ourselves constantly backing off the “ideal” physiological approach in order to preserve consistency, that tells us something, too. The training load, or the expectations surrounding it, are probably inconsistent with what the athlete can actually hold and maintain. The training load is exceeding the athlete’s overall stress budget.
Consistency is king, but consistency works most effectively when it is built around appropriate training modalities and appropriate training dosage. Doing the right kinds of things, in the right kinds of ways, consistently, is where we get tremendous return on training investment.
Patience lives here, too.
I have used this quote by Arnold Glasow for 30 years: “The key to everything is patience. You get the chicken by hatching the egg, not by smashing it.”
You can’t accelerate the process by smashing the egg. You just end up without the chicken.
The same thing happens in training. Fitness that is not particularly strong today can become very strong if it is given enough appropriate work and enough time. But we have to allow the process to happen.
This doesn’t mean patience is passive. We still test. We still evaluate. We still make decisions. We just don’t mistake the absence of immediate visible progress for evidence that the process has failed.
Consistency is the mechanism. Patience allows the mechanism enough time to work.
So, what’s your belief system?
2. Determine Which Dials to Turn
Once you know your beliefs, the next step is figuring out how they will impact your daily coaching decisions.
For instance, I know I want to help my athletes train consistently, but consistently doing what?
I think of athletes as having a whole bunch of dials that we can potentially turn: aerobic capacity, aerobic sustainability, durability, strength, technical skills, pacing, fueling, position, confidence, and on, and on, and on...
Our job is to figure out which dial, or dials, offer the greatest opportunity.
But - and I think this is important - the greatest weakness is not necessarily the greatest opportunity. And the greatest opportunity is not necessarily the best investment.
Let’s say we have a triathlete who really struggles in the water. There is tremendous room for improvement. Swim more. Get better.
Now let’s say that athlete lives 60 minutes from the nearest pool. Every swim requires a two-hour round trip before we even account for actually swimming.
Is swimming still the lowest-hanging fruit?
Maybe. But maybe not. Again, it depends.
The potential magnitude of improvement matters. So does the likelihood that we can produce that improvement. And so does the total cost required to pursue it.
Training effort matters. Time matters. Recovery matters. Injury risk matters. Logistics matter. The athlete’s life matters.
If two opportunities are relatively similar, athlete preference can matter, too. If the athlete is excited to work on one and dreads the other, that may affect buy-in and, ultimately, the likelihood that the training produces the adaptation we expect.
In my mind, this all rolls up into what we refer to at QT2 as Return on Training Investment, or ROTI.
Of all the things we could improve, where can we get the most meaningful return for the resources this athlete can realistically invest right now?
The lowest-hanging fruit is the meaningful opportunity that is most accessible to this athlete. It is not necessarily their greatest weakness.
Try this - calculate the ROTI
Before prescribing a new training focus or rushing to fix an obvious weakness, ask yourself:
- What is the potential magnitude of improvement?
- What is the likelihood we can produce that improvement given the athlete’s current skill, physiology, environment, and level of buy-in?
- What is the total cost required to pursue it - training effort, recovery, time, injury risk, logistics, and the athlete’s life?
This isn’t a literal equation. It is a way of forcing ourselves to look beyond the obvious weakness and ask whether that weakness is actually the best use of the athlete’s finite training resources right now.
3. Balance Physiology with Practicality
Naturally, some of those dials are physiological, and this is where testing comes into play.
Interestingly, I am less interested in testing as a report card than I am in testing as a decision-making tool.
Did the athlete get fitter? Sure, I want to know that.
But that is almost a secondary consequence of what I really want from the data. I want to understand where the athlete is now. What is their aerobic sustainability? What is their aerobic capacity? How do those things relate to one another? What does that relationship tell us about where the greatest physiological opportunity may exist?
This is why I think of testing as looking under the hood.
At QT2, we use field testing because it gives us a relatively simple, repeatable way to get those glimpses into an athlete’s current state. The testing itself may not be easy physically, but it is logistically simple enough that we can do it regularly.
