Every trainer eventually hears some version of the same thing. "I tried this before and it didn't work." "I'm terrible at sticking with things." "I'm just not a gym person."

People usually say it like they're explaining why hiring a trainer would be a waste of money. They assume the problem is them. They're not disciplined enough, not focused enough or not motivated enough to get much out of coaching.

In 2025, Stephen MacGabhann at the University of Canberra and Stephen Cobley at the University of Sydney published a review in the journal Sports Medicine. They went through fifty years of work on coachability, 53 sources in all, trying to pin down what the word actually means.

Six qualities kept showing up. Paying attention. Being willing to change. Sticking with the process through a rough patch. Going looking for feedback instead of waiting for it. Taking a correction without getting defensive. And following through on what you agreed to do.

Read that list and it's easy to start grading yourself. Maybe your mind wanders when someone explains something. Maybe you get excited for two weeks and vanish in week three. Maybe you nod at the homework and never do it.

You could look at all that and decide you're just not coachable. I think that's backwards.

If you were already good at all six of those things, you'd need less coaching in the first place. Those aren't the qualities that make a trainer worth hiring, they're the gaps a trainer is supposed to fill.

When a client stalls, "they're not motivated" is the easy explanation. It's also the least useful one.

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• • Maybe they aren't hearing the cue, in which case the fix is one cue instead of four, not the same four repeated louder.

• • Maybe they hear it fine and don't understand why it matters, so nobody's told them what the exercise is for.

• • Maybe they've stopped believing the program works, and nobody warned them what week six was going to feel like.

• • Maybe they're lost and too embarrassed to say so.

• • Maybe every correction lands as criticism, so they've quietly stopped asking.

• • Or maybe they understand everything perfectly and the homework was built for a life they don't actually have.

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Six different causes. Six different fixes. From across the gym they all look identical.

A good trainer can tell them apart. That gives you a better way to pick one.

Certifications matter, and so does knowing anatomy. But pay attention to what happens when the two of you actually talk. Can this person explain something in a way that makes sense to you? Do they notice when they've lost you? Can you admit you're confused without feeling stupid? When one explanation doesn't land, do they have another one?

And when you get something wrong, can they correct you without making you feel like you're the thing that's wrong?

That last part matters more than people think.

There's a limit to what a trainer can do, and it's worth being honest about it.

If the homework doesn't fit your life, say so. That's a design problem and a good trainer will fix it in about thirty seconds. Wrong time of day, too many exercises, equipment you don't own. They can't fix what they don't know about.

But if you skip it, say nothing and skip it again, you've turned a fixable problem into a mystery. Now your trainer is guessing, and they'll probably guess wrong. That part is on you.

Notice that the difference isn't motivation. It's whether you spoke up. That's a habit, not a character flaw, and you can start it this week.

Older research treated coachability like a personality trait. You had it or you didn't. Newer work treats it as a set of skills, and skills improve. You can learn to notice when your attention drifts. You can learn to hear a correction as information instead of an insult. You can learn to stay with something long enough to find out whether it works.

A good coach should be helping you get better at those things, not just counting your reps.

The researchers are careful about what they're claiming, and I'll be careful too. This was a review about defining a word, not a study proving anything. There's no validated coachability test, and nobody has shown that scoring high on these six predicts faster weight loss or a heavier lift. If someone offers to measure your coachability, they're ahead of the evidence.

Writing about this same study in Outside magazine in spring of 2026, Alex Hutchinson took the idea further. These qualities aren't really about coaching at all. They're how anybody gets better at anything, coach or no coach. Which is why the question isn't whether you're coachable. It's whether this coach brings it out in you.

You don't show up with it. A good trainer builds it over the first few months.

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Reference Links:

6 Ways to Improve Your Coachability and Reach Your Potential Faster

Alex Hutchinson
Outside Magazine, Published March 24, 2026

Click Here for the Study: https://www.outsideonline.com/health/training-performance/science-of-coachability-performance-tips/

 

Exercise, physical activity, and self-determination theory: A systematic review

Pedro J Teixeira, Eliana V Carraça, David Markland, Marlene N Silva, Richard M Ryan
International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, Published 2012 Jun 22

Click Here for the Study: https://doi.org/10.1186/1479-5868-9-78

 

Self-Determination and Physical Exercise Adherence in the Contexts of Fitness Academies and Personal Training

Ingi Petitemberte Klain, Dihogo Gama de Matos, José Carlos Leitão, Luís Cid, João Moutão
Journal of Human Kinetics, Published 2015 Jul 10

Click Here for the Study: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4519215/

 

Why do Some Respond and Develop more from Coaching than Others? A Systematic Review of Coachability and Its Constituent Components

Stephen MacGabhann, Phillip Newman, Jeremy Witchalls, Rebecca Dowse, Gordon Waddington, Stephen Cobley
Sports Medicine, Published 2025 Jul 12

Click Here for the Study: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-025-02267-6

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9/8/2026