Most strength coaches didn’t pop out of the womb wanting to become a strength coach. They were involved in competitive sports until they couldn’t do their sport anymore. Then the specter of joining the ranks of the 9-5 death march was too frightening to comprehend, so becoming a strength coach provided a way of being around what you love and earn a living to boot.
When we start out, our knowledge base is narrow to say the least. We train everybody like we trained. If you were a Football player everybody got trained like a Football player. As for me, when I started my career as a strength coach at Los Angeles City College everybody got trained like a Weightlifter because that’s what I was. Because of my enthusiasm, and the fact that the first day I met with the basketball team, at six foot and 250lbs (with a bullet), I grabbed a basketball stood under the basket and dunked the ball with two hands. They instantly bought in to what I was selling. In my second year, we did win the schools first ever State Championship, however, I tortured those poor guys. At that point in my career the only formal coaching I had been exposed to was from my Weightlifting coach Bob Takano. Up until that point I had been a self-taught coach. All I knew was, I was a shit load stronger, faster, and more powerful then I ever was and I wanted my players to experience that as well. However, the training I was being put through by Bob was to prepare me to be able to perform six lifts, six years from then, at the Olympic Trials, for a shot at competing at the Olympic Games in Sydney. That is a far cry from training to be able to play a 30 game season over a few months. One of the worst things that happened, as far as my strength and conditioning career is concerned, was the success I had early on. It validated what I was doing, even though what I was doing was wrong.
As the years passed, I attended Grad school where I studied and learned Biomechanics and Exercise Phys. I already had a strong science background from my undergraduate studies. I became exposed to different coaches and their methodologies, continued to train full time as an Olympic Weightlifter, and read everything about athletic development I could get my hands on. Because there is no formal coaching developmental program in this country, I had to create my own. I followed the model that the former Soviet Union used. Their training and preparation of coaches set them apart from the rest of the world. Coaches in the Soviet Union were looked upon in the highest esteem; much like a doctor or a professional athlete is in this country. This was the only system at the time, created to develop professional coaches. And that’s what I wanted to be more than anything else.
Along this journey I learned some valuable lessons, which I share with all the young strength Coaches that contact me for advice or who spend time mentoring with me. Now, I will share them with you.
• Find a good Olympic Weightlifting coach and train as a Weightlifter.
There is nothing more important in sports than the ability to get to the point of attack before your opponent. This is the ability to produce force quickly, better known as being powerful. Regardless of what personal trainers like Juan Carlos Banana, and coaches like Louie Simmons say, there are no better tools for developing power and athleticism in athletes. I respect the heck out of Louie Simmons. I have read as many of his writings as I could get my hands on. He is a very well educated coach and there is nobody better in the world at getting people strong however, developing athletes is more than being brutally strong. I am not bashing Louie or his methods, all I saying is the science does not support his methods as a better means of developing athleticism. Please, do not believe what I say, find out for yourselves. As far as Banana goes, I have nothing constructive to say, so Ill move on.
If you are going to be a strength coach you must have more than a rudimentary knowledge of the Olympic Lifts. You must train as a Weightlifter does and become proficient with the lifts. Not necessarily for the purpose of becoming a competitive Weightlifter, but to immerse yourself into this world in order to truly understand how to perform not only the snatch and clean and jerk but all the other exercises that go along with the developmental process of becoming a Weightlifter. The exercises you will master will make up the vast majority of the exercises you will need in order to develop athletes properly. By mastering these exercises in this environment, you will have developed a skill set that will set you apart from the rest of the pack. You will have developed a “coaching eye”. This is the art of coaching, and the part you can’t learn from a book. It’s the ability to truly see what is going on during a lift and be able to give proper feed back to the athlete. It allows you to not only use what you see, but what you hear as well. You will know by the way a lift sounds if it was performed properly. Because of this total immersion, you develop an innate sense of what efficient movement and energy flow is supposed to look and feel like. It becomes visceral and burns permanently into your minds eye. When something you experience in the weightroom is incongruent to what you innately know to be correct, you are instantly able to make the proper adjustments with your athletes. There is a direct correlation that exists between the coach’s ability to affectively teach these movements, the efficiency an athlete shows with these movements and improved athleticism. This is an ability that can only be developed by watching, performing, and paying attention to thousands of lifts.
• Go to school
Learn biology, biochemistry, anatomy and physiology, exercise physiology, biomechanics and sports psychology, at the very least. If you are training humans then you should know how they work from the cellular level on out. Its not enough to understand what you can see happening, you have to understand what you cant see happening. The training stress we put on our athletes have very specific effects, which cause very specific changes to the body. These changes begin at the cellular level and work outward to what we can see. If you don’t understand the effects training stress can have on an athlete, beginning at the cellular level, how can you effectively create training programs that elicit the changes you are seeking?
• Seek out other coaches and learn as much as you can from them, even if they are terrible.
Learning what not to do is as valuable as learning what to do. Don’t make the mistake of spending your entire career learning from one coach. The learning process should NEVER stop.
• Coach lots of bad athletes
In the beginning of your career, try to coach as many bad athletes or athletes with physical limitations as you can. This forces you to become an effective problem solver. It is also easier to see problems with poor athletes. Superior athletes, by nature, are very effective at masking their physical shortcomings. This makes it more difficult to diagnose what is limiting their performance.
• Round out your knowledge base
If you have gone through the above steps you will have covered the vast majority of the required pieces in the strength coaching developmental pie. To finish things off, have a basic knowledge of nutrition, recovery methods, and physical therapy. Why only a basic knowledge? These are very involved disciplines, just as strength coaching is. You need just enough knowledge in these areas in order to understand:
1. How they fit into the development pie
2. How they fit into the design of the training programs
3. How to ask intelligent and pertinent questions to the experts of these disciplines in order to get the information you need.
If you’re a professional strength coach, you will not be a professional PT, massage therapist, or nutritionist. There aren’t enough hours in your life to make that happen. Don’t try to be good or mediocre in multiple disciplines, strive to be great in one!
• Develop a professional network
Find a good network of professionals you can work and share information with. Locate massage therapists, chiropractors, orthopedists, nutritionists and sports psychologists that you feel comfortable with and are willing to collaborate with you and each other. You can’t do this by yourself! It takes an entire village to raise an athlete.
There is no one secret training program, seminar or DVD that will give you the key to unlocking the mysteries of athletic development. The only secret is… there is no secret! Coaching is about understanding how and why the body reacts to stress, understanding how your athlete responds and changes while being stressed, and being able to properly manipulate training variables in order to manage the stress and elicit the desired training response.
Its part science, part art and its all magnificent!
Good luck on your voyage!
To enquire about mentor opportunities please contact me at Sean@purestrength.com
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