Once in a while, the opposition between Evidence-based vs Belief-based coaching comes up, in reference to an Internet article from Dr. Rushall. However, whenever I hear about this, I always think of the following definitions:
Belief-based coaches:
These are the coaches you are supposed to believe that they’re good coaches.
You go into their websites and click on the “About Us” link. Some of them will tell you how good of an athlete the coach is, which is strange because people that visit the site are not triathlon team managers or marketing agents, they’re not looking for an athlete, they are looking for a coach. So with that information at hand we’re supposed to believe that they’re good coaches.
Others will tell you that they’re “elite coaches”. You dig a little deeper in the site, but there’s no mention of they ever working as an elite coach, for example as the national coach for some country. Or that they have some kind of high-level coaching certification. Or that they have worked with (real) elite athletes. They’ve only been coaching for less than 5 years, amazing progression to get to elite level. No, we’re just supposed to believe that they’re good coaches.
There are also the McDonalds-type coaches: Millions served! More than one coaching service prides themselves of having helped “hundreds of athletes” throughout the years. However, if you do some quick math, and knowing for how long the service has been in business, either the coaches have at one time close to one hundred athletes or the “hundreds of athletes” were more like “dozens of athletes". But… we’re supposed to believe that they’re good coaches.
Another kind are the “scientists”. They have pseudo-science articles on their website, where they have the right references but the wrong extrapolations to training, often twisting the conclusions stated in the paper to fit their particular view. If there’s one paper that supports their view and 10 papers that refutes it, we know what paper will be quoted. Through the use of pseudo-science lingo, they want us to believe that they’re good coaches.
Finally, we have the guru-type coaches. They read a Zen book sometime in their life and they’ve developed their own Zen approach to triathlon. They use half-words to describe everything, not wanting to risk being wrong. They say things like “the way you train is not important (but just in case, do what I say)” or “The goal is not important as the process”, especially as consolation for their athletes setbacks (or their own). The way they express themselves project that they’re profound and have a deep understanding of the sport, but again we have to believe that they’re good coaches.
Evidence-based coaches:
These are the coaches for which you have factual evidence that they’re good coaches.
Coaching is a goal-oriented activity. Every athlete that hires a coach has goals and 99% of the people that hire a coach is to achieve a particular competitive goal. Therefore, success in coaching is easily measured in results. While this train of thought seems obvious to me and to many of those that read it, it is quite amazing how the measure of success of a coach, results, are out of the whole process of choosing a coach.
That’s where my (new) definition of evidence-based coaching comes from. With evidence-based coaches you have evidence of their success because you know who their athletes are, how they perform and more importantly how they improve. You can go back and look them up, their results, i.e., their coach’s success with them. You will see if they progressed or not. In this age of having our whole lifes on Google, you can even contact the athletes, know how is the coach, if they’re satisfied, etc. It is surprising how the belief-based coaches I defined above are very keen in not letting us know who are the athletes they coach. It’s all very secret for “privacy” reasons, but whenever they have an athlete do well, they’re the first going around publicly babbling about how well their athlete did at this race.
Evidence-based coaches are not afraid to put themselves on the line and assume credit for their successes as well as responsibility for their setbacks, because both success and failure are part of a coach’s job. Evidence-based coaches don’t play the blaming game of “when you do well it’s because of me and when you do poorly is because of you”. With evidence-based coaches you have evidence that did well with multiple athletes and not just one athlete.
So is Tom, Dick or Jane a good coach? I don’t know, show me the evidence.