How to Improve Performance: The Science of Coachability

Every runner has a coach these days. In fact, it sometimes seems that every runner is a coach. You can even sign up for private guidance from recent Olympic marathoners like Dakotah Popehn and Malindi Elmore. The rise of online coaching has democratized the availability of personalized advice from expert mentors, not just in running but across endurance sports and even in other areas of life like business and entrepreneurship.

But does it help? Even at the elite level, some runners thrive under the long-term guidance of a coach, others seem to bounce unhappily from coach to coach, and a few—Frank Shorter, Patrick Sang, and Jakob Ingebrigtsen are notable examples—have mostly preferred to call their own shots. The difference, according to a recent study in the journal Sports Medicine, may have something to do with a concept called “coachability,” which affects why some people respond to coaching more strongly than others.

The study, from a team of scientists in Australia led by Stephen MacGabhann of the University of Canberra and Stephen Cobley of the University of Sydney, reviews half a century’s worth of research into coachability, starting with the classic 1966 book Problem Athletes and How to Handle Them. Attitudes have evolved considerably since then, MacGabhann and his colleagues point out. Coachability used to be considered a mostly unchangeable personality trait; these days, it’s seen as a set of skills that can be developed.

Drawing on the literature and on interviews with current elite sports coaches, the researchers propose a general definition of coachability—“an individual’s willingness and ability to seek, receive and act upon constructive feedback to foster self-development and enhance performance across sport, business and educational domains”—and identify six key components. Here’s what it takes to get the most out of your coaching relationship.

1. Attentiveness to Information

To benefit from a coach’s advice, you have to hear what they’re saying. If your mind tends to wander when the coach is talking (or if you scroll rapidly through the coach’s emails), that’s a problem. It might simply be that you’re not very good at regulating your attention, in which case it’s a behavior you can work on improving. Or it might be that you don’t think the coach has any useful advice to impart, in which case you either need a different attitude or a different coach.

2. Willingness to Learn

Once you’ve absorbed new information, you still have to apply it in order to improve. The primary barriers here are overconfidence and lack of motivation. If you think you’re already doing everything right, or if you simply can’t be bothered to make changes to your current habits, then the coach’s advice won’t help you.

3. Persistence in Overcoming Setbacks

Even the best advice or the most carefully conceived training plan won’t necessarily click the first time you try it. When runners switch coaches, it’s not uncommon for them to struggle initially as they adapt to different workouts. If you pull the plug after a disappointing first season, you’ll never know whether the coach’s program would have eventually worked for you.

4. Feedback Seeking

Some people are especially hungry for knowledge. They’ll seek out mentors and solicit opinions from a wide range of sources. This is a step up from being merely attentive and willing to learn—it’s proactively seeking coaching input, and being eager to debrief after workouts and races. The flip side is feedback avoidance, where, after a bad race, you shut down and avoid talking about it.

5. Feedback Receptivity

The difference between “feedback” and “criticism” is in the eye of the beholder. When you feel like you’re doing your best, you might get upset when a coach seems to criticize you. Or you might respond by making excuses, explaining why you did what you did instead of listening and trying to understand what you could do better. The more you can put those responses aside, the better equipped you’ll be to benefit from your coach’s feedback.

6. Feedback Implementation

This is where the rubber hits the road. Knowing is half the battle, as G.I. Joe used to say, but the other half is doing.

Here’s an example. At a conference last year, I heard a great talk about an Australian program that puts aspiring athletes through a series of physical tests and then matches them to top coaches in the sport they’re best suited to. It’s a way of funneling raw talent to more obscure Olympic sports like freestyle skiing and archery. The archery coaches are thrilled with the program, because they receive a group of athletes with more raw physical ability than their usual recruits. When the coaches tell these athletes to, say, hold their arm at a slightly different angle or adjust their movement pattern, they’re able to implement this feedback quickly and accurately. The usual recruits might tick all the other boxes—they’re attentive, willing to learn, receptive to feedback, and so on—but if they don’t have the physical awareness to be able to execute the coaching instructions, they won’t progress as rapidly.

In sports like running, this sort of physical awareness is less important (though not entirely irrelevant). But even executing big-picture instructions like “keep your easy runs below threshold” can be surprisingly difficult to stick to. Researchers have found systematic differences between what coaches prescribe and what runners actually do: in general, easy runs end up harder than intended and hard runs end up easier than intended. That tells us something about coachability, but perhaps it also tells us something about human nature.

That’s my biggest hesitation about this concept of coachability: that it’s not really about your capacity to benefit from a coach, but is actually about your capacity to improve more generally. Self-coached runners like Shorter, Sang, and Ingebrigtsen are clearly attentive, persistent, and willing to change. We should all aspire to master the six dimensions of coachability outlined above, regardless of whether we have a coach. And if you’re considering hiring a coach, the question to ask yourself isn’t: “Am I coachable?” It’s: “Will this particular coach unlock these traits in me?”

For more Sweat Science, join me on Threads and Facebook, sign up for the email newsletter, and check out my new book The Explorer’s Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map.

This article is from the Spring 2026 issue of Outside magazine. To receive the print magazine, become an Outside+ member here.