When Heath Ledger played The Joker in the Batman movie “The Dark Knight,” he said something that caught my ear and stayed with me: “If you’re good at something, never do it for free.”
 
Would you believe me if I told you there was a time in this country when almost all weightlifting coaches were giving away their services for free? It’s true. Back when I came up in the sport in the 90s (and even before my time), the vast majority of the coaches in the United States were doing it purely as a just-helping-out-lifters-for-the-love-of-it thing. They weren’t charging their athletes. No money involved.
 
And I’m not just talking about some Joe Blow “coach” down at the local gym who showed up a few times a week and gave out some flimsy technique pointers. Nope, I’m talking about highly successful coaches who were cranking out the best weightlifters the US has ever seen. These guys were running organized programs that produced national champions, world team members, and Olympians…and very few of them were getting paid for it. This probably sounds freaky to most of you because it’s not like this anymore. Nowadays, coaches get paid. It’s the norm in the business, regardless of the skill level of the coach. Even rookie coaches with almost no weightlifting experience or accomplishment are making money. Some of them are making quite a bit.
 
What changed? What’s the difference between then and now? Those questions are going to lay the foundation for this article, and then we’re going to connect the discussion to your personal weightlifting life. All of you are either lifters or coaches (or both). That means you’re most likely in some kind of financial arrangement with somebody.  Either you’re a coach who gets paid for your work, or you’re an athlete who pays a coach. Even if you train on your own in your garage, you’re most likely spending your money to get help in some way. Remote coaching, seminars, clinics, books, etc. The days of freebies in this game are over. If you want somebody to help you out in this new era, you should be prepared to open up your wallet.
 
Let’s talk about the financial situation between weightlifting coaches and athletes. If you’re a coach, you need to understand what your services are worth, and how to set up an effective system that will prevent any bad blood between you and your lifters. If you’re an athlete, you need to understand how much you should expect this thing to cost you, and what NOT to do when money enters the conversation. And you need to learn why this is important. Our sport has reached a point where it won’t survive if people aren’t willing to spend money on it, unlike the old days. I didn’t have to pay for coaching when I was a young weightlifter. Then, when I became a coach, I gave away my services for free…just like my coaches had done before. But it didn’t stay this way. The game changed, and so did I. So let’s talk about the change, and how you should view the sport differently than the coaches and athletes of my generation.
 
The Shift
 
Let me walk you through the history of this thing. Back in the 1980s and 90s, there were several competitive clubs with outstanding coaches around the US. My team was the Calpian Weightlifting Club out of Washington, coached by John Thrush. Down in the south, Gayle Hatch had a powerful club that always fielded top talent out of Louisiana, while Mike Cohen and Team Savannah did the same thing in Georgia, along with John Coffee and Ben Green in the Atlanta area. Bob Takano’s Van Nuys Weightlifting Club in California was always a strong force at the national level, just like fellow SoCal coaches Steve Gough and Mike Burgener and the various programs they worked with over the years. Leo Totten organized most of the northeast talent into his massive East Coast Gold club, Florida was chock full of coaches, and who could ever forget the legendary Jim Schmitz at the Sports Palace in San Francisco?
 
I didn’t know all of these guys well enough to have access to their tax returns or anything like that, but I was pretty close with many them because I was on the national scene during that era. Their lifters were often good friends of mine. That’s why I know most of them weren’t charging any money for their coaching. A few of them were running commercial gyms where people had to pay memberships, but those were the exceptions. Overall, the coaching situation was a freebie back then. Why was it like this? I don’t have an answer to that question, aside from the basic “That’s just how it was.” Mainly, I think everybody accepted the idea that weightlifting wasn’t a place where you made money. That acceptance became the normal culture. Back then, almost all the competitive lifters in this country were in their 20s or younger, and none of them had any money because they were, obviously, training full-time. We didn’t have high paying jobs, so our coaches would have been trying to squeeze blood from a stone if they would have started charging us. I guess the easiest way to say it is this…coaches didn’t charge money because there was no money to get, for the most part.
 
Fast forward to 2001. One of the guys I trained with told me about some dudes who were running a weightlifting gym in Seattle and charging people $150 per month to teach the Olympic lifts. My jaw almost dropped through the floor when I heard this, and my first question was, “Who the hell are these guys?” He told me their names, and I had never heard of them. As far as I knew, they weren’t even part of the weightlifting community. But they were running something called a “CrossFit” where they taught OLifts and charged people a lot of money for it, along with doing handstands and snatching kettlebells and stupid crap like that.
 
I was pissed about this, to be honest. It made me angry that a bunch of nobodies who had no experience in the sport were scoring cash by teaching weightlifting, while the legendary coaches I knew were doing it for free, despite producing Olympians and elite US lifters.
 
As the early 2000s passed, CrossFit became a big thing, but the only real weightlifting guy who was making a lot of money from it was Mike Burgener. Mike was one of us, so nobody begrudged him for finding a way to get rich. But most of us still looked at CrossFit like it was a goofy collection of tattooed idiots who did the Olympic lifts with horrible technique in board shorts and running shoes.
 
Fast forward to 2010. CrossFit had grown into the leviathan we know it as now, and there were gyms all over the place full of cool people who wanted to learn to do the Olympic lifts the right way…and they had money to spend. So they turned to guys like me, old veterans who had done the sport at a high level and knew how to teach. As an added bonus, we learned CrossFit wasn’t totally comprised of morons. Most of them were actually great to work with.
 
I’ll be honest, I felt a little weird taking their money at first. I offered to work with people for free in the beginning, because that’s the mentality I had grown up in. Somebody paying me to teach weightlifting was like getting a check for eating a pizza. It was something fun that I would do for nothing, honestly. But once I heard about how many no-name coaches there were in the CrossFit world who were making piles of cash for teaching weightlifting, I felt just fine about it. Not to sound rude…but if a bunch of nobodies were getting paid for this, I sure as hell needed to be getting paid too.
 