Assuming the data are valid, testing gives us a current physiological context. It helps us identify developmental opportunities. It helps us establish appropriate training intensities across the energy systems. And, yes, over time it also lets us see whether something changed.
But a test does not have to show improvement to be valuable. If it gives us a valid look at where the athlete is today, it has done something useful.
Testing helps tell us where we would like to go. The athlete’s practical context tells us whether or not we can go there now.
Let’s say I am coaching someone who wants to perform better in mountain biking. Testing tells me there is a tremendous opportunity to develop their Critical Power.
There’s just one problem: the athlete is relatively new to mountain biking, and their technical skills don’t support their ability to use more fitness on the trails. Because they struggle with bike handling on technical terrain, they are unable to effectively express the fitness they already possess.
Do we spend our available training resources raising Critical Power if it comes at the expense of time spent improving those technical skills?
Probably not.
It doesn’t really matter how fit the athlete is if they can’t express that fitness in the environment in which they want to perform. So we work on riding the mountain bike first.
The physiological need tells us where we would like to go. The practical context tells us whether we can go there now.
And “practical” can mean just about anything: durability, injury risk, fueling, pacing, physical resilience, emotional stability, rest and recovery, technical skill, life stress, environmental readiness, psychological readiness, or the ability to execute important skills under the stress of intensity.
Try this - find the burnt-out bulb
I think of an athlete’s development like an old-school string of Christmas lights wired in series. If one bulb goes out, everything downstream goes dark. Our job is to find that bulb.
- Identify the goal: What does testing or performance data tell us about the athlete’s physiological opportunities?
- Check the blockers: What practical constraint could prevent the athlete from developing or expressing that adaptation?
- Prioritize the blocker: If that practical constraint sits upstream of the physiological goal, fix it first. Until that bulb works, adding more power to the other bulbs doesn’t light up the wire.
Before asking what physiological adaptation would make the athlete better, it is worth asking whether anything upstream could prevent the athlete from developing or expressing that adaptation.
The Attic
There is another way I think about the physiological side of this, borrowing from a model I learned from Dr. Phil Skiba.
Think of the athlete’s power or speed at VO2 max as the roof of a house. Their aerobic sustainability, represented by Critical Power or Critical Speed, is the ceiling. The space between the ceiling and the roof is the attic.
The size of that attic matters.
If the attic is very small, the athlete is already sustaining a high percentage of their aerobic capacity. There may not be much room left to raise the ceiling without first raising the roof. In that case, increasing aerobic capacity may offer the better opportunity.
If the attic is enormous, the athlete may have plenty of aerobic capacity but be unable to sustain enough of it. Now the better opportunity may be to raise the ceiling and close that attic space.
And sometimes the attic is pretty normal. Depending on the time of year, we may work on moving the roof and ceiling together. As the athlete gets closer to an important race, we may care more about closing the attic and maximizing how much of their existing aerobic capacity they can sustainably use.
The point isn’t that every athlete needs to fit neatly into a house analogy. The point is that aerobic capacity and aerobic sustainability have to be understood relative to one another if we want to know where the meaningful physiological opportunity exists.
4. Stop Carpet Bombing Your Training Plans
Without this kind of decision-making, endurance training can very easily turn into a carpet-bombing approach.
Do a little bit of everything: threshold, VO2 max, tempo, long stuff, short stuff, strength, speed.
Drop enough bombs and you are bound to hit something.
To be fair, this method can work. The issue is efficiency.
Some of those bombs are landing in places where there isn’t much left to accomplish. Meanwhile, another area may offer a tremendous opportunity for development, given adequate attention.
Training resources are finite. Time is finite. Recovery capacity is finite. The athlete’s ability to absorb stress is finite.
That does not mean every minute of training has to be precision-targeted. At QT2, a large majority of training stress is still relatively broad aerobic work. Roughly 75 to 80 percent occurs below LT1. Another relatively small portion falls between LT1 and what we call the Oxidative-Glycolytic Crossover, or OGC. That broad aerobic foundation matters.
