This has become a common thread for S&C coaches I have been interacting with lately: going the long, hard road of becoming a S&C coach is the only way. I find that young aspiring strength coaches are fixated on going ridiculous lengths to becoming a strength coach. They do this while having little understanding of what they want in the first place. It’s time we discuss this. 

Take for instance a conversation I had with a coach that works for me: 

Me – What are your S&C aspirations? 

Coach – I want to open a gym

Me – How are you going to do that? 

Coach – Get a GA/Assistant S&C coach position 

I’m paraphrasing a little, but you can kinda see where I am going with this. Young coaches are clueless about what the hell to do in regards to their career. Part of this is our industry’s fault. Part of this is that young people in general are really stupid. Part of this is no one has any idea what to do, so why not just say work really hard, work really hard, and see what happens. 

Here is the problem, it is hard to become a strength coach. It is especially hard when you have no idea how to judge success in an industry that does not pay necessarily well. The default then becomes let’s try to enter through brutal sacrifice. Not saying this makes sense, just kinda the way it is. 

The other problem is that there is no real clear path for someone to become a strength coach. The default then becomes to simply just do something: education and interning. These are fantastic entities and serve a greater purpose than just understanding and gaining experience. But the issue is that they are haphazardly approached with lack of clear understanding of what is the best path. 

It is easy to get an internship. Everyone loves free help. It is easy to pursue more education. For the most part it is a for profit business, they’ll gladly take your money. The reality is that all this is essentially just productive procrastination. A young strength coach pursuing a path that was not clearly defined, but hey you’re doing something. This is the problem, doing something is potentially a huge waste of time and money if not related to what you want. 

The coach I was discussing with their aspirations was convinced that the only way to obtain what he wants is from sacrifice. Sacrifice of time and personal resources. Yes, you should work hard for something. Yes, you should be willing to displace personal comfort for something you really want. This is misguided logic if that personal sacrifice is irrelevant to your primary goal. Without understanding what you want, sacrifice becomes counterproductive. 

The illusion is that your goal is not what you are willing to do, it’s what you want. Only you can determine that. People love ‘hacks’, here’s one: stop doing unnecessary things to things that are unrelated to what you want. If it’s your goal, you should align what you do and how hard you work with that. The process is only justified by the means, not the other way around.  

I often ask coaches that work for me, clients that pay me, friends that solicit my advice these three questions: 

1 What do you want? 

2 How bad do you want it? 

3 What are you willing to do for it? 

Once you find out what you want, you have to put all your chips in that basket, and work like hell till you get it. The hardest part is actually deciding what you want. It’s harder to first determine what you want and then work for it. It’s easy to just work hard, without knowing what you want. That may sound contradictory, but I see it all the time. 

I see powerlifters diagnosed with metabolic syndrome, tell me they want to be able to play with their grandkids. Then only to keep busting their ass to improve their totals in the weight room. I see marathoners tell me they want to add muscle, but refuse to lift weights. I see strength coaches that tell me they want to live in a certain area doing a very specific thing applying for GA positions all around the country with sports or demographics that are completely unrelated. It is an illusion that blindly working hard is the key to success. 

People are incredibly unaware of how dumb they sound when they say almost the complete opposite path to what they want to say they want. The reality is that it is simple to just work hard without purpose. Working really hard without a clear purpose is procrastination to what you really need to do. First step to anything is understanding first what you want, then attempting to form the best plan to achieve that. Once you figure that, then work your ass off to get it.