What experience do you have coaching cyclists at my level?
Everyone wants a qualified and experienced coach. But the thing that’s most valuable is when the coach has already had clients similar to you. Similar doesn’t just mean your VO2max and other performance metrics, it means your preferred type of races, your amount of time for training, your age, your work and family constraints, and your athletic aspirations.
This question also reveals how good this coach is about asking you questions and getting to know you. If you have to do all the heavy lifting here, it may be a bad sign.
What does your coaching process look like?
Understanding how a coach works with their clients is important to assess whether their approach matches your preferences and expectations. This question is a bit too broad to get a full picture. So, depending on the answer, you may want to follow up with several more to get specific.
- Will you create my workouts?
- Can you help me with things like nutrition or stress management?
- What is your experience with race preparation?
- What time commitment is expected of me?
- What tools, apps, platforms, and equipment do you expect clients to use?
- How often will we communicate, and how do you provide feedback?
- Do you do in-person training sessions, group rides or training camps?
How do you measure progress?
Can you expect measurements of lactate production and muscle oxygen monitoring during training? Or is it more about tracking power, training volume, and body composition? Or is it simply about your performance in races? Does the enjoyment of cycling factor into this?
The way your coach looks at and measures progress should align with your goals and values, otherwise you may feel like you’re not being pushed enough or, on the other hand, you’re losing touch with the fun side of cycling.
How do you handle unexpected changes to the training plan?
It’s normal for your training motivation to fluctuate throughout the year. It’s also normal to encounter unforeseen events such as injury, illness, work travel or sudden life changes. All of these can lead to you not being able to follow the plan as prescribed.
It can be very revealing to ask the coach how are they going to handle this situation. You will find out how flexible they can be. And even more importantly, you will see whether they would address these situations with empathy, understanding, and practical strategies or with frustration, blaming or even anger.
Do you have any past or current clients I can talk to?
The only way to get a third-party opinion about a coach before starting to work with them is to talk to their clients. A coach who’s organised and effective should have no problem providing references or connecting you with past clients.
If there’s something that caught your attention when talking to the coach, you can verify this when talking to a past client. Or you can simply ask them for something they really liked and really disliked about working with this coach.
