How to Choose a Health Coach Training Program

What to look for, what to avoid, and the questions worth asking before you commit

The coaching industry is full of training programs and not all of them are created equal.

Some are rigorous, science-backed, and will prepare you to be an excellent coach. Others are superficial, overpriced, and will leave you entirely underprepared for the actual work. The difference matters, both for your development as a coach and for the clients who will eventually trust you with their time, their money, and some of the most important goals in their lives.

Here's how to tell a good training program apart from a bad one.

Questions to ask yourself before you start

Before you choose a program, it's worth getting clear on a few things about what you actually want from this career:

• What kind of coaching do you want to do?

• What problems are you most passionate about helping people solve?

• Do you want to run your own business, or do you want to be employed as a coach? (These are very different paths, and they may point you toward different training programs)

If you're thinking about becoming a coach for one of these reasons, you might want to reconsider

I talk to a lot of people who are thinking about pursuing a career as a coach, and one thing I've noticed is that there are a lot of misconceptions about what coaches do, what the coaching industry is like, and who makes a great coaching professional.

Here are 4 things people say who are thinking about becoming a coach, but don't actually know what a coach is...

• "I want to be a coach because I love giving advice and helping people figure things out." Coaches are not advice-givers. In fact, neutrality is one of the most important skills in the coaching toolkit. Our job is not to tell clients what to do, it's to help them develop the capacity to make decisions for themselves. A good coach understands that a client is far more likely to follow through on their own idea than on someone else's. Sustainable change comes when clients own their process.

• "I want to be a coach because I went through a big transformation myself, and that experience qualifies me to help others." Lived experience is extremely valuable. Many of the best coaches I know found their way to this work through a personal challenge or transformation, and that experience informs a deep understanding of human capacity for change. But lived experience alone doesn't make someone an effective coach. No two clients share the same experience, history, or context, and the skill of coaching is knowing how to flex and adapt to each individual person you work with, not to apply your own journey as the template you'll guide others through.

• "I want to be a coach because I know so much about health and wellness! If people just had the right information, they'd change." A lack of knowledge is rarely the reason why someone hasn't yet changed their behavior. We all know, for example, that flossing daily is good for our gum health, and yet... Are you doing it every day? Coaching is effective not because coaches deliver information, but because coaches walk alongside clients across the full spectrum of ambivalence, experimentation, setbacks, and change. Education and information alone are very rarely what's missing.

• "I want to be a coach because I'm a positive, motivating person, and that's what coaching is about." While coaching does take a strengths-based approach with roots in positive psychology, coaching is not inherently positive. It's also important to understand that positivity and motivation are not the same thing, and that external motivation is far less powerful than intrinsic motivation. Effective coaching holds space for the full range of human emotion, not just the highs. Trying to mobilize someone toward change without honoring that full context of their lived experience often does more harm than good.

Being a coach is more nuanced than passion, knowledge, lived experience, and a positive attitude (though all of those things do matter). The coaches who build highly effective practices are the ones who cultivate curiosity, empathy, openness, and a real comfort with not knowing. Our role is not to ensure a client's success, but to invite them to grow into their own capacity for self-leadership — to become, in a sense, their own coach.

If that speaks to you and makes you feel excited, then coaching might be the right career path for you.

Coach training programs I recommend

If you want to sit for the NBHWC board exam and earn your NBC-HWC credential — which I strongly recommend — you need to complete an NBHWC-approved training program. The NBHWC maintains a list of approved programs on their website and that list is the most useful place to start your search.

NBHWC-approved programs meet specific standards for curriculum content, training hours, practice sessions, and the practical skills assessment (PSA). They're not all the same in approach or format, but they've all cleared a set of standards that help maintain the professional credibility of the coaching field.

I've taught in four NBHWC-approved coach training programs and have a deep familiarity with what rigorous training actually looks like. Based on my direct experience and knowledge of the field, here are the programs I recommend to coaches who are thinking about entering the field (in no particular order).

• San Diego Mesa College

• Real Balance Global Wellness Services

• AFPA Certified Master Health and Wellness Coach (affiliate link)

• University of Houston

• Open Source Wellness

• Pediatric Health Coach Academy

• Health Coach Institute Advanced Health Coach (affiliate link)

• Healthy Gamer

• Wave

• Headspace

My general recommendation: Choose a program that is NBHWC-approved and has faculty who are actively practicing coaches. Don't choose a program based primarily on cost, convenience, or how good the Instagram ads are.

Red flags to watch out for

Some patterns in the coaching training space should make you slow down and reconsider:

• Programs that promise income outcomes. "Earn six figures as a health coach!" is a marketing claim, not a credentialing standard. Run. Fast. Earning six figures as a health coach is absolutely possible, but it's exceedingly rare for a new coach to make that kind of money.

• Certifications that take less than a weekend to complete. Becoming a skilled coach takes years. Getting started requires training hours, a lot of practice, and practical skills assessments. A two-day certificate might be a great way to make sure you like coaching, but it's not enough to learn the skills required to offer coaching to paying clients.

• Programs that aren't NBHWC-approved but claim equivalent credibility. The NBHWC approval process exists for a reason. Programs that bypass it while claiming to be equivalent are telling you something important, especially if they're "accredited" by a program that the course created invented (yes, unfortunately this is a real thing).

• Heavy focus on selling supplements, products, labs, or a specific protocol. Coaching is not a vehicle for product sales. A training program that blurs this line is not teaching you coaching skills. Coaches do not prescribe supplements, diagnose conditions, interpret labs, or write functional protocols. If that's the kind of work you want to do, coaching is not the field for you (Sigh, MLM culture in health and wellness coaching is a topic for another day).

• Programs led by coaches without credentials themselves. Who is teaching you how to be a coach? Do they have coaching skills themselves? Are they a skilled teacher and facilitator? Have they spent time working in the space you want to work in (i.e. private practice or corporate wellness)? These questions matter a whole lot -- Make sure you ask them before you spend thousands of dollars on a training program.

Questions worth asking any program

If we were having coffee and chatting about what coach training program to choose, here's what I'd ask you:

• Is this program approved by the NBHWC?

• How is the program structured? Does this match the way you like to learn?

• What's the curriculum based on?

• What's the pass rate for graduates who sit for the NBHWC board exam?

• Does the program offer any support after you graduate, like a board exam prep resource?

• What does the faculty look like? Are they practicing coaches with real credentials?

• Does the faculty in your program have experience working in the kind of environment you want to work in (i.e. private practice or corporate wellness)

• What does it actually cost (all in, including books, program fees, and board exam prep resources)?

Ask Me Anything

Every week, I get messages from people who want to ask me questions about:

→ Choosing a coach training program
→ Switching careers to become a health coach
→ Sitting for the NBHWC Board Exam
→ Working as a coaching professional
→ Building a private practice
→ Getting a job as a coach
→ The coaching industry in general

The thing they all have in common is that they want to talk to a real person with experience in the industry who can answer their question honestly and help them get the information they need.

I absolutely love chatting with new coaches, but I'm not able to accommodate having free 1:1 conversations with the volume of coaching, consulting, and teaching work in my business.

So I've started hosting free small group Ask Me Anything events for people who want to talk to a real person about all things coaching! All you need to do is jot down your questions and I'll answer them during our time together.

This is a live Google Meet event capped at 10 participants to keep the space small and the vibe conversational. I don't record these sessions and I ask that you RSVP only if you can make it live since spots are limited. If you're interested, join the waitlist to be notified of future dates!

I also offer a paid 1:1 Ask Me Anything option for people who prefer to have these conversations 1:1.