Almost everything written about online coaching is written by people selling online coaching, which makes it hard to find out what it is actually like. This is written by somebody who sells it too, so treat it accordingly. It is at least going to be specific about the parts that do not work.
The short version: the structural half of coaching transfers almost completely, and the observational half barely transfers at all. Most of whether it will work for you comes down to which half you are short of.
What transfers, and transfers well
- Structure. What to do on Tuesday, how hard, and why. This is the largest single thing most self-coached people are missing and it is entirely deliverable at a distance.
- Progression. Knowing when to add and, much harder, when not to. Self-coached athletes are systematically bad at this in one direction or the other and rarely in the middle.
- Accountability. Unglamorous and probably the most valuable item on the list. Sessions get done when somebody is going to look.
- Reading the training you did. Files, times, heart rate, how it felt. A coach who reads that weekly catches a downward trend before you have noticed you are tired.
- Planning around a real life. Shift work, a newborn, a job with travel. A plan built around the hours you actually have is a conversation, not a physical examination.
- Nutrition guidance. Largely a conversation and a set of habits, and it survives the distance well.
What does not
This is the half the adverts skip.
- Anything the coach needs to see. Swim stroke, running gait, a squat that is going wrong at the hip. Video helps, but it does not close the gap: a coach beside the pool sees the thing you did not know to film.
- Bike fit and position. Remote fitting exists. It is not the same, and a position problem that a coach could spot in ten seconds can survive months of remote coaching intact.
- Fear. Open-water anxiety is the clearest example, and it is common. It responds to somebody being in the water next to you, in small graded steps, and to essentially nothing else. See swimming in the sea here.
- Learning a skill from scratch. Nobody learns to swim over a video call: learning to swim as an adult is a physical job. The same goes for a child learning bike handling.
- The first session with somebody who has never trained. That one needs a person in the room, and pretending otherwise is how beginners get hurt in week two.
The arrangement that actually works
In practice the useful version is rarely purely remote. It is a conversation at the start where the coach finds out what they cannot infer from a file, then remote delivery of the block, with in-person sessions where the physical thing matters.
Here that shape is deliberate rather than accidental. The consultation is an hour and can be taken on the phone or in person, which matters if you are not on the island, and matters more if you are and have never been assessed. The monthly programmes then run remotely. 1-to-1 sessions exist to be dropped in when something needs watching: a stroke, a position, a first attempt at something.
If you are on this coast, or coming to it, the in-person half is worth using. If you are not, the honest answer is that remote coaching will get you most of the structural benefit and none of the observational one, and that is still a considerable amount.
What to ask a remote coach before you pay anybody
- Who writes the plan, and who reads what I did? Those can be two different answers and the second one is the one that matters.
- How often does it change? A plan issued once and never revised is a template with your name at the top.
- How do I reach you, and how fast? Reasonable limits are fine and normal. Vagueness is not.
- What happens in a bad week? Illness, work, a holiday. This is the question that reveals whether you are buying coaching or a document.
- What can you not do from there? A coach with a straight answer to this is a coach worth having.
Where the technology helps, and where it flatters
Training files are extremely useful to somebody who reads them properly and close to useless as a substitute for talking. Two riders can produce identical files from completely different weeks: one slept, one did not; one is on the way up, one is on the way down.
The same applies to automatically generated plans and to the current generation of tools that write a programme from your data. They are good at structure and blind to context, which is a reasonable description of their entire limitation. A programme is a starting document; the coaching is what happens to it afterwards.
Where this lives here
Coaching sets out the monthly programmes, what each one includes and what it costs. Read the figures there rather than in an article, where they would quietly go out of date.
It covers cycling, swimming, triathlon and general fitness rather than one sport, which is worth knowing if you do more than one thing and are tired of coordinating two coaches who have never spoken.
Is online coaching worth it if I am not racing?
Often more, not less. Athletes with a race have an external structure imposing itself on them; somebody training for their own sake has nothing but their own judgement, and that is precisely the thing a coach supplies. The most common outcome for a non-racing rider is doing less, more consistently, and getting fitter for it.
How often do we actually speak?
That varies by what you have signed up for, so read the detail of each package rather than assuming.
Can I start remotely and meet later?
Yes, and a lot of people do it the other way round too: a consultation and a session or two while they are here on holiday, then remote coaching once they are home. Both work. The sequence matters less than having the in-person part happen at all if there is something that needs looking at.
What if I travel a lot?
That is the case remote coaching is best at, and one of the few where it beats a local coach outright. A plan that expects you to be in three countries this month is a planning problem, and planning is the half that transfers completely.