Many years ago, I was a young weightlifter just getting started in the sport. Unlike most of you, my earliest beginnings in Olympic lifting were completely self-driven. I grew up in a small town in the middle of nowhere. There were no weightlifting gyms, no coaches, no clubs…and no internet (remember, this was the 80s). The only place in town where you could lift weights was the high school weight room, and the only way you could get information about the sport was from magazines you bought at the grocery store, like Muscle and Fitness. I didn’t have the luxury of a CrossFit gym with a barbell club, or online resources for weightlifting. Those things didn’t even exist yet. I saw the sport on TV, learned what I could on my own, checked out a book on weightlifting from the library, and went to the gym to try some snatches. No help, no guidance, and nobody to turn to when I ran into trouble.
 
Then, I finally got a coach. I had been training and competing for two years with limited success (mainly because I didn’t know what the hell I was doing), and then I met a guy who was interested in working with me. He was about 10 years older than I was, and according to what he told me, he had been a pretty successful lifter several years earlier. I liked him, and I was practically peeing myself with excitement at the idea of having a coach, so off we went.
 
To make a long story short, it didn’t work out. Several things eventually went wrong, and the coach-athlete relationship between us exploded into pieces like somebody dropped it on a land mine. There were two basic problems: 1) Our personalities didn’t work well together. 2) I didn’t respect him as a superior.
 
So I broke it off with him and went to lift for a different coach. This turned out to be one of the best decisions I ever made, because my new coach guided me to the highest successes of my career.
 
Many of you are coaches yourselves, right? If you’re not, you probably will be someday. I’ve said it many times: If you stay in this sport long enough, somebody will eventually ask you to coach. It never fails.
 
Regardless of your current role in weightlifting, it’s important to have the right understanding about the key ingredients of the coach-athlete relationship. Few things in life are as awkward and uncomfortable as dysfunctional dynamics between weightlifters and coaches. Lifting is so important to all of us, you know? It’s often one of the best parts of our lives. Sometimes, it’s the only thing we really care about. This creates a situation where the coach is a huge presence in the life of the athlete, even more so if there’s a close personal bond between the two in addition to the weightlifting component.
 
Different athletes value different things. Something that’s essential to one lifter might be completely unimportant to another. For those of you who are lifters, this article is going to be about figuring out what YOUR essential coaching requirements are. What are the two or three qualities a coach absolutely must have for you to work with them? And for those of you who are coaches, we want to sharpen your understanding about what your athletes need, and what they need to see in you. Trust me, you don’t ever want to have the kind of ugliness I’ve occasionally seen between lifters and coaches over the years, so let’s talk about how to prevent it.
 
Your Superior Officer
 
One thing that I think is an absolute deal-breaker is the expertise of the coach. To state it simply…the lifters have to know that the coach knows more than they do. Take a personal inventory right now and ask yourself about this. Is it important to you that your coach is an expert, or at least more of an expert than you are?
 
It was always really important to me, for sure. Remember my first coach that I told you about? When I started training for this guy, I thought he was a former lifter with a respectable level of accomplishment. I knew he wasn’t an Olympian or anything, but I thought he had lifted a lot more weight than I had and competed at a higher level than I’d been to. These things made me respect him, and trust him. I knew my career was in good hands because this guy had been there and done that.
 
Unfortunately, I found out over time that I was wrong. This guy basically had never done jack squat as a lifter, or coach. I was better than he had ever been before I even started training for him. He had an authoritative personality and he talked a good game (and I was a young kid), so I bought his exaggerations. But it became clear over time that he wasn’t what I originally thought, and that contributed a lot to me losing respect for him.
 
This is why I’ve always believed it’s extremely difficult to be an effective weightlifting coach if you don’t have any prior success of your own in the sport. If you’ve been an accomplished lifter, you’ve got credibility. You’ve done the sport at an advanced level, which gives you a heightened understanding of it (in most cases). Sure, we all know legendary athletes don’t always make great coaches. You might have made an Olympic Team, but that doesn’t guarantee you’re going to be good at teaching others. These things are true. But at the end of the day, a former elite athlete is still probably going to have more to offer than an average Joe.
 
Then there are people who were mediocre athletes, but they turned into great coaches. I know a handful of US guys who were average local-level lifters back when they competed, but they’ve cranked out a long line of national champions and Olympians in their coaching tenure. This is their success in the sport. They didn’t accomplish much as lifters themselves, but they’ve proven their expertise through their track record of athlete production. It doesn’t matter if they lifted big weights. As an athlete, you know you can trust them because their record speaks for itself.
 
If you’ve never done anything important as either an athlete or a coach, you’ve got a bit of an uphill battle on your hands when you start coaching. Most likely, your stable of athletes will be bare-bones beginners who barely know a barbell from a broom handle. And there’s nothing wrong with this. Everybody has to start somewhere, and if you’re launching your coaching career with no impressive accomplishments of your own in the sport, you should expect to start at the bottom. We’ve got too many knucklehead coaches these days who want to work with Olympic hopefuls eight months after they learned the damn sport themselves. It doesn’t work that way, and it SHOULDN’T. If you don’t have a substantial level of accomplishment in weightlifting, just start your coaching with newcomers and youngsters.
 
