When you’re in weightlifting for a long time and you accumulate a lot of experience, people eventually start to ask you questions. Whether you’ve done anything to distinguish yourself as an expert or not, I suppose it’s inevitable that others will want you to teach them something when they know you’ve been in the game for several years.

I’m currently starting my 28th year in competitive weightlifting. I don’t know if I’m an expert in anything besides being handsome and charming, but people must think I know what I’m talking about because they contact me for training and coaching advice pretty regularly. The majority of these questions are programming and technique related. Lifters want to know how to set up effective routines and ingrain perfect movement in the lifts, so it’s understandable that they solicit input from people who have been around the block a few times.

It’s fun to help lifters with their questions. Seriously, it never feels like a chore to work with people on finding solutions that’ll make them better. However, you want to know the questions that are the most fun for me? The ones where coaches want some input about how to handle a personality situation with an athlete.

I find human interaction fascinating. To me, it’s one of the deepest sciences known to man because there’s literally an unlimited number of circumstances and situations that can hit you in the face. People are complicated. Relationships can be tricky. Working with somebody in something as serious as the coach-athlete relationship can create a whole smorgasbord of joys, problems, and dilemmas.

It’s not uncommon for coaches (even experienced ones) to feel some confusion about how to deal with their athletes. This is why I occasionally get some requests for advice about it. Obviously I’m not the sage master of personality conflict resolution, but I know enough to navigate the occasional crapstorm. To be honest, these questions are the coolest ones I get. They’re juicy, and there’s no textbook on how to handle them. I like that.

This article is going to be about one of the most interesting components of the interaction between coaches and athletes. The fundamental question is this… “HOW HARD SHOULD COACHES PUSH THEIR ATHLETES?” I’m not talking about how much volume or intensity should be programmed into an athlete’s routine. I’m talking about the kind of pushing that goes along with the relationship between the coach and the lifter. Conversations, demands, body language, refusal to compromise, butt-chewings…you know what I mean. You’re not stupid. We all understand what it means for a coach to push an athlete. We just don’t always know how far it should go or how hardcore it should be. Those of you who are parents probably ask yourselves these questions all the time about how hard you should push your kids. You want to get the best possible performance out of your athletes, right? So should you pound them with a hammer, or reassure them with a soft touch? Which one works best?

Not too long ago, I saw one of the most captivating movies I’ve seen in years, and I’m going to use it to walk us through this analysis.

Whiplash

“Whiplash” is a 2014 drama film about an ambitious young jazz drummer named Andrew Neiman. Andrew is a talented student at the most prestigious music school in the United States, Shaffer Conservatory in New York. He’s a loner, with almost no friends or relationships with anybody his age, because he has tunnel vision about becoming one of the all-time great jazz drummers like his idol Buddy Rich. His whole life is spent practicing, drumming alone in his room until his hands bleed.

During his first year at Shaffer, Andrew gets selected to be in the most esteemed jazz ensemble program at the school, the best of the best. The elite. It’s an amazing opportunity that he’s been dreaming of being a part of. The problem is the teacher of this program, Terence Fletcher. Fletcher is an iconic figure at the school, universally recognized as the most successful instructor in the business. His bands never lose a competition and his students often go on to huge careers after they leave his program. He’s like one of those coaches with a long track record of taking athletes to the top, know what I mean?

Fletcher is incredibly demanding, tough, and cruel. He controls people through abuse and intimidation, both physical and verbal. When Andrew screws up his drumming during his first lesson with the elite class, Fletcher throws a chair at his head and then spends five minutes ripping the kid to shreds in front of the whole class, calling him a faggot, insulting his divorced parents, slapping him in the face, etc. The other musicians just put their eyes down and sit there silently while Fletcher destroys Andrew, as it’s obvious this is just the way things work in his program and most of them have probably had to endure the same thing at some point. Andrew leaves the class in tears.

However, he doesn’t quit the program. He decides he’ll need to toughen up and endure Fletcher’s abuse if he wants to graduate and have a shot at the big fame and stardom as a jazz drummer, so he keeps coming to class, practicing incessantly at home, and suffering the frequent attacks of Fletcher. As the movie goes on, Andrew changes a lot. The easiest way to describe it is…he hardens up. He breaks up with his girlfriend because he thinks she’s distracting him, he gets in arguments with his family when they question his determination, and he eventually starts fighting back against Fletcher.

He also becomes an incredible drummer through this process. The mean streak he builds up in his personality, along with the fanatical practice and work ethic he puts in to satisfy Fletcher’s demands, gradually elevates his performance to a level nobody has ever seen. By the end of the movie, Andrew is a tough kid with a difficult attitude. He’s not easy to get along with and he doesn’t care much about anybody else. But the final scene of the movie is a ten-minute drum solo he delivers during a concert that sends shockwaves through the audience. He’s on his way to the greatness he wants, and Fletcher finally gives him a smile and nod of approval.

