THE FUTURE OF FITNESS: PRINCIPLE-BASED COACHING VS. PLAN-BASED COACHING
The fitness and health world isn’t much different from other communities—it’s just as tribal. Some people swear by heavy back squats as the cure for everything (except herpes), insisting any program without them is sacrilege and that you can’t gain muscle or strength without them. On the other end, there are those who think simply looking at a barbell will turn you into He-Man. The same split shows up in nutrition too. One week fat is the enemy, the next you’re the devil if you offer someone a Diet Coke. In both areas, many miss the key to lasting progress: focusing on principles.
To lose weight you need a caloric deficit, and there are many ways to achieve it. To gain muscle you need progressive overload, and squats are just one path among many. In today’s guest post by Michigan-based trainer Alex McBrairty, he elaborates more on this idea.
THE FUTURE OF FITNESS: PRINCIPLE-BASED COACHING VS. PLAN-BASED COACHING
The fitness industry has been failing. After a decade of work in the field, it’s clear that many popular products and programs leave people worse off, with the benefits mostly going to those selling the products. But this is changing. Slowly, a new approach is emerging—one based on sound reasoning, free of marketing gimmicks and fads. It’s called principle-based coaching.
Principle-based fitness coaching uses practices grounded in first principles—ideas and information we know to be objectively true. This is foundational knowledge drawn from psychology, human physiology, nutrition, and exercise science. It’s the kind of information many traditional plans cherry-pick to push their own spin on fitness.
Paleo aims to limit processed foods. Keto tries to limit carbohydrate intake. In reality, both work mainly because they limit calorie intake. The first principle in both cases is calorie management: to lose weight you must eat fewer calories than you burn. Each diet tackles this in its own focused way.
This traditional style of coaching is called plan-based fitness coaching. Plan-based coaching uses specific plans to help people reach results. The main flaw is the extra leaps these plans take from first principles to their own conclusions. If calorie management is the first principle, a Paleo plan might claim processed foods cause overeating, while a Keto plan might claim carbohydrates cause overeating.
Plan-based coaches make unverified claims to move from first principles to their own rules. This produces plans that are rigid, inflexible, and disconnected. For someone following Paleo or Keto, there’s a strict dichotomy of “good” and “bad” foods. Good Paleo foods are unprocessed, whole foods our ancestors ate; bad Paleo foods are anything processed or modern. Good Keto foods are low in carbohydrates, with high-fat foods like butter, bacon, cheese, and red meat considered acceptable, while anything with carbohydrates is discouraged. In both plans there’s little room for nuance, a mindset that can be off-putting and ineffective for many people.
The rigidity of these plans ignores real-life accessibility. If you want to follow Paleo but live in a food desert with limited access to fresh foods, how can you stick to such rules? The common reply—“Just try harder”—isn’t helpful.
Imagine attending a dinner party with vegetables, meat, potatoes, and fruit pie. If you’re on Keto, you might feel frustrated that you can only eat the meat. The rigid rules push you into inflexible eating patterns and increase stress around food.
Because these plans are rigid, they remain disconnected from the everyday lives of the people they aim to help. They may work for a few, but the list is short. Plan-based coaching can offer direction, but it often fails to address the complex realities of human life. What if the plan’s assumptions are wrong? If restricting carbohydrates increases stress and social friction, you may end up giving up your favorite foods, skipping social events, and worrying about your diet constantly. Would that have been worth it? That risk is inherent in any plan built on unverified claims.
Principle-based coaching, by contrast, results in an adaptive, flexible, and integrative program. It starts from base-layer truths—calorie balance, progressive overload, and self-efficacy—and uses those principles to guide decisions. Coaches can evaluate what must be true to achieve results and tailor the program to the individual in front of them.
If two people need better calorie management, a principle-based approach doesn’t force one to eat fewer carbohydrates while the other cuts carbs entirely. Both can succeed within the same framework. This approach treats individuals as individuals rather than lumping everyone into one bucket, making the program naturally adaptable to different needs and circumstances.
Because the means of achieving the first principles aren’t prescriptive, they’re flexible to changing life situations. If you live in a food desert, you can still make sensible choices with available options and often achieve the same or better results as with a rigid plan. If you’re at a dinner party or traveling, you can adjust the specifics of your intake or movement to stay aligned with the first principles. The ability to adapt strategy without sacrificing results makes principle-based coaching well-suited to real life.
These programs, rooted in objective truths, can fit into any goal or life stage and evolve as needs change. The flexibility also supports better adherence and consistency—two crucial factors for success in both the short and long term. Principle-based coaching helps incorporate healthy habits into daily life for lasting change.
Fitness programming began as a way to educate people about healthier living. But as the industry grew, obesity rates rose, and the industry began making assumptions about what people were getting wrong. That led to the plan-based model that dominates today. The result has been rising obesity rates, with as of 2018 more than two-thirds of U.S. adults overweight or obese. It’s clear that education alone isn’t the full solution.
What we need is education grounded in first principles paired with action. We should teach people to practice healthier habits consistently, not sporadically, and to move beyond prejudice about what’s “good enough.” We need fitness programs that are adaptive, flexible, and integrative. We need principle-based fitness coaching.
