Let’s zoom out for a second and look at coaching as a whole—whether that’s in the weight room, out of the weight room, or across sports like baseball, football, or basketball.
If we ask a simple question—when a successful head coach leaves for another school, why does the original program often fall off?—the obvious answer is talent. But I think that’s a drastic oversimplification. It has a lot more to do with the actual ability of the coach.
Now let’s zoom in on strength and conditioning across high schools, colleges, and professional teams. When an assistant coach moves to a new place and runs many of the same programs from their previous job, why don’t they get the same results? Or on the flip side, when a head strength coach leaves and the assistant takes over, why doesn’t performance stay consistent?
A more accurate answer is this: it’s not the program—it’s the coach’s ability to implement it.
You could take someone like Mike Krzyzewski and drop him into a run-down gym with a group of middle school kids, and he’d still be incredibly effective. Honestly, he would get that team A LOT further along than I could—even if I had a state-of-the-art facility and the best coaching manuals ever written.
The program fallacy
I hear this multiple times a month. When parents or athletes reach out to our facility, they’re usually not looking for coaching. They want to know what we can hand them on a piece of paper—something they can take and go implement on their own. They believe that periodized program is what’s going to get them to where they want to go.
And that is not an unreasonable way to think—but it’s incomplete.
The program itself is maybe 10% of the overall effectiveness.. At the end of the day, a program is just a piece of paper or a file on a computer. It can’t motivate someone. It can’t create accountability. It can’t look at an athlete and figure out what they’re truly capable of, or understand how to bring that out of them.
A great coach can do all of those things.
Digging a little deeper, we have to appreciate that the effectiveness of a program is predicated on how well you perform it. To get athletes to perform exercises well, they have to be coached. A piece of paper cannot coach you through a session or give you practical feedback on how to perform certain exercises better.
If we want to be able to translate what we are doing in the weight room to the real world, having an unbiased observer (aka your strength coach) being able to pick apart how you move and then implement them immediately is going to be far more effective than if you try to wing it yourself.
Digging a little deeper, we have to understand that a program’s effectiveness is entirely dependent on how well it’s performed. And if we want athletes to perform exercises well, they have to be coached.
A piece of paper can’t coach you through a session. It can’t give you real-time feedback or help you adjust how you’re moving to get more out of each exercise.
If the goal is to actually translate what we’re doing in the weight room to real-world performance, then having an unbiased observer—your strength coach—matters. Someone who can break down how you move, identify what needs to change, and make those adjustments on the spot.
That’s always going to be far more effective than trying to figure it out on your own.
Mix & Match Strategy
The base philosophy of strength coaches has not changed in decades. We want our athletes to be able to run fast and get strong. To do that, we have to sprint and we have to lift weights. The difference is in knowing what makes each of your athletes tick.
Every kid that walks into our weight room comes from a different background. Some have had it easy, others have dealt with a lot of adversity—and most are somewhere in between.
If a kid’s had a lot of ease in their life, I’ll intentionally introduce some difficulty. If they’ve had more than their fair share of challenges, I try to make certain things as simple and approachable as possible
Different kids respond to different stimulus, both inside and outside the gym, and it is not always the exercises that are going to get the kids to where they need to go. There is a different key to every lock, and it is up to us to find the key.
In closing
At the end of the day, coaches change lives.
Think about that high school coach you still remember 30 or 40 years later—the one who had a real impact on you. You probably still repeat things they used to say, or carry yourself in a way they helped shape.
That’s the kind of impact great coaching has.
An Excel spreadsheet with reps and sets on it will not do that, and at the end of the day, the people will always matter more than the paper.
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