WHAT'S MEASURED IS MANAGED - ASKING BETTER QUESTIONS

By James Macintosh

James is an ex powerlifter, online coach, educator and Pre-Script coach. He believes that education is not just theory but, more importantly, applying what we are taught. James takes a detailed approach to the art of coaching by facilitating conversations to improve communication, programming and training protocols for coaches to develop their services.

What’s measured is managed, but more importantly, Asking better questions of what we are measuring.

We all know that there’s so much more to coaching than giving someone a spreadsheet. 

As a coach in this day and age, we get told we have to consider biofeedback markers and performance metrics when assessing clients’ progress within their micro/macrocycles. This “full system” approach to evaluating and understanding the body can be vitally important in our decision making when writing programs to align with your client’s goals. BUT if we aren’t able to ask better questions about these biofeedback markers, what’s the point? 

Take sleep, for example; even if you don’t “formally” assess your client’s biofeedback, it’s usually the one that comes up the most. “Hey (Insert client’s name), How are you going? How did you sleep last night?”  Is one of the most said phrases on any gym floor. 

BUT we should be asking better questions with regards to this sleep metric. Our sleep patterns can help us understand what’s happening to the body if we know what we are looking for and can ask our clients the right questions. 

One of the first questions we should be asking is, did you sleep through the night? And if you did wake, what were those times? Start to track these, looking for any trends. 

It seems like a simply asked and answered question, and usually clients take no notice of it, but it can highlight some essential health information for us. If we see a trend of waking between 1 am and 3 am, it could mean that we have something going on in the liver as it’s dumping glucose into the bloodstream, which could wake us up. This could mean we need to look into our client’s glucose management. 

This has nothing to do with programming for your client, but it has everything to do with coaching your clients. 

Start looking to ask better questions of your biofeedback markers to allow you to make more informed decisions for your clients.