From racing to coaching
Frederik Van Lierde became Ironman world champion in 2013. He started coaching in 2010, and he has been working on Coachbox since early 2015, which makes him one of the longest-running users on the platform.
He coaches around 25 triathletes, almost all of them age groupers.
They are mostly people who need structure in their training, where I can share my experience and build structure into their schedules.
What he offers is deliberately narrow:
- Individual triathlon coaching for age groupers
- Structured schedules built from a world champion’s own racing experience
- Daily follow-up and feedback inside the platform
- A roster capped at 25 athletes
The Excel years, and why they ended
The first five years of coaching ran on spreadsheets.
In the beginning it was just Excel forms and creating PDFs. That worked, of course, but the feedback you had with your athlete was less, or it had to happen by phone.
One of the Coachbox founders is a good friend of his. When Ruben came to him with something new, he jumped on it.
Since 2015, with a platform like Coachbox, it has become much easier and much more interesting. As a coach I find it really important to be able to communicate with my athletes, and a platform like Coachbox allows that perfectly.
Why he stops at 25
Frederik has a main job and an ambassador role next to his coaching. But the cap is not only about his calendar.
I am certain that limiting it benefits the quality. If I went to 50 people or 100 people, that is a very large group, and I think I could be far less intensively involved with my different athletes.
It is worth sitting with that for a moment, because it runs against the instinct to grow. His coaching is not a volume business. The value is the attention, and attention does not scale.
The library, and the discipline of using it
The feature he leans on most is the workout library.
You can very easily pick the kind of session you want to bring in for your athlete. You can work in a structured way with a warm-up. It is all in there, so that as a coach you can work very efficiently, and as an athlete everything comes back to you efficiently too.
His second habit is the one he pushes hardest on new coaches. He keeps communication inside the platform on purpose.
I consciously try to stay away from WhatsApp and phone calls, but I follow my athletes daily and I see what comes in. Asking how does that feel, or how are you feeling yourself. That kind of thing is very easy through Coachbox.
A schedule is a proposal
The reason he insists on that daily contact is a coaching philosophy, not a preference for a tool.
I always say that the schedule I write for a week is a proposal. It is not the Bible. It is not something that absolutely has to happen. Something can always come up, an illness, an injury, something in the family. So it really is always a proposal. And if you communicate with your athlete, you can indeed adjust when it is needed.
He hears the other side of that from athletes who come to him.
Sometimes athletes who want to train with me say that they did not have much contact with their previous coach, or that it took a very long time before he responded. I think that is a really important one, that your athlete does not have to wait six days for an answer from the coach.
Would he do anything differently?
Not really. If I were starting again I would do it the same way. It all runs well, so I see few issues or few things that could be better.
His reason for recommending it says as much about him as about the platform.
It is above all very simple to use. I come from a generation that was much less involved with data, and these days it flies around your ears. But I find Coachbox a platform that is easy to work with for the athlete as well as the coach, and that is what I find most important.