How much does experience REALLY matter when hiring an online powerlifting coach?
Can you be a good powerlifting coach if you’ve read all the same books as the top coaches but are new to coaching?
Short answer: nah.
You can probably do about as good as a training app or other algorithmically generated training program, but there’s a HUGE gap between being “book smart” in coaching and having the soft skills required to really tailor a program to a lifter.
From a lifter’s perspective, hiring a newbie coach in the above scenario would probably be more expensive than just buying a monthly subscription to an app.
On the other hand, a truly experienced coach would develop a sense of intuition about how they design a training approach (notice how I didn’t say “program”?).
For example: on paper, someone could miss 300 lbs on a bench press for a set of 5. A coach can take into account all the peripheral factors OUTSIDE of the gym that could contribute to this. Maybe said lifter had mismanaged nutrition on the day leading into the session, or even had a psychological block around that weight that they needed to work on just getting more time with the load to feel confident with it.
On paper, we might assume that the lifter simply wasn’t recovered enough or just wasn’t strong enough to lift the weight but there are SO many more factors that go into things other than that. Anybody who wants to dispute this should probably go train for another 5 years🙂
Having been coaching powerlifting full time for 9 years now, I look back at what I was doing when I started and cringe.
Looking back just 5 years ago, I still shake my head at some of the stuff I did, but it was definitely better.
Heck, even a year ago there were methods that I used, ways I communicated, etc that could stand to be further refined.
And you know what? In another 5 years, I’m 100% certain I’ll look back on what I’m doing now and find imperfections in my system.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the difference between a good and a GREAT coach is how much they care. As a coach, if you’re not constantly re-evaluating your processes and looking for areas to improve in order to better tailor your approach to your lifters, you’re not living up to your potential and definitely holding your lifters back from theirs.
Do you agree with the above thought process?
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