The Pros Are Real, and I'm Not Going to Pretend Otherwise

Let me get this out of the way first, because half the people reading this are already forming a response in their heads.

Online coaching is the best thing that has happened to access in this sport.

You can work with a great coach from anywhere. Doesn't matter if you live in a town with one commercial gym that won't let you use chalk. Doesn't matter if the closest powerlifting gym is three hours away. You can hire someone who actually knows what they're doing and get real direction.

You can get a program built around your needs. Your schedule. Your injuries. Your equipment. Your goals. That used to be a luxury reserved for people who happened to live near the right room.

You can send videos, get feedback, track progress, and skip years of guessing.

That matters. I'm not going to minimize it.

When I was coming up, if you didn't have access to strong people, you had magazines and whatever the biggest guy in your gym believed. Some of that was good. A lot of it was garbage. And you had no way to tell the difference until you'd wasted three years finding out.

I spent fifteen years training and learning before I ever walked into Westside Barbell. I took classes. I went to seminars. I talked to coaches. I put in the hours under the bar. And when I finally started training with Louie Simmons and the morning crew, I realized most of what I thought I knew was bullshit. My education was just starting.

A good online coach can save a lifter a decade of that. That's real value, and I'd never argue against it.

But that's not the whole story.

What the Room Looks Like Now

Walk into most gyms with a powerlifting population and watch what happens.

Everybody in the same room, everybody training alone.

The program is on a phone. The feedback is in a text thread. The accountability lives in a spreadsheet that gets a green checkmark when the session is done. The coach is real, the coaching might be excellent, and none of it exists inside those four walls.

Nobody is calling depth.

Nobody is putting a hand on your upper back and telling you where the bar drifted.

Nobody is telling you the set looked like shit.

And here's the part that bothers me most. Nobody is teaching anybody anything. Not how to spot. Not how to wrap knees. Not how to load a bar fast and safely. Not how to hand off a bench press. Not how to run a warm-up room at a meet or read a lifter's face and know he's got one attempt left in him.

Those skills are being lost in real time.

Online coaching didn't do that on purpose. But the effect is real. Training got so individualized that the room stopped functioning as a room.

What a Crew Gives You That a Program Cannot

I've written before that you are a product of your environment. I was lucky. I was put into a good training environment early on, and I took it for granted because I didn't know any other way to do it.

A good environment reduces limitations. It raises expectations. It reinforces technique. It builds the right patterns and kills the wrong ones. It corrects bad behavior before that behavior becomes who you are as a lifter.

None of that comes from a document.

Here's what the room gives you.

Standards

At Westside, the rules were never posted on a wall. Nobody sat you down and explained them. You learned them by being there and watching what happened to people who broke them.

Don't be late. Ever. I watched a top-five-ranked lifter, a guy with the most explosive squatting strength I had ever seen, get thrown out for being five minutes late one time. He'd been training with us for over two years. That was it. Gone.

I was part of a vote to remove a lifter who pulled 800 and was close to his elite total because, on one max-effort day, his effort wasn't there, and he didn't back it up for the rest of the session. One bad session. The vote was unanimous because we all knew that kind of thing spreads like wildfire.

Was that harsh? Absolutely.

Was it effective? I watched run-of-the-mill gym rats walk in there and hit elite totals inside twelve months. Guys who came in with nothing special. Benches are going up a hundred pounds. Same in the squat and pull.

You don't have to run your gym like that. Most shouldn't. But understand what that standard was actually doing. It was making it impossible to be casual about something everyone in the room had decided was serious.

A spreadsheet cannot make you serious. Twelve people who will notice can.

Accountability

Not the checkmark kind. The kind where you show up flat, someone sees it in your first warm-up set, and says something.

Your attitude sets the attitude of everyone around you, and theirs sets yours. Go in fired up, and the whole crew comes up with you. Go in feeling like garbage, and odds are somebody else is having a great day, and it rubs off on you.

That only works if there's a crew to rub off on you.

Alone with headphones, a bad day is just a bad day. It compounds. Nobody catches it.

Experience You Can't Buy

Anyone can spot a lift. Anyone can give a lift-off.

What lifters actually need is someone who will coach them. Someone standing there telling you to get your lats tight, drive your feet, stop letting the bar drift forward. Not a rah-rah session. Coaching.

I've watched thousands of training videos over the years. The most common problem I see isn't programming. It's a technique. And what I always wonder is why the guy handing off the bar isn't saying anything.

Video review catches some of this. Video review is a day late. The guy standing next to you catches it on the rep.

Community

Powerlifting is not a team sport. But every strong lifter I've known was built by a group.

One of the Westside rules I remember best: make those less than you better than you.

Think about what that does to a room over ten years. Everybody's job includes bringing up the person behind them. That's how the knowledge moves. That's the whole thing we mean by Live, Learn, Pass On. It isn't a slogan we put on a shirt. It's a description of how strength actually gets transmitted from one generation of lifters to the next.

