The Pitfalls of Coaching With Too Much Pride
/(3-5 Minute Read)
As I was transitioning from training elite military units and personal training powerlifters - to high school and college female athletes, I had to do my research. A lot of research. Even though I was definitely qualified to train elite athletes, I just was not confident in training female athletes. I read and read and read and attended many clinics. I found college strength coaches who worked with female athletes and I would email them random questions. Many responded and were an integral part of creating my basic foundational program for female athletes.
So after my first year of training my confidence grew and I found that using many of my same programming I use with football teams (powerlifting bench, back squats, power cleans, straight-bar deadlifts and of course curls, I could use with my female athletes. My girls were getting stronger. It felt great. Why would I need to adjust what I am doing?
Then a couple years later I had an athlete who was diagnosed with spondylosis; any kind of loaded squat or loaded pull would send sharp pains in the low back. Of course I knew how to approach this. I was this great young strength coach and I knew exactly how I was going to attack this...setback. I had the athlete just lower the weight and changed up the foot placements. With a little help from luck, and of course because I was this great strength coach, the pain went away. However, a few weeks later it came back. I lowered the weight and readjusted again. This went on for a few months until I was at a loss. This was a freshman athlete who we knew was going to be a big time player one day (she ended up a D1 All-American and Pro athlete) so I couldn't risk injury. However, I needed them to get stronger. So I went back to reading and reading some more. I researched for hours each day until I finally found a possibility of the issue. This was the start of what we eventually referred to as “ABF WAY.”
Up until this point I had been blindly, partly because of my ignorance and partly because of my pride, having athletes go through lifts as they were starting in the NFL. Not too long after we found out about this athlete's spondy, other issues started popping up with more athletes. Nothing big, but just nagging little things that hindered them from going up weight on some lifts. I'm not quite sure if these issues were there before and I just didn't see them or if they were just being "covered up" by our training and had finally hit their threshold. Either way this was the beginning of a new philosophy of training. And to do this I needed help!
Help. That is something that is tough to swallow for many people, especially coaches. But at this point in my career I had to develop...humility. Something I have never really thought about in regards to my job and career. I didn't know it all and I needed help to get to the place I wanted to be as a coach. It is okay to say that you were wrong. I was wrong. I didn't do it deliberately. I didn't intend to have my athletes suffer from nagging injuries, but it happened. What I was doing in the weight room was wrong. This is something that many coaches experience. None of us, whether it is on the field, court or in the gym, set out to be wrong. We are doing the best we can with the knowledge we have. My biggest step in this process was to change where I was getting my knowledge. As I mentioned, up until this point, most of my sources were from the power-lifting and military units. What else did I really need to learn about these? I had been doing it for a decade. I knew this stuff. I needed something new. I needed something out of my box.
A humble person recognizes their limitations and welcomes correction and critique. We are human and learning how to take criticism is no different than learning how to throw a ball. It takes practice. Over the next couple of years I researched topics outside of my typical area and stumbled across some of the best resources in the business. I attended Physical Therapy seminars, spent time working with strength coaches that were physical therapists, I shadowed different college strength coaches and emailed dozens more. What I found was that I needed to train my athletes like humans. Just because they play soccer or basketball or whatever sport, doesn't mean that since they play they can automatically jump in and train like a seasoned veteran. They had to be developed. They had to be developed just like you develop them on the field and court.
We had to start small and then add a little more, then a little more. It was tough at first because I stopped doing the big lifts that we had made a staple in our program. I had to learn progressions and learn how to strengthen the athlete from the inside out instead of the opposite like so many coaches do. I had to focus on technique instead of the weight. Over a decade later, we still train that way and it is what has made us standout. It is why our athletes have been the best in the area and went on to become elite champions. It is why our athletes step into a college as a freshman and are better trained and prepared than most of the upperclassmen. We finally got back to those big lifts (well most, not all), but we ensure that our athletes are prepared to perform those lifts, by performing progressions and regressions of the big lifts.
Remember to check your pride at the door. Your goal is to make your kids better. Your goal is to keep them on the field or court. Your goal is to help them constantly progress. Sometimes that takes us coaches to say we were wrong and learn something new. At the end of the day, it is about your kids; their safety and their success, not our pride.