“Functional training” has been the hot buzzword in the world of Strength and Conditioning for quite some time now. It seems every-where you turn you can find some coaches fawning over the latest and greatest functional exercises they picked up at a clinic. If I ask them to describe this exercise to me, and they start their reply with “First you get a bosu ball” or “Lay down on your back”, I abruptly stop them. They have been misinformed.

What most people call “functional training” are really physical therapy or rehabilitation protocols. These protocols have been used for years to take people from an injured state to normal function. In contrast, the strength coach takes the athlete from normal function to a level of high performance. These are two very distinctly different phases of development. They are different because each phase seeks dramatically different results. Physical therapy according to the World Confederation for Physical Therapy is “the provision of services in circumstances where movement and function are threatened by the process of ageing or that of injury or disease.” Whereas the main objective of training for sport according to Dr. Zatsiorsky is “to induce specific adaptations in order to improve sport performance results”. As you can see by definition they are nothing alike.

How did we come to this point in time where in so many cases strength and conditioning has melded together with rehabilitation? In order to provide some answers to this question we must explore the roots of the strength coach profession.

When the National Strength and Conditioning Coaches (NSCA) was founded in 1978 they had a membership of 76 strength coaches. As of today it has grown to over 30,000 members all vying for a piece of the estimated 4.1 billion dollar sports performance training pie. In 1985 the NSCA adopted the Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist (CSCS) program. The purpose for this according to the NSCA Certification Commission was to “identify individuals who possess the knowledge and skills to design and implement safe and effective strength and conditioning programs for athletes in a team setting”. When the NSCA surveyed its over 21,000 CSCS members they found that the overwhelming majority of the growth in CSCS certifications, 45%, have come from the world of rehabilitation and fitness. Strength and Conditioning Coaches made up only 7% of the CSCS membership.

NSCA has taken the strength coach from the bowels of the dingy weight room to near celebrity status. The NSCA became the driving force for having certified strength coaches at every institution that had anything to do with training of any sort. Nearly every school, University, and health club required some kind of certification for their coaches. The strength coach had become an integral part of the training lexicon, and everybody needed one.

The NSCA was the driving force behind standardizing the requirements for being a strength coach. The NSCA made the schools understand the importance of having a “certified” coach who specialized in strength and conditioning. This created many job opportunities that previously did not exist. On the surface, this seemed like a good situation for everybody involved. The schools got a professional coach to implement a strength program and the sport coaches had one less thing to worry about. The strength coaches could finally get paid for what they had been doing for free in many cases and the NSCA made money certifying people as coaches. There was one problem; the NSCA did such a good job promoting the importance of being certified that there were not enough strength coaches to go around.

There were a small amount of progressive thinking schools that already had programs with coaches in place. Other schools did not. In fact, there weren’t many places to go to learn how to develop athletes. The first coaches had come from the world of Weightlifting or Heavy Athletics. These were men who truly understood how to develop strength and power. They spent the better part of their lives in weight rooms as both athletes and coaches. They immersed themselves in the “iron subculture”. They understood what it meant to be strong and powerful because they spent their lives in pursuit and realization of this goal. Where were schools going to get strength coaches?

The Athletic Trainer
Schools already had people who “trained” their athletes; they were called athletic trainers (AT’s). These were the people who worked under the team physician and specialized in the evaluation, treatment, management, and rehabilitation of injuries. They played a key role in helping athletes recover from injuries. There was not much job turnover for AT’s, making athletic training jobs at the college level scarce. Unfortunately, if you were not the head or assistant AT on the staff you did not make very good money. In fact, schools used students studying to be AT’s on their staff. This allowed the students to get experience (a little scary for the athlete if you ask me) and it allowed the schools to save money by not having to pay for their services.

Things started to look up for the AT’s. They realized that they could go from severely underpaid and underappreciated AT’s to slightly better paid and slightly more appreciated strength coaches. All they had to do was pass a test and they could transform themselves over the course of a few hours. Across the country, AT’s rushed out and got their strength coaching certification and over night they became certified strength coaches.

When it was time to hire strength coaches the schools looked to the NSCA for guidance because they had set the standard for what strength coaching should be. That standard was to be certified as a CSCS. Unfortunately, most institutions had no idea what strength coaches were supposed to do except to “train” their athletes and to possess a certification.

The hiring process was generally handled by a combination of the medical staff, administrators, and sport coaches. None of these groups truly understood what a strength coaches should and shouldn’t be. They could not differentiate between athletic training and training for sport. Therefore, they could not differentiate between true strength coaches who understood how to elicit a peak performance from an athlete, and AT’s who only understood how to return people to “normal function”. Because the pool of applicants was heavily weighted with AT’s turned strength coaches, there was a huge influx of strength coaching jobs being filled by unqualified applicants.

The Physical Therapist
Around the same time that the AT’s were gobbling up strength coaching positions at the collegiate level, physical therapists saw opportunities to capitalize on the overwhelming demand for strength coaches, as well.
PT’s generally operated out of privately owned facilities that were equipped for the purpose of rehabilitation. They saw patients who were referred by physicians. The physicians would write therapy prescriptions for as many weeks as the insurance companies would allow. If anybody has ever tried to get reimbursed by an insurance company, you know how difficult it can be. Insurance reimbursement is how PT clinics get paid. It becomes a harrowing experience when you’re waiting for dozens of reimbursement checks so you can make payroll.

In the 1990’s, PT’s began to realize the revenue potential of providing strength and conditioning services for their clients. It was a perfect fit for the PT business; a 100% cash revenue stream. No longer would they have to rely solely on the insurance companies for their livelihood. PT’s ran out and got certified. Overnight you had so-called certified “strength coaches” in every neighborhood. The consumers didn’t know the difference, they had never heard of strength coaches before. All they saw were the CSCS. According to the second S in the acronym, that made them a “specialist” and that was enough for them.

To be continued……
“Dys”functional Training (Part 2)
The Death of the True Strength Coach
How we went from the Back Squat to the Bosu ball

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Tags: Training Articles by Sean
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