You cannot pass anything on to a tripod.

The Part Nobody Is Talking About

Here's what worries me long term.

We are producing a generation of lifters who can execute a program at a very high level and cannot handle a lifter at a meet.

They've never wrapped somebody's knees. Never given a lift-off to a guy taking a real attempt. Never had to make a call in the warm-up room when the flight is moving faster than expected. Never learned how to keep somebody calm before a third attempt or how to tell them the truth after they missed one.

Those aren't side skills. Learning to see other people lift is how you learn to lift. You develop an eye. You start to understand leverage, bracing, and bar path by watching 30 different bodies solve the same problem. Then you go take your own attempt, and you know things you couldn't have gotten any other way.

Take that away, and you get lifters who only understand their own body, only from the inside, only through a phone screen.

And when they're forty and beat up and want to give something back to the sport, what exactly are they going to pass on?

What the Good Online Coaches Are Already Doing

I want to be fair here, because plenty of online coaches are excellent and know all of this better than I do.

The good ones understand that direction is the product. They're selling you a plan, an eye, and a decision-making process. They're not claiming to be your training environment, because they can't be.

I don't offer online coaching. Never have, never will. Not because I think it's a bad model, but because I know I can't do it anywhere near as well as I can in person, and doing it badly would be a disservice to the people who actually want to learn.

So take this from someone with zero money in the game.

A few things worth knowing.

Be open with your gym about who your coach is. Gym owners and experienced lifters are not offended by your hiring someone. What frustrates us is spending time helping a lifter whose coach disagrees, so the help gets discarded, and someone else in the room who needed that time didn't get it. If we know who your coach is, we often already know their methods, and we can reinforce what they're trying to do with you. Say something. You won't hurt anyone's feelings.

The best coach available to you might already be in the building. I could list twenty gyms owned by guys who were very good or great in their era, who have spent decades coaching thousands of lifters. It boggles my mind how many lifters walk right past that person on the way to the rack and open a phone to run a template written by someone with five years in the sport.

Here's a vetting tip. If a coach is spraying unsolicited technique advice all over other people's posts, odds are good they're not who you want. I've never understood offering online technical advice to someone who didn't ask for it.

And know that the medium is not the message. The platforms keep changing. Magazines, forums, blogs, videos, whatever comes next. What doesn't change is that people can tell whether you've actually spent time on the floor coaching, spotting, and failing under a bar. Build your digital presence. Also, keep your hands chalked and your shoes planted where strength actually gets made.

The coaches who last are the ones who can work both. The floor and the feed.

How to Get Both

None of this is an argument to fire your coach. It's an argument to stop letting the coach be your entire training world.

Practical version.

1. Find a strength-friendly gym even if it costs you thirty minutes of driving. Size means nothing. Ten serious people beat seventy people there for social hour. Search for local gyms, find their social media, check their hashtags, and see who actually trains there. The best gyms come from referrals, so the closer you get to that network, the more you'll learn.

2. Tell your coach you train with a crew. A good one will adapt and might even be relieved. A coach who gets territorial about you having live eyes on your lifts is telling you something.

3. Trade the tripod for a human being at least one session a week. Same session, same lifts, just with someone watching who will tell you the truth. Start with your heaviest day.

4. Learn to wrap, spot, and hand off. Ask somebody who knows. Most experienced lifters are happy to teach this, and almost nobody asks anymore. It's a two-hour investment that permanently changes how you see the sport. If you don't own a pair of knee wraps to practice with, get some and learn on somebody else's knees first.

5. Work a meet, don't just lift in one. Go handle somebody. Load. Run attempts. Carry the bag of wraps and sleeves. You'll learn more in one day in a warm-up room than in six months of watching your own footage.

6. Make somebody less experienced than you better. That's the entry fee for being in a room. It's also the fastest way to find out what you actually understand versus what you've only read.

7. Be worth having around. Put your stuff away. Don't walk in front of a squatter. Don't dump the bar. Don't spend the whole session on your phone. Help when you can. The lifters who get the most out of a gym are the ones the gym wants there.

Nobody Gets Strong Alone

A coach can write the plan.

A crew teaches you how to become a powerlifter.

Those are two different products, and we've spent about a decade acting as if the first replaces the second. It doesn't. The best online coaches in the world are giving you direction, and direction is worth paying for. But the standards, the accountability, the eye, the experience, and the community only exist in a room with other people.

The answer is not getting rid of online coaching. That ship sailed, and I wouldn't want it back.

The answer is to refuse to let it replace the room. Combine good coaching with a strong training environment, and you get something neither one produces on its own.

Because powerlifting is an individual sport.

But nobody gets strong alone.

What do you feel online coaching has helped or hurt the most? I want to hear it.

Live, Learn, Pass On.

Dave Tate / elitefts