That’s a situation that will work well, because you’re still their superior. You might not have mastery level expertise in the sport, but they’re all still five levels below you because they don’t know ANYTHING. You spend some time paying your dues at this level, and you’ll occasionally land a talented stud who becomes your first national qualifier, you know? Then you’ve got your start, and you just continue working your way up.
 
So if you’re an athlete looking for a coach, find somebody who’s clearly your superior in the sport. They know more than you and they’ve done more than you. That’s what you want. If you’re a coach, follow the pattern I’ve described. Pay your dues. Build up your track record. And for god’s sake…LEARN as much as you can from people who are several levels above you.
 
Personality
 
Remember what I said in the beginning about the first coach I had. Our relationship collapsed for two reasons. The first one was what we just covered: coaching expertise. The second one, you recall, was personality conflicts.
 
And to be fair, I don’t want to make it sound like the conflicts were all his fault. I’ll openly acknowledge that I was a difficult athlete back then. But I was a kid. I was 20 years old. He was an adult, and the man in charge. That’s the thing about personality conflicts between coaches and athletes, you see. It’s the job of the coach to straighten them out.
 
For those of you who are athletes, let me fire a few questions at you. Are you an obedient soldier? Do you handle it well when somebody tells you what to do? Are you okay with putting yourself below somebody and letting them call the shots? Or are you one of those nobody-tells-me-what-to-do types? Do you like to argue? Do you like to be the one who dominates conversations and relationships? Do you always have to be the one who’s right?
 
Your answers to these questions might start to give you an idea about whether you’re a good fit for a coach-athlete relationship. I’ve known a few athletes over the years who fell into that horrid one-word description you sometimes hear in sports: uncoachable. They simply can’t work with a coach. Keep in mind, I just said I’ve known a FEW of these in my career. I haven’t known a ton. I think it’s rare to find a personality that’s difficult to the point of impossible to work with. Not completely unheard of, but rare.
 
If you’re the kind of person who argues a lot and constantly bucks against authority, you should probably expect some trouble if you work with a coach. Most of the successful coaches I’ve known in my life (including myself) don’t respond well to this. Coaches aren’t Nazis, and most of the best ones are open to communication and questions that are phrased the right way. But there’s a difference between this kind of interaction and blatant insubordination. Granted, some coaches will put up with it, especially if there’s a championship athlete hanging in the balance. I’ve known a few coaches who sold their souls to the devil and compromised their character, just so they could get their Olympian.
 
Whether you’re an athlete or a coach, I think it’s important to respect chain of command. When you’re the athlete, you’re not the dominant personality. You’re not the one running the show, and you shouldn’t try to be. You’re supposed to trust your coach and do your job. Most of the best athletes I’ve seen in my life were good soldiers. They respected their leaders and did their job to the best of their ability. If you combine this kind of attitude with great coaching expertise and positive personality interaction, the results can be astounding.
 
The Self-Coaching Option…
 
Stop and ask yourself: as an athlete, what do you want from a coach? And as a coach, what do you want from an athlete?
 
As a coach, it’s extremely important that you always keep your personal standards and expectations at the top of your priority list. You have to respect your athletes and do the best you can for them, but you can’t turn into one of those spineless coaches who lets athletes run roughshod over them simply because they’re talented studs who can win championships. There will be two consequences if you do this: 1) You’ll hate your job most of the time. 2) All the rest of your athletes will lose respect for you because they see what you’re doing.
 
As an athlete, your personal career always has to come first. Let’s say you’re working with a coach, and it’s not going well. You’re not making any progress for a sustained length of time, and you feel confident that it’s because your coach isn’t doing the right things to move you up to the next level. Or maybe the personal relationship between the two of you has grown toxic. There might be a situation where you need to switch coaches. Remember, when your career is over, you’re the one who has to live with the results. If those results are crappy because you stayed in an unsuccessful relationship out of fear of making a change, your coach won’t be the one who spends the rest of his life feeling unhappy about it. You will. So put yourself in the best position possible to make the most of your time with the barbell.
 
Going it alone? Coaching yourself? Sure, that’s always an option. If you’re new or intermediate, it’s a bad option. I wouldn’t advise coaching yourself unless you’re an experienced competitor who’s got a solid understanding of how to program. And even then…it might not be a wise choice. Some people can’t work well without a coach because they find it too easy to blow off workouts if they don’t have somebody to be accountable to. Others have the opposite problem, where they go off the rails and totally overdo it if they don’t have somebody pulling back the reins on them.
 
There are several angles to this, and you should look at every one of them. Just try to keep a few fundamentals in mind. A proven expert is usually going to be reliable. You can’t be coached by somebody you don’t like. Coaches are authority figures, and you have to respect them as such. Trust your gut and your instincts if you’ve felt for a long time that you need a change. These are some of the carved-in-stone laws of the coach-athlete universe, and you’re guaranteed to make some mistakes with them as you travel the long road of weightlifting. That’s the life, right? Nobody gets all the way through this thing without a few missteps. Just learn from them when they happen. That’s the best any of us can do.