Perform Best was created to assist runners of all abilities in their pursuit of personal athletic growth. As one of our clients, the training program you receive each week will be unique to you. However, all of our coaching is guided by a few overarching principles, each influencing the means by which we aim to develop our athletes. You can read a little more about these principles below. 

Consistency

When you select one of our coaching packages, you are taking the first step towards becoming a better runner. To truly realise your athletic potential, however, you need to go beyond a simple sign-up. In running, there are no shortcuts to success; real progress can only be achieved through an ongoing commitment to consistent training. It is only by continuing to lace-up each day, building layer-upon-layer of new abilities and attributes, that you will attain your best results. But this is easier said than done – indeed, it is a lack of consistency which limits the development of the vast majority of runners. This is where we come in. Not only will we create a training program which is structured in a way that makes it easier for you to maintain your momentum (i.e. strategic placement of key sessions, methodical interspersion of easier runs, etc.), we will also be there to hold you accountable, offer direction and support, and modify your weekly program to ensure that it fits with the rest of your life. We feel strongly that consistency is among the most important factors in the development of our athletes, and our coaching services are tailored with this belief in mind. 

Moderation

On any given morning, how often do you pass a runner heaving for breath, sweating profusely, locked in a battle with their body just to keep moving along? Or maybe you are that runner, for whom every run is a struggle, a frantic fight against fatigue. It’s understandable; running can be hard, especially if you’re just starting out. But that doesn’t mean that it should be – at least not all the time. One of the principles which most heavily informs our coaching is moderation. We believe that the best outcomes are achieved when an athlete’s training is aligned with their current abilities and is well-balanced, with a generous dose of easy mileage to break up each week. Certainly, there is a place for hard sessions, and you’ll do plenty over the course of each training block. However, the bulk of your time running should not be spent ‘in the red’. Instead, you should become comfortable – both physically and mentally – running within your limits. A strong aerobic base is the foundation upon which your future accomplishments will be built. Hence, developing it – and not getting injured through overtraining in the process – is essential to your running success. 

Feedback

Many coaching services are entirely transactional in nature: you pay your money, you’re sent a program – and that’s it. But athletes are not robots. You can’t just dispense a program, walk away, and expect them to faultlessly execute your prescriptions each week. Athletes are human, and therefore imperfect. Sessions will go wrong and there will inevitably be hurdles to overcome. It is how these obstacles are dealt with that will determine the amount of progress which each athlete makes. This is why one of the pillars of our coaching philosophy is feedback. We use advanced tools to analyse our athletes’ performances in training, from which we can formulate conclusions, identify areas for improvement and deliver refined insights back to our runners in the form of comprehensive – and readily comprehensible – feedback reports. In addition to these data-oriented reports, we also draw on our own experiences as coaches to provide more anecdotal advice when appropriate. Running is far from an exact science, and it can often be valuable to hear from someone who’s worked their way through the same issues you’re facing themselves. Whatever form our feedback takes, though, we feel that it is one of the things which sets us apart, and empowers our athletes to achieve. 

Psychology

Running is an inherently physical pursuit – but that doesn’t mean that psychology doesn’t play a role. The mental side of running is something we’re intimately familiar with, and something which we always consider in our coaching. As alluded to above, we feel that a coach’s role goes beyond setting a training program. That’s why we strive to equip our athletes with the tools for developing not only their physiological abilities, but their psychological performance too. All of our packages include a pre-race strategy briefing, wherein your coach will offer educated advice on the best ways to mentally approach your event. Likewise, regular coach-athlete communication ensures that if you are ever in need of guidance regarding a specific aspect of your running, or simply wish to learn more about the mental side of the sport, you’re only an email or phone call away. The idea that your mentality can be the difference between ‘good’ and ‘great’ is central to our coaching philosophy. We’ve worked hard to ensure that our athletes can benefit from our experience and knowledge in this area, and arm themselves with the competitive advantage which optimised psychological performance can provide.