So there’s this thing now called the internet. I’m not sure if you’ve heard of it, but people are using it to share information quite a bit these days. Literally everything is on there, weightlifting included.
 
As the internet has developed over the last 20 years, there’s been an interesting twist in our sport. I’m talking about online coaching. I’m sure you’re all familiar with this, but let me give you a little context and description anyway. Back when I started weightlifting in the late 80s, the internet didn’t exist. If you wanted coaching back then, there was a simple process for getting it. You found a gym and asked the coach to work with you. If he agreed, you came back to that gym every day and got coached.
 
There were a few instances of “long distance” coaching back then, where a coach would mail programs to a lifter in another state or wherever. But these were extremely rare situations because they were cripplingly slow and limited. Almost all coaching was done face-to-face.
 
However, over the last two decades, technology advances have created a world where it’s easy to instantaneously share emails, text messages, and videos. Hell, most of this stuff can be done with your phone. It doesn’t even require sitting down at a desk computer anymore. And as the ease and speed of sharing information has risen, the weightlifting community has jumped on it and created the phenomenon known as remote coaching. This is where a coach and a lifter live in different areas and use technology to basically come as close as they can to daily face-to-face interaction.
 
In this article, I want to talk about the positives and negatives of remote coaching. It’s a huge thing these days, and lots of weightlifters are doing it. Our sport has seen a massive population explosion over the last decade, and many newcomers live in areas where they can’t find a good coach who can give them the guidance they want, so they go online to look for somebody who will work with them long-distance. Quite a few coaches are making their entire business like this.
 
Some of you might be in on it yourselves. And here’s the thing about this sport: if you stay in it long enough, chances are you’ll eventually be in a position where you wind up coachless. Your current coach quits or moves away, you move away, or whatever. You still want to lift, but the coaching you’ve always had is no longer available.
 
Or maybe it’s a different predicament. Maybe you find yourself in a position where something isn’t working out with your current coach, and you want to go to somebody else. Maybe you feel like your coach has taken you as far as he/she can. You want to move up a few levels in the sport, and it doesn’t look like your coach has the goods to take you there. This is a harsh way to talk, but sometimes it’s a very real spot you can find yourself in. When it happens, you look around for somebody else. You may be in a position where you’ve found a perfect coach that you want to work with, but he lives on the other side of the country.
 
This is a good subject to take a look at because technology isn’t going away. Quite the opposite. It’s growing by leaps and bounds, and none of us can foresee what society is going to look like 15 years from now. As we get closer to a world where people can live in different states (or countries) and still interact almost as closely as if they were in the same room together, we’re going to continue to see athletes and coaches who want to use all this stuff to their advantage. You need to be prepared, so let’s dig into it a little bit.
 
Two Ways of Doing It
 
To walk you through some of the nuances of remote coaching, I’m going to tell you how I do it personally. I don’t make remote coaching a huge part of my business, but I’ve been doing it for a while, and I’ve seen different levels of success that come through different methods.
 
Program-only coaching: This is a service I offer where a lifter emails me a complete synopsis of their weightlifting life, and then I write them a custom program that’s tailored to their needs, goals, and upcoming competitions. The programs might be six weeks, eight weeks, 12 weeks, etc. Once I send them the program, I’m out. There aren’t any further communications, updates, or ongoing coaching work. They pay me for a program, and I send it to them. Done deal.
 
Positives: Any plan is better than no plan. I write good programs, and I can usually spot the things a lifter needs once I know what they’ve got going on. To state it bluntly, program-only coaching is better than nothing.
 
Negatives: Effective coaching requires a lot more than just programming. In Olympic weightlifting, a coach absolutely positively must be able to SEE what the lifter is doing. Programming can’t fix a disastrous technique problem that’s holding a lifter back from making progress. You can send somebody the best program in the world. But if they’re making big mistakes in their movements, they’re never going to improve unless those flaws get fixed.
 
Full-service coaching: This is the other kind of remote coaching I offer. Full-service coaching is exactly what it sounds like. I do the lifter’s programming, but I do it weekly. The lifter sends me videos and reports after every workout, and I give them whatever kind of feedback they need (technical, mental, encouragement, kick in the ass, etc.). I base their weekly programming on what I see them doing week to week, and I make any kind of adjustments we need. In short, I do everything I would do for a lifter in my gym who I see every day.
 
Positives: You can get some very good work done this way. If you’re good at written communication, you can have a lot of success fixing technique problems through email. Seeing what’s going on with the lifter through videos allows me to coach them through the program, and I’m not just talking about working on their technique. I can see how they’re doing, know when they might need to back down for a few days because of fatigue, and stop technique problems as soon as I see them instead of letting them fester into habits.
Negatives: There’s one thing that you have to keep in mind with this kind of coaching, and it’s not really a “negative.” It’s more like a cautionary note. Full-service remote coaching puts a tremendous burden of responsibility on the lifter, even more than the coach. Because the success of the whole thing will be dependent on whether the lifter gets those videos to the coach. It can be painstaking and arduous to record and email a whole slew of videos to a coach after every workout, week after week. But if it doesn’t happen, the coach doesn’t have a complete picture of what’s going on. Let’s say the lifter is missing snatch after snatch in training, but he’s not sending videos of those snatches to the coach. From a coaching perspective, it’s like trying to figure out what’s wrong with a car’s engine just by listening to it. If you never get a chance to open up the hood and check everything out, you’ll never be able to fix the problem, so if you want to be coached online, make sure you know what you’re getting yourself into. It’ll only work if you make sure your coach sees what you’re doing.
 
