This morning I took the intern to breakfast and among our conversation was many things that I feel would benefit other young coaches in his position.
1. Knowing what level of learning you are on.
There are 7 technical levels of learning and you must know where you are on that continuum. Those levels are:
1. Terminology:
----- If you don’t know the name of an exercise, how the hell are you going to teach it.
2. Being able to do the exercise
----- If you can’t do it efficiently, you can’t teach it
3. Learn the cues to teach the exercise
4. Being able to identify when people are not doing something right or having issues
-----Lots of proper cueing can fix many issues
5. Be able to identify what is causing issue in form
6. Being able to select exercises to fix the cause of the issue
7. Being able to create a proper progression in a well periodized program
These levels of learning are separate from your advancement as a coach. Coaching is a separate and distinct skill from being able to teach and fix someone in an exercise.
The most important skill in coaching is something that cannot be taught:
THE WANT & NEED TO HELP OTHER PEOPLE.
I know many great technically smart people in the lifts and programming and they are shitty coaches because they only care about themselves. Being a great technician and a great coach are two vastly different things.
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Your education sets your foundation for your knowledge but other than the physiology/anatomy/biomechanics/motor learning, the rest you will learn as you go. Much of it will contradict what you learned, but the best skill you can develop is to learn how to learn. That is to learn to think critically about issues and solutions and find the one that best fits the individual situation or client.
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As far as masters degrees go:
Get one in coaching or biomechanics but stay away from ex. phys. This is if you want to be a better coach. There are many masters that will help you in many different ways but to be a better coach, you need to work on coaching.
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If someone writes an article where they did a study and they claim to have the magic exercise or exercises to make you strong, you must ask
1. Are they super strong or have they created any super strong people? If not, then they are talking out their ass. If they did know what they were talking about then you would be talking about their stable of lifters/athletes and not the stupid article they wrote.