What is the difference between a health coach and a functional health coach?
First off, the term health coach is a very broad category of wellness professionals. It’s often an umbrella term used to describe someone who provides a service you can pay to help guide you to a healthier lifestyle. Different types of health coaches have different types of training’s, schooling, knowledge, approaches, styles, and their services they offer will also vary from coach to coach. But at the very base of who would be considered a health coach is again someone you pay that will offer you ways to better your life in a healthier way.
Now, when you add the term functional, this brings things to a deeper level. Depending on their training, different certifications have different titles that go along with them. But when you see the term functional attached in there, that is saying they’re trained to further uncover deeper rooted issues in the body. Then at that point their protocols offered are much more tailored to the individuals needs and deeper, long term healing is likely to occur.
A “health coach” is going to likely recommend general healthy lifestyle tips, like foods that are healthier to eat, removing junk/ processed foods, exercising, etc. All of this is of course great stuff and can be very helpful. The downfall is when you stop there, clients will likely hit a plateau because there is still uncovered deeper root issues that must be addressed properly to get back to optimal health and getting into a better position of reversing symptoms, disorders and diseases.
At this point the term practitioner is better suited than coach. There is a higher level of “practicing” holistic medicine. It is common for training programs that have a functional approach use the terms functional and practitioner in their certifications. This sounds obviously, but just really trying to break it down for you all.
All these different terms/ training’s/ certifications/ titles can get SUPER confusing, which is why it might be hard to pick who might suit your needs best. Most health coaches/ practitioners offer free consultations to discuss if working together would be a good fit. Also, most health coaches have a niche too, so it’s best to ask about that is if that information hasn’t already been provided for you.
Continue reading “Holistic Sumer Explained” to learn about how I fit into all of this.