Roles of a Coach

by Johnny Nguyen, BS, FIT Exercise Director 

Coaching, Training and their Role Dynamics

On any given weekend, millions of coaches suddenly come alive, tuning in to Sports Center in living rooms across the country, barking commands and orders as if they themselves should be coaching the game. On the fields of little league, soccer and touch football games, you find more coaches whose full-time jobs are anything but coaching. Some make great coaches for the kids. Others trade punches in front of them. Then there are high school, college and professional team coaches, and they all vary in talent and effectiveness, from the truly devoted to the drunken has-beens.

Coaches can be great for many reasons, fueled on by wonderful charisma and the tireless capacity to motivate and inspire. They coach by encouragement rather than by ridicule, pushing the individual with positive guidance rather than with demeaning rhetoric. These coaches employ both real-world experience and theoretical knowledge, balancing both appropriately, while keeping an open mind to other training styles, as no one style is the best. These are the coaches that still influence some parts of your life, years or decades later, long after the coach-athlete relationship.

Other coaches, however, are as useful in their coaching position as a lampshade is on the sun. These coaches are placed into the coaching job through the infamous work-placement program called It’s-Who-You-Know-And-Not-What-You-Know. They had “connection” that routed them through personnel, or they once participated in the sport, which helped greased their way in, but neither of which necessarily qualifies them to coach the sport. And yet there they are, barking commands and orders, running the show on dogmatic philosophy and rigid arrogance.

The National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA) is a respected certifying body that requires members to have a college degree (or to be in the process of completing one) in order to test for the Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist (CSCS) certification. Most colleges now require their strength coaches to possess this certification in addition to a college degree, preferably in the exercise sciences. These college strength coaches typically work long hours with lots of travel, but their salaries often don’t match the hours and serious nature of their work.

Training people is a matter that one must take seriously. Strength coaches and personal trainers not only change peoples’ games and lives but also literally change their bodies – they prescribe training programs that cause neurological and organic alterations, occurring under the skin but visible to the eye. The stimulus for these changes is comparable to surgery; that is, while fitness training is done without a scalpel, it has every intention to change the structure and function of the body. A surgeon with a scalpel in hand has the same intention. And just as surgery is inherently risky, so too is exercise. A scalpel can cut a muscle; a barbell can wreak a tendon.

Of course, fitness training isn’t brain surgery nor is it as pressing as a triple bypass. But training involves forces that can build up the body and improve its function, or break it down and disable it.

Coaches and trainers, therefore, need to understand proper progression, which is entirely based on exercise principles that have been established over several decades and discussed extensively in hundreds of textbooks. A coach or trainer that loses sight of these principles has to contend with increased risk of injury to his athletes or clients, as well as their loss of motivation or surrender to burnout. When you continually struggle with inappropriate weight or intensity, you lose motivation simply because you always feel defeated… assuming, that is, you haven’t suffered an injury before hand. Or the opposite: A coach or trainer, who doesn’t exploit the amazing adaptability of the human body by pushing and progressing it at the right time, can fail to produce result. And what kind of motivation can that provide the athlete or client?

It comes back to understanding exercise principles – those that have been established not just by scholars but also by practitioners, not just in theory but also in application, and not just with intelligence but also with sensibility. Furthermore, there is a need to understand individualism, the fact that everyone is different and responds to exercise differently. Great coaches and trainers inject these principles into their training programs, rather than navigate solo by a dogmatic formula and gut feeling. And as far as I’m concerned, in the training world gut feeling is merely causal association, which is an element of intellect that is as primitive as the appendix organ, or as useless as the belief that rubbing a rabbit foot would bring luck with Webvan stock in 2001. This is the twentieth century, the age of information, not of luck, prayer or guesswork.

By the same account, many coaches and trainers unwittingly use causal association. If doing crunches work the stomach, then a thousand crunches will give you washboard abs. So a large portion of the workout session is devoted to hundreds of repetitions of crunches at low metabolic cost, while neglecting the more metabolically expensive exercises that help burn the layer of fat off the belly. Another causal association is that if exercising is challenging, then anything challenging must bring fitness result. So balancing on a wobble board, which is neurologically challenging, is suddenly the new exercise fad. Well, playing a piano is neurologically challenging, too, but I won’t draw a link between this activity and physical enhancement; so, a balancing exercise cannot get me excited about burning off the cheese that I washed down with a bottle of cabernet sauvignon. Give me back squats and pull-ups, any day.

I see causal associations drawn frequently in the training industry. Some trainers and coaches build their entire training program around balancing exercises, to the point that some gyms look like a training ground for a circus of seals and elephants. Other coaches and trainers think that bodybuilding is the only method that brings fitness and improved sporting performance. Some coaches believe that doing biceps curls with 30-pound dumbbells while using moderate tempo will build arm strength to support the Olympic-lifting jerk, which is typically executed with several hundred pounds at eye-blinking velocity. In other words, if curling 30 pounds works the arms, then it must follow to reason that the arms will then be strong enough to support several hundred pounds of barbell overhead, ballistically! The association is there, isn’t it?

It is human tendency to define cause-and-effect. This tendency allowed us to evolve as a tool-using species, eventually developing technology that allowed us to further evolve as an advance society. Drawing associations is a crucial skill, but it can also make some of us draw casual connections between things that often have little or no relationship: weight training and the dumb jock; back squats and bad knees; the athlete’s heart and cardiac dysfunction; black cats and bad luck, etc.

Of course, I can’t fault a few coaches and trainers for the lack of qualification, or for training arrogance or causal associations, unless I also fault myself on occasions. But there is no excuse for any of us to think that a black cat crossing the street will bring bad luck, or to think that we can create an optimal training program devoid of exercise principles, train people without compassion for the human body, and dispense a formulaic program without regards to individualism.