Saying the hard thing

The client trains four times a week, eats reasonably, and his body composition has not moved in five months. His numbers are the least dramatic on the sheet, and that's exactly the problem: nothing looks urgent, and nothing is working.

The coach knows what she needs to raise: the volume isn't the issue, the recovery is, and he's been treating sleep as a rounding error. She has said versions of this before. It has not landed.

What she needed wasn't more conviction. It was a sentence short enough to be repeated at home, specific enough to be arguable, and gentle enough that he didn't have to defend himself.

What I've watched work looks like this. You put one number next to one week. You say: your training load went up in April, and this number went down in April, and they moved together. Then you stop talking.

The client can now do the arithmetic himself, and people defend their own arithmetic far less than they defend their coach's.

MOJOWAY's body kit writes that sentence from the data so the coach doesn't have to improvise it in the tenth minute of a difficult session.