I’ve been spending some time recently thinking about your journey. When I say you, I mean all the different people I have spent significant time helping, and their respective journeys. It’s your unique journey, but to generalize it from a coaching perspective, we call it the “client lifecycle,” which captures the many different starting points and goals people have, and end points where either you have fully realized your goal, or feel empowered enough to train and live healthfully with more independence going forward.
I have been thinking about this a lot because my goal is to help as many people as possible become functionally healthy and independent for a long time: Functional Longevity. It’s become more clear to me that setting this as part of your big picture goal from the start changes the way I coach and interact with you. The simplest metaphor is the fishing analogy: rather than catching fish “for you” (live coaching where you just show up and do the plan without knowing how it all works), or even demonstrating how to catch a fish (live coaching w/ educational lessons), we spend more time setting you up to fish for yourself (live coaching w/ educational lessons that empower you to taper off into more independent study), with your coach as a guide.
Long story short, a ballpark figure that is often used for how long is long enough to make an impact in your life is… 2 years. This is considered a “good” number. However, this usually comes from a client interest or attention span perspective (called average Length of Engagement or LEG in business terms), as in I can keep you interested and engaged by teaching you new things constantly for about 2 years.
And because that’s such a long time relative to most peoples’ health and fitness goals, for sure we have enough time to make significant progress towards them in that time. But it won’t necessarily bring you closer to independence.
So what if we just went by the mission, i.e. Functional Independence? I think that, with intention, we can give you enough to achieve that in much less time in most cases. But like many things in life, it depends a lot on where you start.
I like to use the extremes as learning tools here. If you came from an athlete family, say your Mom and Dad were former collegiate athletes and you had lots of sports and healthy habits exposure in early childhood: you may need relatively little coaching from me to be on your way to the healthy lifestyle you want, and fitness becomes mostly this interesting pursuit or hobby. You opt in, opt out, climb mountains, play sports, etc. You only need a coach’s help in this instance if you want to excel, have an injury or setback, or to learn something your prior experience doesn’t lend itself towards (e.g. making a very polar switch from Golf to Snowboarding). Sounds like a good place to be. I wish everyone had this kind of start in life, honestly. I could see a 3-12 month journey for a young athlete to become roughly independent in a new discipline, but again it’s all optional anyway since they already have good health habits.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have people who come from stories where, for a broad spectrum of reasons and causes, health and fitness were not habitual parts of your lifestyle, and perhaps even dysfunction reigned for a time (or still does). Having time, support, and resources to exercise, eat healthfully, get educated, and even to rest are unfortunately a privilege (in the USA anyway), not a basic human right. You could sum up Zen as basically an understanding that we all exist on multiple intersecting spectra of privileges/advantages and disprivileges/disadvantages, and to coach *you* is to recognize how they all intersect as related to your goals. This is sometimes referred to as the causal web, or simply karma. And that is not simply to say that “bad things happened and are all bad” exclusively, as your scars and trauma can also be a source of immense strength. Strength or “grit” that a privileged life would not provide. All the good things that happened also make you who you are.
Nevertheless, it will likely take more consistent work to achieve functional independence from this starting point. Though not vastly more, as with the goal of you becoming skilled *enough* to fish for yourself, the number of things you need to learn are finite, and even with a complex past, we can still create your amazing future in a matter of months. I think a 12-month journey for most people is enough, if from the outset we agree on independence being part of the big picture goal.
The basics of Functional Independence are:
- Learning how to show up for yourself consistently: establishing healthful habits, like exercise (regardless of which type), as routine parts of your life. This is the big one. It will probably include learning how to “say no” to some old habits that don’t serve you, and creating healthy boundaries in your professional and personal life
- Learning how to Squat and Deadlift safely and effectively. Everyone’s gotta do this!
- Learning how to maintain a constant movement practice even while traveling, i.e. if all the tools you are used to having are not available for a period of time, how do you stay engaged with your body in healthful ways?
- Learning how to talk to yourself in constructive ways
- Learning how to solve your chronic and/or varying muscle and joint pains with simple tools
- Learning what appropriate intensity levels for different exercises look and feel like
- Learning what quality sleep and recovery practices look and feel like
- Learning how to make intuitive healthful food choices in varying circumstances (e.g. at-home vs. traveling)
- Learning how to best interface with the healthcare system
- Learning how to deal with a setback
- Learning how to reboot after a setback
- Learning what resources are available to you to get additional help when you need it (despite your baseline independence)
12 months… We can do it! As you can see, there is more to independence than whatever your current specific goal is (weight loss, blood sugar control, reduce pain, new skills, strength/longevity gains, etc.). But it is when we see the full picture together that we can do our best work.
Coach Mauricio