Success and Failure Stories
 
Actually, I wouldn’t say I’ve had any failures with remote coaching. But I’ve definitely had varying levels of success. Here are a couple of examples to illustrate each one.
 
Program-only remote coaching has clearly been the more limited way of doing it. I had a lifter who contacted me a couple of years ago and told me he wanted ongoing program-only coaching. In other words, I would write him a 10-week program to take him to his next meet, but then he just did the program on his own with no regular coaching from me. After the meet, he reached out to me again and asked for another program, repeat process. In other words, I was his programming coach, but he did all his work on his own.
 
Using this method, his results were…okay. We worked together for a year like this. He told me he liked the programming a lot. It was harder and more organized than what he had been previously doing on his own, so I know it helped his lifting. He set a few PRs here and there, but his overall competitive level didn’t change much. Long story short: program-only coaching was effective for him, but it didn’t result in any big smashing successes.
 
With full-service remote coaching, it’s been a different story. I’ve definitely had a few athletes who elevated their whole career through this method, and the best example is a masters female named Dionne Dunham. Dionne is a lifter in Connecticut (I live in Arizona) who had been competing at the masters level for several years with moderate success. She lifted in many of the national and international masters meets, and her typical results were 145-150ish kg totals in the 40-44 age group, 75 or 75 + class (she went back and forth). She was usually a silver or bronze medalist at these meets, which she wasn’t happy with. She knew she had the talent to dominate the masters scene, but it wasn’t happening, so she asked me for full-service remote coaching in the fall of 2017.
 
After two years of working together, Dionne is now a two-time National Champion, Pan Am Champion, and World Champion. She holds all the American and world masters records in her division (73 kg snatch, 92 kg C&J, 165 kg total in 45-49 87 kg class). She’s getting better as she’s getting older, which isn’t an easy trick to pull off. It’s worth mentioning that she was also recovering from a debilitating back injury (hit by a car) that had taken her down to nothing before we started. Needless to say, remote coaching has been a home run with Dionne.
 
However, it’s essential to mention that one of the main reasons for the success has been her amazing discipline and consistency with sending me videos of her training. Every time Dionne does a workout, my email inbox has 22 or 23 emails from her. Each one is a separate video of her snatches, C&Js, pulls, squats, etc. I basically get to see all of her training, just like I would if she was lifting in the same room with me. This has allowed me to fix her technique, monitor her daily physical status, make modifications based on how she looks, adjust the plan when needed, cut off technical glitches before they become habits, and every other kind of coaching maneuver I would use for any of my in-house lifters. We wouldn’t have had the same success if Dionne wasn’t as diligent as she is, week after week, every single session.
 
With program-only coaching, you simply can’t do any of those things, which are obviously the real meat-and-potatoes of the coaching process. So we’re left with a pretty clear synopsis of the whole thing: the more the lifter is willing to commit and devote to the process, the better chance you have for career-changing results. Programs are helpful, and they can definitely steer you in the right direction. But programming is just a part of coaching. Some would even say it’s one of the lesser parts of coaching, because the magic is in the process, not just what’s on paper.
 
So it can be done, for sure
 
It always takes me a long time to buy in with technology. I come from the rotary-phone generation, so that’s probably to be expected. To this day, I’m still not on Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Tinder, or any of that other crap that’s turning people into zombies. I’m on Facebook, but only to keep up with what’s going on in the weightlifting scene.
 
I think technology offers our world as many negatives as positives. Well, maybe that’s not fair. It’s probably more like 70 percent positive and 30 percent negative or something. I certainly never thought it would offer any value to the coaching profession. Coaching, to me, was always a face-to-face business. The possibility of coaching somebody from mediocrity to masters world champion using only a laptop computer…this wasn’t an option I would have considered ten years ago.
 
But this is the way the sport has gone. Remote coaching is a thing now, and there’s a lot of potential for success if it’s done the right way. If you’re an athlete and you’re thinking about getting remote coaching, make sure you understand it’ll only be successful if you fully commit to it and accept your responsibility in the process. With in-person coaching, it’s a little easier to be an athlete because all you have to do is show up to the gym and train, while your coach does his/her job with you. With remote coaching, you have to do all your normal training, but then you’ve also got the hassle of transmitting your training to your coach. It’s more work, plain and simple.
 
There’s nothing wrong with program-only coaching, and I’m sure there are plenty of lifters getting good results from it. Personally, I’ve found it a bit frustrating. I write a program for a lifter and send it to them. So now, this person’s results are connected to my coaching. I’m a part of their weightlifting life. But I can’t do the work that actually produces the amazing results. If they don’t do well on the program, they can spread the word around that they got programming from Matt Foreman, but it didn’t help much. I’m not crazy about that.
 
So, as with everything else in the technology world, you have to take the bad with the good. If you’re considering diving into remote coaching, either as a coach or an athlete, I would definitely recommend giving it a try. Just make sure you go into it with your eyes open about what will be required to make it successful. It’s a different world, and it puts a different set of demands on everybody involved in it.