And that brings us to now. I don’t know anybody who’s coaching weightlifting for free these days. If I knew anybody who was, I would tell them they’re crazy. The sport has changed. It’s turned into a place with professional expectations. That means services have financial value, and the new weightlifting generation understands this. Hell, European superstars like Dimitri Klokov have turned the US weightlifting community into a big ATM. All they have to do is show up over here and aspiring lifters practically throw money at them. More power to them, as far as I’m concerned. If you’re good at something, you should never do it for free.
 
Rates and Professionalism…
 
Many CrossFit gyms charge members around $150 per month. I think that’s a fairly typical number. For remote coaching, the rates vary depending on the coach. There’s no industry-standard number that everybody has to comply with. Personally, I charge people $125 per month if they want full-service remote coaching (weekly programs, daily input through email, etc.). I know some people who are charging a little more, and others who charge a little less.
 
These numbers are still quite low compared to other sports, by the way. My wife is a coach in the triathlon world, and $400-500 per month is totally normal and accepted in that sport. I know triathlon coaches who charge their athletes $600 per month for remote coaching, and they’ve got fifty people on their roster. Other white-collar sports like gymnastics are in this same ballpark. This is why I chuckle when weightlifters act like $150 per month is unreasonable. There are plenty of sports out there where coaches get paid three or four times as much as any weightlifting coach makes.
 
Granted, this kind of money can get rough for some people. If you train at a gym that charges you $100 per month just to work out there, and you also have a remote coach who charges you $125 per month for programming, now you’re paying over $200 every month for weightlifting. For some people, that’s nothing. For others, it’s a ton. $200 per month might be a deal breaker in certain cases. The lifter just doesn’t have that kind of money. I sure as hell couldn’t have paid that much when I was in my 20s. During the years when I was doing my top lifting, I don’t think I could have afforded even $100 per month. So I get it when people get stonewalled at these numbers. I really do.
 
This is why it’s extremely important to have direct, honest communication between coaches, gym owners, and athletes. You have to talk about money very candidly, and you’ve got to find arrangements that work for everybody. What you absolutely, positively CAN’T have are situations where lifters are trying to slide past their payment expectations. I’ll give you an example of what I mean by that. I coach a weightlifting program in a CrossFit gym where there are monthly dues expected from all members. Most of our members pay their dues on time every month, like they’re supposed to. But we’ve had a few problems over the years where certain lifters have resorted to sneaking in through a back door of the building for workouts to avoid checking in at the front desk like they’re supposed to. They were clever enough to get by with it for a while before anybody figured them out, mainly because our facility has multiple points of entry that aren’t always monitored closely. So now we’re talking about people stealing from the gym. They’re coming to my classes to get coached by me, but they’re weaseling around paying their dues. It’s the same as pulling a dine-and-dash at a restaurant.
 
We’ve also had a few situations where lifters came to the gym to train with me and basically thought they shouldn’t have to pay because they were talented studs who competed at a high level. This is also a frequent problem. It’s sometimes challenging to work with elite athletes because many of them think they shouldn’t have to follow the same rules as everybody else. They want everything for free. It might be because they’re young lifters who train full time and literally don’t have any money, or it might be because of entitlement and ego.
 
All of these have to be dealt with. Fairness and honesty are expected from all sides. Coaches have to set up payment arrangements that are fair to themselves, individuals, and the gym population as a whole. Lifters have to either a) pay what’s expected of them on time every month, or b) have a sit-down with the coach/gym owner to work out an arrangement that everybody is okay with.
 
Consistency is paramount, along with keeping everything above board. Once coaches start cutting deals with athletes that include words like, “Now don’t tell anybody else about this,” you’re creating nightmares. The one basic truth of gyms is that everybody usually finds out about everything, and as soon as members learn there’s some shady money business in the mix, the nails are being hammered into the coffin. All of this can be avoided by doing two straightforward things:
1) Coaches implementing a fair, consistent payment system.
2) Athletes respecting the system and approaching the coach honestly if there’s a problem.
 
It’s a good thing
 
I feel bad that the great coaches from my generation weren’t making the money they deserved in those years. I really do. Those guys were giants, and they weren’t compensated at the level they deserved. I’ve probably made more money from coaching in the last six years than most of them made back in the day, and I haven’t accomplished a fraction of what they did. That’s not right.
 
Still, it’s a great thing that the sport has changed the way it has. It’s a professional environment now, and that’s an important improvement that will elevate the whole game. The central thought to take away from this article is that we all have to respect and honor the professional aspect of the new Olympic weightlifting world. Despite the fact that this change has taken place, weightlifting is still a sport that has a lot of “Wild Wild West” mentality in its culture. Coaches get paid now, but we’ve still got plenty of maverick personalities who don’t want to play by the rules. It’s not like we’re the NFL or NBA, where every aspect of the sport is administrated by legal contracts and iron-clad financial arrangements. Weightlifting’s new era is still very young. Think about the progression I described to you earlier. The time period where nobody got paid for anything was really only a decade or two in the past.
 
If you’re an athlete, you might think it sucks to have to spend your money to get coached. Hey, I get it. I don’t like having to pay taxes, but I understand it’s just a part of life. Whether I like it or not, it’s my responsibility to deal with the costs of life and make sure I meet the financial responsibilities I’m accountable for. I know this might sound like a parent talking to a teenager who gets his first job, but that’s where our sport is at, you know? The new weightlifting culture of charging money for coaching is still in its infantile stages, if you step back and look at everything from a big-picture-history perspective. It’s a new day, but the change is a good one that we all have to support.