But then there is the targeted developmental stress. That is where precision becomes particularly important. We are trying to use that portion of the athlete’s available training resources to address the physiological limiter that actually offers the meaningful opportunity.
You don’t need to individualize everything in order to individualize the things that matter.
So, if we have the ability to better understand where the opportunity exists, why wouldn’t we direct more of our available resources there?
Try this - run a training session audit
Look at an athlete’s prescribed training for the upcoming week. Pick a high-intensity session and replace your default question with a more precise one.
- Scrap: “Is threshold training good?”
- Ask: “Why is threshold training the best use of this athlete’s training resources right now?”
Those are two very different questions.
The first asks whether a training modality can improve endurance performance. Lots of things can improve endurance performance.
The second asks whether that modality represents the best use of this athlete’s finite resources at this particular moment.
If you can’t answer the second question with a defensible reason - why they are doing what they are doing when they are doing it - it might be time to scrap the session and adjust the plan.
That is a coaching question.
Taking Personalized Coaching from Buzzword to Action
Which brings me back to where we started.
Two athletes can have remarkably similar physiologies. They might even end up doing remarkably similar workouts on a given day.
That does not mean the coaching isn’t personalized.
Individualized coaching does not mean every athlete needs different training.
It means every athlete deserves individualized consideration, and an individualized reason for why they are doing the training they are doing.
Maybe two athletes have the same physiological needs, but one has an injury history that changes the decision.
Maybe one can sleep nine hours each night and the other has a newborn.
Maybe one loves swimming and the other lives 60 minutes from the pool.
Maybe one is six weeks from their most important race of the year.
Maybe one has the fitness to race a mountain bike quickly but not yet the technical ability to express it.
Maybe they really do need the same thing.
Again, it depends.
But with a belief system in place, you can move past “it depends.” There is a big difference between not knowing the answer and knowing what the answer depends upon.
Individualization does not require inventing a different training methodology for every athlete. It requires applying a consistent methodology through the context of the individual athlete.
That is an important distinction.
A belief system should provide structure to our thinking. A methodology can grow from it. Decision-making frameworks can grow from that methodology. Data can inform those frameworks. But, in the end, the coach still has to coach.
The framework gives us information. The athlete gives us context. The coach makes the decision.
And the coach should be able to explain it.
The Athlete and the Why
There is another part of this that I think matters.
The coach should always know the why. The athlete should always have access to the why. How much of the why the athlete actually wants or needs is individualized.
Some athletes want to know everything. They want to understand the physiology, the progression, the reason one block follows another, and what the coach saw in their testing that led to a particular decision.
Other athletes don’t want any of that. They trust the coach. They want to know what to do, when to do it, and maybe how hard it should feel.
I don’t think either athlete is wrong.
The responsibility of the coach is to be able to provide the explanation and to understand the athlete well enough to know how much explanation is useful.
When athletes do want to understand the why, I think that understanding can be tremendously valuable. It can improve buy-in. It can strengthen belief in the process. And it can make the conversations much better when training does not go according to plan.
But the athlete saying, “I don’t know. I just trust my coach,” is not necessarily a red flag.
The coach saying, “I don’t know why we’re doing this,” is.
So, How?
The next time an athlete asks you, “How is my plan personalized?”, be ready to answer.
- What do you believe actually makes an endurance athlete better?
- What are you trying to protect above almost everything else?
- When two perfectly reasonable training choices compete with one another, how do you decide between them?
- What information do you need in order to understand where this athlete is physiologically?
- What practical information about the athlete could cause you to override what the physiology suggests?
- How do you decide which available opportunity offers the greatest return on this athlete’s finite training resources?
- And, maybe most importantly, can you explain why they are doing what they are doing when they are doing it?
Your belief system does not need to give you every answer. I don’t think it should.
What it should give you is a defensible way of arriving at one.
So, yes...personalized coaching.
But, how?
