The Questions a Good Coach Actually Asks
Most people who walk into a gym with a coach have already answered the first question before they arrive. They want to lose weight. They want to build muscle. They want to look better. The answer feels specific enough to act on, and most coaches act on it immediately—they write a programme, they start the sessions, they deliver what was asked for.
This is where bad coaching begins.
Not because the goal is wrong, but because the goal that was stated and the goal that was meant are rarely the same thing. When someone says they want bigger muscles, what they are usually describing is a feeling—more masculine, more capable, more comfortable in their own body. When someone says they want to lose weight, they are usually describing a version of themselves that moves through the world differently. The words are a rough approximation of something they haven't fully articulated yet, because most people don't have the vocabulary or the abstract depth to express what they actually want. They give you the nearest available shorthand and hope you understand.
A good coach understands what they want—not what they say.
In practice, this changes everything. Someone who wants to look better—more masculine, more defined—is almost never best served by starting a muscle-building phase. Not if they're carrying excess body fat and years of poor posture. What they need first is to lean out and build the structural foundation that makes muscle visible and functional. Six months of the right work, and they are standing differently, moving differently, looking in the mirror at something that resembles what they described. That is the right starting point for building muscle. Not the other way around. The coach who simply programmes what was asked for—mass building on a body that isn't ready for it—is giving the client what they said, and failing them with it.
This is also where most coaching fails at a deeper level. The circuit sessions that are fun and varied and go nowhere. The programmes that keep clients coming back without giving them the tools to continue on their own. The dependency that gets built not through expertise but through entertainment. People get a handful of moments in their lives where clarity arrives and they can see a different direction. Those moments are rare and they are serious. A person who spends one of those moments with someone who is selling them a concept rather than teaching them a process has lost something they may not recover.
A good coach uses those moments differently. In the early sessions, the work is physical—but the real work is learning to hear what someone is actually asking for beneath what they say. Over time, it goes deeper: what drives them, what they are afraid of, what they want their life to look like when the training starts to compound into something larger than fitness. The body is the entry point. The rest of the person is what you're actually working with.
The question a good coach asks is not "what do you want?" Anyone can ask that. The question is: what would it mean for you if you got it—and is that what you're actually chasing?
That answer takes time to find. It is worth finding.
Until next time,
Scott and Lennart