Personal training for executives and business owners: a coach who knows your world

Your diary is full, you travel regularly and you eat out more often than you would like. Training is on the list. Then something shifts in your week and it moves to next month.

With directors and business owners, discipline is rarely the issue. Anyone running an organisation or keeping a company afloat knows exactly what it takes to stick with something. It comes unstuck somewhere else: a training approach built around a week you do not have.

What makes personal training different on a full diary?

The exercises barely differ. The difference is in the steering: a coach who knows your diary and your recovery adjusts your load as soon as your week changes, and keeps your rhythm intact.

Why a standard programme falls apart on a full diary

Four sessions a week, fixed days, a steady build in load. On paper it works. It assumes you control your own week. In practice a meeting overruns, a flight appears in your diary, or a child is at home ill on the sofa.

What happens next is predictable. You skip a fortnight, feel guilty and cram the missed session into the one evening you have left. You train heavy on a body that slept badly. A fortnight later you are sitting with a physiotherapist over a shoulder or a lower back.

Meanwhile you sit a great deal. Adults in the Netherlands sit for over nine hours on an average day, and fewer than half meet the national physical activity guidelines.¹ Spend most of your day in meetings or in front of a screen and you are well above that average.

What a coach with life experience brings

Age on its own says little. What counts is whether someone knows your situation from the inside.

I am in my forties, I run a business and I have a family. I know the week where everything lands at once. That changes how I build a plan. Three days of travel call for a different shape of week: a short programme you can do in a hotel room, and a solid session the moment you are back.

Then there is everything beyond sets and repetitions. With a client who has a full diary I look at your sleep, at alcohol over business dinners, at what is on the menu when you eat out four evenings a week, and at how your blood pressure and body composition are developing. That is where the return is for this group.

There is a third point that rarely gets said out loud. You are used to people following your lead. A coach who does the same is of little use to you. You need someone who will tell you that three exercises is enough today, precisely when you want to prove something.

Workload and recovery sit in the same system

In 2025, 20.7 per cent of employees in the Netherlands reported burnout complaints.² Run an organisation and that figure covers your team as well, and how you handle workload yourself carries through. We wrote about that side earlier in a personal training partner for your organisation.

For your own training, a demanding period means this: under heavy workload, recovery is the limiting factor. Volume comes down and intensity matches how you slept that night. Technique gets more attention than weight in a week like that. It takes a coach willing to adjust your load week by week. For how that looks in practice, read Steven's story, from 105 to 90 kilos.

A real example from our practice

"I came in asking whether I could lose ten kilos in four months. The intake was about entirely different things: that I ate out four evenings a week, that I was still reading email after eleven, and that I had not slept through the night in two years. We started with two sessions a week and one agreement with myself: laptop closed at ten. Three months later I was eight kilos lighter. The difference my team noticed was mostly in my head."

What to look for when you choose a coach

Four questions you want to answer with yes:

• Does the trainer ask about your diary and your recovery first, before a programme appears on the table?
  
• Is the plan adjusted in a week that runs differently than planned?
  
• Will the trainer hold you back when you want to push on?
  
• Is more than your weight being measured?

Four times yes and you are in good hands. Even if that trainer is twenty years younger than you. Training after forty also raises the question of how you protect your joints while getting stronger, which we covered earlier in strength training after 40.

Ready to get your rhythm back?

Schedule an intake at de Werf in The Hague, with no obligation. We map your capacity, your lifestyle and your diary, and then decide what fits into your week.

Schedule an intake

Read also:
Our coaching in physical training and burnout and stress.

Sources:
¹ VZinfo (RIVM) - Physical activity among adults
² RIVM - Burnout complaints among working people