Why Work With a (Human) Coach? What the Research Says.

It’s a fair question, coaching costs money. There are free training plans everywhere and new AI Coaching tools coming up from all sides. So what’s the point of getting a human coach these days?

We dug into some recent research on sports coaching to find out what actually happens when athletes work with coaches and why that relationship seems to matter so much.

It’s Not Just About the Training Plan

Research suggests that what coaches provide goes far beyond a set of workouts set into an athlete’s training plan.

A 2023 study from published in the International Sport Coaching Journal looked at endurance sport coaches who work remotely with athletes: cyclists, triathletes, runners. As these coaches coach remote, they might might never see their athletes in person. Some are separated by continents and time zones. Yet the relationships they described were remarkably deep.

One coach reflected that over twenty-plus years of remote coaching, he’d been with athletes ‘through births of children and divorces and marriages.’ Despite never meeting many of them face-to-face, he felt he’d developed ‘surprisingly good relationships.’

The Confidence Connection

A 2024 study from Newcastle University surveyed 537 athletes across multiple sports to understand how coach support affects confidence and wellbeing. The findings were striking.

Athletes who perceived their coach as available and supportive showed significantly higher self-confidence. Not just a little higher, the relationship was strong and consistent. When athletes believed their coach would be there if needed, they felt more confident in their ability to perform.

But here’s where it gets interesting: the study found that different types of support do different things.

Perceived support: Simply knowing your coach is there if you need them was the key driver of confidence. It didn’t matter as much whether the coach was actively providing support in any given moment. What mattered was the athlete’s belief that support was available.

This suggests that part of what a coach provides is a psychological safety net. When you know someone has your back, you’re willing to take more risks, push harder, and trust your training.

The Real Work: Creating Athletes Who Can Think for Themselves

One of the clearest themes from the research is that great coaches aren’t trying to create dependence. They’re trying to create independence.

The endurance coaches in the study talked repeatedly about ‘generating autonomous athletes’, helping people learn to guide themselves, make decisions, and eventually not need the coach at all (at least not in the same way).

This might seem counterintuitive. Why would a coach want you to need them less? But it makes sense when you think about what performance actually requires. You can’t have your coach standing next to you during a race, telling you what to do. The work happens in training, building judgment and confidence so you can execute when it counts.

As one researcher put it, effective coaching means helping athletes ‘gain and take ownership of knowledge, development and decision making.’

What Coaches Actually Do (That You Can’t Do for Yourself)

A second study, from Loughborough University, looked at high-performance coach education and found something important about how good coaches think.

The best coaches don’t just evaluate what happened (‘that session went well’). They constantly examine why they do things a certain way. They consider multiple perspectives, e.g how the athlete experiences training, what colleagues might see differently, what the research says.

When you’re coaching yourself, you’re stuck in your own head. You can only see things from your perspective. A coach brings an outside view. They notice things you might miss. They ask questions you wouldn’t think to ask yourself.

One coach developer in the study described it as helping coaches ‘shine a light into the places they don’t even know to look.’

The same applies to athletes. A good coach sees blind spots you don’t know you have.

The Accountability Factor

You might expect accountability to be the big selling point of coaching. And that is partly the case based on the research.

The research found that being accountable to someone else does matter. Having a coach review your training data, check in on how you’re feeling, and ask questions about your progress creates a structure that’s hard to replicate on your own.

But here’s the nuance: accountability isn’t just about having someone watch you. It’s about the quality of that relationship.

Some athletes, the research found, just want to be told what to do. ‘Give me the plan and I’ll be fine.’ Others want deep engagement, feedback, conversation, understanding.

Both can work. What matters is matching what you actually need with what the coach provides. The best coaching relationships involve honest communication about expectations on both sides.

The Bottom Line

Working with a coach isn’t about outsourcing one’s thinking. It’s about having someone in your corner who can see what you can’t, ask questions you wouldn’t ask, and help you become the kind of athlete who eventually doesn’t need to be told what to do.

The research is clear: good coaching is about relationship, not just prescription.

Whether that’s worth it depends on what you’re looking for. If you just want workouts, you can find those for free. But if you want someone to help you understand why you’re doing what you’re doing, to push you past your own blind spots, and to be there through the inevitable ups and downs: that’s what a coach is for.

Sources

Blanchfield, McArdle & Haughey (2023). “Sports Coaching in an Online Space: What Can We Learn From Endurance Sport Coaches?” International Sport Coaching Journal.

Downham & Cushion (2024). “Reflection and reflective practice in high-performance sport coaching: a heuristic device.” Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy.

Coussens, Stone & Donachie (2025). “Coach–athlete relationships, self-confidence, and psychological wellbeing: The role of perceived and received coach support.” European Journal of Sport Science.

Pan & Sui (2025). “Research on coach-athlete relationship and team performance based on 3Cs theory: the chain mediating role of emotional intelligence and athletic engagement.” Frontiers in Psychology.