Fletcher’s abuse of Andrew was part of a plan. He intentionally brutalized this kid because that’s what he believed he needed to do. It’s easy to understand his coaching philosophy. You push somebody ten miles past their breaking point because that’s the only way they’ll ever make it to the top. Most of them will crumble and quit because they won’t be able to hack it, but the ones who survive will be superstars.

How we can use this…

I found myself thinking a lot about weightlifting and coaching when I watched this movie. Obviously, we’re all thinking the same thing about it. “Is this the right approach for a coach?” “Should a coach treat people the way Fletcher treated his students to make them champions?” “As coaches, are we supposed to be mean and nasty to our athletes to toughen them up?” “Is this the magic secret for coaching?”

As I mentioned earlier, there are unlimited ways you could look at these questions, and we all understand there’s not a blanket answer to any of them. They’re all complex, and none of them have a universal response that applies to every athlete equally.

But I’ve got some thoughts about it, as you probably guessed. When I watched this movie, I thought about my football years when I was younger. I grew up playing football, and many of my coaches were in the Terence Fletcher ballpark. Football coaches are generally like this, period. They use a combination of toughness and brutality to build great players. During my years as a football coach, I was the same way. Does it work? Yeah, it works in football when you’re working with younger athletes.

Will it work with weightlifters? If you try to build lifters by pushing them past their limits with abuse and intimidation like Fletcher, will it lead to championships? There’s no one single way to answer this, but I generally lean towards no.

I don’t think you need to build weightlifters through brutality and punishment because the sport of weightlifting itself is brutal and punishing on its own. In football, it’s different. Football players will get lazy and undisciplined at the drop of a hat. They get treated like gods everywhere they go and most of them won’t work hard unless you basically threaten them with death, so that’s just the way you need to approach it. I’ve never worked with musicians, but I know all artistic types can easily get flighty and disorderly, so maybe a stern hand is required in that field too. I don’t know for sure.

Weightlifting is different. I DO know that for sure. The demands of training are extreme and there’s very little reward in terms of fame or money (in most situations), so the sport doesn’t really attract a lot of lazy types. When I watched “Whiplash,” I kept thinking to myself, “You don’t need a coach to abuse you in weightlifting. Weightlifting abuses you by itself.”

In my opinion, coaches in our sport need to follow a sequence that probably looks a little something like this:

• Develop a training plan for the athlete
• Explain the plan and its requirements to the athlete
• Guide the athlete through the training plan
• Give the athlete a combination of toughness, strict expectations, reassurance, and encouragement whenever these are called for, knowing the reassurance and encouragement will probably be required more often because of the sheer difficulty of weightlifting.

This doesn’t cover everything, nor is it supposed to. However, I can definitely say one thing for sure…after almost 30 years as an athlete, I’ve definitely needed calm support more often than I’ve needed brutal hammering. I’m already brutal enough on myself, and I think most lifters are the same. I don’t need a coach to kick my ass. I’ll kick my own ass, and often I need somebody to stop me before I go too far with it.

And all the other possibilities…

“Whiplash” was a hit with audiences because it’s entertaining, and the portrayals of extreme uncompromising personalities like Terence Fletcher are always going to blow people away. We’re fascinated by loose cannons who go past the limits of what’s accepted.

Toughness is good. Strict rules are good. Discipline is good. Boundaries are good. Work ethic is good. I’m positive about all these things. They’re all components in successful weightlifting, that’s for sure. However, they don’t work the same way in our sport as they did in the movie situation I described in this article.

So when you work with athletes, you’re always trying to figure out the perfect formula of programming and interpersonal skills to propel them to the top of their potential. It’s a never-ending battle, and sometimes I think we all wonder if we need to be harder. This is a normal coaching instinct, especially when we see people like Fletcher, or Bobby Knight, or Ivan Abadjiev, or any of the other famous coaches from the sports world who have built dynasties through dictator-style methods.

Are there certain systems that can blend together at the right time and place with a maniacal taskmaster to produce greatness? Sure there are. History has proven this. But those situations are rare, in my experience. As a general rule in the sport we’re all involved with, there will likely be more times when you have to work hard at lifting somebody up instead of tearing them down. I’m not talking about coddling. I’m not talking about spoiling. I’m not talking about going easy on people. Trust me, I’m the biggest believer in strictness and toughness you’ll ever see. Ask any of my athletes and they’ll tell you that. I also think there’s a lot of benefit to having a personality that’s been hardened up by rough experiences.

I’m really talking about being very careful with a coaching approach that’s based on kicking your athlete’s asses. The barbell will kick their asses every day. If you’re an athlete and you decide to make Olympic weightlifting your life, you’ll be covered in the punishment department. Your coaches will usually need to talk you down from the ledge, instead of saying things that make you want to jump off it.