A health coach is a professional who guides and supports people in improving their overall well-being by helping them identify and modify aspects of their lifestyle that hinder their health. They work to facilitate the adoption of healthier and more lasting habits and behaviors in line with the client’s personal vision of optimal health.
- Who is the health coach?
- What does a health coach do?
- How a health coach works
- Who can benefit
- Professional training and certification
1. Who is the health coach?
A health coach is a professional who accompanies people toward an optimal state of health by adopting healthier and more sustainable lifestyles based on their uniqueness. He is a facilitator of change, as he helps people, through personalized tools and strategies, identify and overcome the obstacles that prevent them from living healthier lives according to their optimal vision of health.
In the context of health coaching, health is not simply understood as the absence of disease but is defined as a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, as recognized in the definition given by the World Health Organization. An optimal state of well-being is obviously subject to fluctuations and changes over time, and this can depend on both personal and external factors, such as physical events, life experiences, and environmental changes.
Working on empowerment and the self-efficacy of their clients, the health coach promotes the conditions for them to better address and manage the evolution of their health status. Not only, in fact, does he help them to define and achieve goals for improving health and well-being, which can also be very specific and limited in time, but also, more generally, to acquire personal knowledge and skills (the so-called health skills) that allow them to become progressively autonomous in managing their health.
Here you can find a list of all the health skills >
Improving health through health coaching involves identifying and transforming behaviors, habits, and mindsets holding back health and wellness. Health coaches work with clients to understand their current lifestyle, uncover areas that may be limiting their health, and develop strategies to replace them with behaviors that work better for their health goals.
It is a profession born in the United States in the 90s and spread in Europe in the last decade to fill a gap in the health system in the approach to the patient, usually focused on the prescription and treatment of diseases and less on prevention and lifestyle changes. Unlike traditional health workers, who focus mainly on the diagnosis and treatment of specific conditions, health coaches adopt a broader and more holistic approach, considering all the areas that influence the state of health and well-being of a person: body, mind, emotions, relationships, and fulfillment. For this reason, it is considered a complementary profession to those existing in the health system, which often supports their work.
You can see what areas of life can affect a person’s health >
2. What does a health coach do?
2.1 What they do
The health coach’s responsibilities include:
- Facilitating behavioral change. Work closely with your client to identify and change behaviors and habits that are holding them back from their health, helping them set SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound) goals and a sustainable, achievable path to implementation.
- Offering personalized guidance and a holistic approach. Provides personalized andholistic support, considering individual characteristics, personal strengths and obstacles, current health and lifestyle conditions, values, and goals.
- Providing ongoing support and supervision. Support and motivate the client, especially when faced with doubts and obstacles. Regularly check in on progress and help them adapt the process as needed to maintain the most effective direction.
- Providing information and educational resources. Shares knowledge and resources needed to make informed decisions about your health, using official sources and information based on scientific evidence, organized and simplified material for each client.
- Empowering Clients. A central goal of health coaching is to give clients the tools and skills to take control of their health, which is called health empowerment.
- Working in collaboration with other health professionals. Work in synergy with other professionals in the health system in specific cases, such as supporting overcoming chronic diseases that imply lifestyle changes, preventing them in predisposed subjects, and recovering from injury or illness.
You can learn more about health empowerment in this article >
2.2 What they don’t do
For the sake of clarity, it is important to underline what a health coach does not do and, above all, must not do:
- Making decisions. The coach’s role is to support and facilitate change, not choose and direct it. He or she should be seen as an “accountability partner” who provides guidance and support, but the client makes the decisions.
- Making diagnoses and prescribing medical treatments. This is a responsibility that falls on doctors and other health professionals, as well as not performing or interpreting medical tests.
- Prescribing medications and supplements. This responsibility also belongs to other health professionals.
- Providing therapy. A health coach is not a psychotherapist or counselor. While they may offer emotional support, they do not provide mental health therapy or psychological counseling.
- Providing personal training. The health coach is not a personal trainer and does not provide training and fitness plans.
3. How a health coach work
Here, I prefer to write about how I work, even if the main elements of my health coaching are those generally used by health coaches. However, not everyone has had the same professional training (I will talk about it later in this article) and has the same approach.
In working with clients, I follow a clear and structured path, but with flexibility and a “fluid” approach to respecting each one’s uniqueness. The path includes, very briefly, initial assessment, definition of objectives and plan, ongoing support and accountability, measurement of success, and progress.
It takes place during individual sessions, generally lasting 45/60 minutes, for a total number of sessions that depend on the specific case and that are established together at the beginning. During the meetings, in person or online, I use techniques (motivational interviewing, discovery questioning, etc.) and relational skills (conscious presence, active listening, empathy, etc.) that allow me to establish a relationship of trust with the client and support him in the “discovery of himself” by creating the mental and motivational conditions appropriate to make the process effective.
I then provide tools that facilitate the process, such as questionnaires, support documents, and resources that inform and “educate” the client on aspects of health and lifestyle relevant to his case.
In essence, the health coaching relationship I aim to create is a partnership of equals: on one side, the health coach who is the expert in guiding the empowerment and behavior change process; on the other, the client who is, or “becomes,” the expert on his or her own life, values, and health goals.
Why Integrative Health Coaching? In addition to being the name of the professional training I followed (I talk about it at the end of this article), “integrative” is a term that emphasizes the holistic approach that considers the person in his totality by integrating work in the various areas of life relevant to health.
To learn more about the foundations and path of Health Coaching read this article >
4. Who can benefit
A health coach can be effective for anyone who decides to improve the quality of their life in a conscious, informed, and responsible way, a need for improvement that can arise from personal, but also professional or sporting needs.
Here are some examples:
– Increased physical activity
– Improved eating habits
– Stress Management
– Management of chronic conditions (diabetes, hypertension, obesity, fatigue, etc.)
– Prevention of chronic diseases
– Post-injury or post-illness recovery
– Managing life transitions (job changes, menopause, retirement, etc.)
– Need to increase vitality and energy.
5. Professional training and certification
Becoming a health coach requires a solid foundation in health knowledge and coaching skills. Health coaches typically undergo specialized professional training that provides them with the tools and techniques needed to support clients effectively.
There are courses lasting a few weeks, or even on a few weekends, that claim to train health coaches quickly. Moreover, some professionals claim to be health coaches when they have other more specific and complementary certifications (for example, personal trainers or nutritionists) that do not provide the preparation and tools to intervene as a certified training course for health coaches can. It also happens to find online so-called “health coaches” who call themselves such only because of alleged self-training or personal experiences.
Valid, certified, and recognized training programs last a year or more and are professional certification programs that require a combination of coursework, practical experience, intermediate tests, and a comprehensive final exam. Often, to access them, they require other pre-existing certifications (in the medical, psychological, or counseling field) or significant experience in the health sector. Generally, ongoing subsequent training is also required, or at least encouraged, to maintain the certification and stay up to date on the latest research and best practices in the sector. Not all health coaches are the same; not all have the professionalism and the personal nature of continuous improvement. And not all have the right professional ethics.
The best professional health coaching training programs are recognized by the most authoritative certification bodies, such as the National Board for Health & Wellness Coaching (NBHWC), the American Council on Exercise (ACE), and the International Coach Federation (ICF), which validate their adherence to professional standards.
As for me, I trained and certified as an Integrative Health Coach at Duke Health & Well-Being, part of Duke University, which is one of the most prestigious universities in the United States, training recognized by the National Board for Health & Wellness Coaching (NBHWC) and the International Coaching Federation (ICF).