elitefts™ Sunday Edition
I’d like to preface this article by expressing my tremendous gratitude toward elitefts™, the knowledgeable and passionate coaches on here, and fellow authors of mine who sacrifice their time and energy by graciously passing on their knowledge to coaches, athletes, and lifters throughout the world. The thoughts I'm about to share below aren't in any way influenced by anyone else and are purely reflections of my somewhat brief coaching career. They came to mind as I was ensnared in Philadelphia-area traffic while commuting home after a long day of work.
1. Learn to appreciate.
Along the first few lines of my brief foreword, I think we, as coaches and fitness professionals, need to recognize the contributions of those who came before us. Their contributions set the foundation for the evolution of the strength and conditioning and fitness industries. Brilliant coaches out there continue to help our industry grow and gain legitimacy in the eyes of medical and allied health professionals as well as sport coaches, athletes, and parents.
From a foundational standpoint, the works of Seyle, Bompa, Siff, Zatsiorsky, and Verkhoshansky greatly impacted our understanding of the science behind training, helping revolutionize the study of exercise science, which, years ago, was blindly lumped under the umbrella of physical education at many universities.
From a coaching standpoint, we owe an immense appreciation to the great minds who uncannily translated their understanding of science and applied it to their work in the trenches. Coming to mind immediately are the names of Louie, Gayle Hatch, Charlie Francis, and Boyd Epley. Countless others have aided in the advancement of our field, which our contemporaries, such as the coaches’ roster on elitefts™ and other training luminaries such as the Cresseys, Brunos, and Brets of the world, have considerably helped the advancement of our industry and have helped cement the gaps that fall between theory and real world application. Many of these aforementioned individuals have forgotten more than we’ll ever learn in our professional lifetimes.
Anyone who earns a living as a strength and conditioning coach, fitness professional, athlete, or anyone who spends his waking free time in the trenches in dogged pursuit of personal bests and a healthily functioning and aesthetically appealing body needs to appreciate those who bust their asses off to empower us with the knowledge to do so. To steal an idiom from Sir Isaac Newton, we, as coaches, lifters, and athletes, are “merely standing on the shoulders of giants” who came before us.
2. Pursue your passion and enjoy what you do.
As recent as five years ago, I was the miserable nine-to-fiver, slaving forty hours per week in the bowels of corporate America. While my pay sucked, it paled in comparison to how thankless my job was. I had to endure the misery of having to don a shirt and tie everyday while I was tucked away in a remote cubicle. To the division of my former company, I was merely a number. Few of the higher ups knew or even cared that I, like the hundreds that the division employed, even existed. Commonalities with my coworkers were mainly centered around the mutual hatred of our jobs, and water cooler talk was limited to a few of my coworkers occasionally jeering me that I had to stuff a twenty-inch neck into a seventeen-inch, off the rack, collared shirt for eight hours a day or more, which incidentally, was the only link to ever talking about training with any of my largely sedentary coworkers.
Needless to say, I had an epiphany. The awful mixture of a crap job with low pay, which barely provided me enough money to rent a Section 8 caliber apartment that I was forced to share with an equally miserable girlfriend at the time, and the void in my life created by the inability to truly help others put me over the edge. I assembled a plan of action that involved training people, pursuing a certification, and going back to school.
While the money isn’t the greatest, the passion to help others achieve success fuels my fire each day. That’s why I got into coaching and that’s what I love. My advice to others is to discover what they enjoy doing and set out and turn their passion into a career.
3. Remove toxic people from your life.
If you willingly associate with people who drag you down with corrosive attitudes, ditch them immediately. If those surrounding you question your passion, doubt the successful achievement of your goals, and criticize your plan to accomplish them, jettison them faster than an airplane expels blue ice.
4. Grow thicker skin.
As it pertains to the strength and conditioning and fitness industries, if a fellow coach or colleague drags you down (I’m talking about getting flamed on a blog or in a forum, or being the lucky recipient of a condescending email in which you’re made to feel like a two-foot tall leper with Al Qaida affiliations), keep on truckin’.
Keep in mind that most people don’t understand what a strength coach does or what a “trainer” is exactly, which is why many medical professionals, sport coaches, and rehabilitation professionals think they can step in and do our jobs. That is if our jobs consisted of counting reps and wiping down benches. Anyone can do that. Similarly, any strength coach or personal trainer can hastily respond to the mistreatment from others or a person’s misunderstanding of what we do.
Also, one needs to bite his tongue when dealing with our industry’s governing bodies, which can be abrasive in their dealings with professionals at times. Recently, I was precluded from joining a professional organization and deemed ineligible to sit for a certifying examination for another. Guess what? I took both pieces of news in stride, going about my day, which entailed writing programs, reading, and coaching my ass off, things that most elitist gatekeepers aren’t doing on a daily basis.
It is important that you develop thick skin if you want to last in the coaching business and in the fitness industry, which would give working in politics or investment banking a run for their money as to what industry is the most hostile and cutthroat. If you have thick skin, you’re less likely to wash out or lose your professional cool, which can permanently tarnish your repetition.
5. Quit complaining about your situation.
If your employment situation, or lack thereof, relationship situation, or lack thereof, or transportation situation, or lack thereof, is causing you strife, complaining won’t improve it one bit. Every time I hear a strength coach complain about his job, I cringe.
C’mon, you wear shorts to work. You can work out on your breaks and you willingly accepted a job that constitutes working horrendous hours for average to below average pay. 
At the end of the day, you’re able to shape not just someone’s physique, but his or her outlook on competition and life in general as well. Few careers afford you the ability to make a profound impact on someone’s life.
If your facility doesn’t have enough equipment, your department has a limited budget, or other logistics are stacked against your favor, you have to get creative and perform your job as best you can. Complaining will hinder your ability to do so. Great coaches don’t complain. They make the best of their situation by adapting to the set of circumstances they’ve been dealt.
6. Screaming doesn’t equal coaching.
If an athlete isn’t receptive to screaming, it doesn’t mean he's weak and pathetic and would be best suited to perform a weekly Curves circuit. Instead, it means that your approach isn’t working. Try coaching more and screaming less, unless you’re cheering on your athletes on their way to a PR or alongside them in a grueling conditioning session.
7. Nothing is truly “cutting edge.”
Our foundational knowledge slowly evolves, meaning that many coaches share similar academic backgrounds. For instance, most coaches know the basics regarding muscle cell structure and the permutations to muscle cells, which ignite a series of physiological responses. And I’d hope that most coaches understand the fundamentals behind getting stronger and preventing injury and conditioning and nutrition.
However, there’s a contingent of coaches who are unwilling to share their knowledge with others, as they see themselves as trendsetters and far ahead of science. I contend that most of these coaches are full of it and perhaps a bit paranoid. Bear in mind that the only thing that differs them from us is the interpretation and application of existing knowledge. Strength coaches and personal trainers are essentially educators, so why obscure knowledge from people even if it truly is cutting edge?
I hope you enjoyed the thoughts that I concocted about our industry while stuck in gridlock after work one day. Feel free to add some of your own reflections as a coach or personal trainer.
