How To Train Your Husband, Part II

In How To Train Your Husband, Part I, I describe how I set out to use my husband as a coaching guinea-pig for a month. The idea was to get him back into training and to give myself a sense of what being a coach would be like. In this post I look back at the results and figure out lessons learned.

Did we achieve his objectives?

Yes – pretty much, sort of!

Obj. 1 – Achieve some consistency of training again – specifically, two workouts per week for each of swim/bike/run and strength.

              We got there! The first week we missed a swim and run but got consistency the next two weeks. The final week was derailed by a cold. Overall, 72% of workouts were completed. All credit for this goes to my husband, who re-evaluated his working hours to make time for working out.

Obj. 2 – Complete swim workouts of no less than 30 minutes each, and be able to swim 500-600m steady continuous

              Achieved! First swim, he came back saying that every lap felt like hard work. Last swim, he completed 1500yds including some 50’s at a harder effort, and “felt good”.

Obj. 3 – Be able to run a minimum of 5 miles continuously, i.e., no walk-run

              Nearly! We got to 5 miles with breaks for stretching. We did get out of the “this hurts and I have to walk now” mentality, and whereas week 1 I got a frowny face as comment, by week 4 I got the happy face. Turns out the mantra we put in place, “one step at a time”, was hugely valuable here, as was ensuring time set aside for proper warm-up.

Obj. 4 – Do not, under any circumstance, buy cheese

              Fail! Mostly because when it came my turn to cook, I bought pizza. Naughty coach.

The nicest part for me was to see how the motivation grew over time, with one small workout success feeding the next. As example, the first early morning strength workout I’d planned, I laid out his kit the night before, set the alarm, made coffee, dragged him out of bed, and went through the routine with him one exercise at a time. Fast forward to week 3…an hour after the alarm goes off, I stumble into the living room to find him standing on one leg surrounded by different color resistance bands, telling me to “stop talking, I’m in my focus zone”. Nice, hon!

Which brings me to the one argument we had…it was single-digit temperatures outside, and he came home early evening having worked outside, had a bad day, then got his muscles kicked by our ART practitioner.

“Doctor worked my muscles, so I can skip my swim, right?”

“No. He worked your legs. Swimming uses arms. You should get to the pool now.”

In the ensuing argument, the funniest thing was that I couldn’t tell if he was upset at me because I was his coach, or his wife…if I kick you out the door at 8pm to go swim in 5-degree weather, is that tough love coaching or just being a crappy wife? In this instance it happily turned out to be the former, as he finally left to get it done and came back with a smile. Phew.

Lessons learned

1. Coaching is hard! Kudos, coach-people
2. The critique from my husband was that I did not allow for enough rest days. In particular, as we ended up going away for a weekend I took away his usual (Monday) rest day to shoehorn in the required number of workouts, thinking it was do-able given the relatively easy workout schedule. That was a mistake because a) I was under-estimating the cumulative muscle fatigue associated with the run workouts; and b) I was not factoring in that recovery days shouldn’t just be for muscle recovery but also for mental recovery and general rest & relaxation. Unsurprisingly, that mirrors the same mistake I make with my own training
3. You can’t impose what you would do on other people. The right “pace” of progression is unique to each person, and you need to meet people where they are. For example, I put structure in certain workouts to give a boost to fitness gains, but my husband didn’t always want to do them and I couldn’t talk him round
4. In a similar vein, it seems important to give people space to figure out what works for themselves. My instinct is to try and be helpful, when the reality is that I’m just being overbearing…there’s a fine line between guiding and imposing that I find hard not to cross.

And finally…I really like coaching. Time to study!