You know what blues music is, don’t you? Maybe you’re a fan, maybe not. But I’m sure you’ve at least heard the blues at some point, probably from BB King or Eric Clapton or some other blues player who’s had mainstream success.
 
Let me tell you a quick story you probably haven’t heard before (and yes, this is going to connect to weightlifting). One of the most famous blues players of all time was a guy named Robert Johnson. He lived in the 1920s and 30s, and he’s generally acknowledged as one of the central figures in the history of the blues genre. The main reason he’s so highly regarded is his music, but there’s another part of his life story that grabs people’s attention.
 
Robert claimed throughout his life that he got his musical skill by making a deal with the devil. Supposedly, he went to a crossroads near a Mississippi plantation late one night and met a man named Legba, who was a human embodiment of Satan. Legba offered to tune Robert’s guitar for him, with the agreement that Robert would achieve musical greatness, but his soul would belong to the devil when he died. Robert agreed, the devil tuned his guitar, he went on to become a blues legend, and then he was dead at 27.
 
It’s up to you how much of that you want to believe. If you’re into superstition and spiritualism and mumbo jumbo like that, you can take it as gospel truth. If you’re like me, you love these kinds of stories because they’re great stories, but that’s all.
 
However, there’s a weightlifting direction I want to take this in. I want to talk about the idea of selling your soul to the devil when you’re a coach.
 
Let me explain. As long as I’ve been in coaching, there’s been a familiar cautionary tale that floats around the sport. It’s about coaches who are willing to sacrifice their own standards, rules, and moral commitments to work with a freak of nature athlete who’s destined for greatness. The basic structure of the story works like this: an athlete walks into a coach’s gym and wants to become a weightlifter. Almost immediately, it becomes clear that this athlete is exceptionally gifted. He/she has unparalleled talent and potential, and there are obviously championships in the future. However, this athlete is also dysfunctional and toxic, with behavior that violates every rule and expectation the coach preaches to the other members of the program.
 
When you’re a coach in this position, you have a decision to make. You can enforce the same disciplinary measures on these wunderkinds as all your other lifters, knowing they might walk away because of it. Or you can let them get away with the bullcrap because you know you’ve got a champion in the making, and you don’t want to lose it.
 
If you pick the second option, you’ve sold your soul to the devil. You want greatness as a coach, and you know there’s only one way to get it: producing elite athletes. This athlete is going to be elite. You’re positive of it. But this athlete is also a major behavioral problem who does shady stuff you’ve always said you would never allow in your gym. When you decide to allow it because you want the fame and glory this athlete is going to bring you, you’re the weightlifting version of Robert Johnson. You made a decision to go for greatness, accepting moral corruption to get it.
 
Trust me, this is a very real situation in the coaching business. Elite athletes often have dysfunctional personalities. They’ve been spoiled throughout their lives, with everybody telling them they’re gods and letting them get away with whatever they want because they’re just so damn special.
 
It’s not always like this, obviously. There are plenty of talented lifters out there who aren’t like this at all. They’re freakishly gifted, and they’re also mature, responsible, respectful, and obedient. I don’t want to make it sound like ALL elite talents come with troubling baggage, because that’s not true. However, you’re kidding yourself if you don’t think there’s a hefty population of physical specimens in the world who fit the exact nightmare description I’ve given you here.
 
This article is going to be about how to handle them. As I always say, most of you will coach someday, if you’re not already. If you stay in this sport long enough, somebody will eventually ask you to coach. And if you ever find yourself in the position I’m describing, you need to know how to handle it. Your whole coaching career and reputation depends on it.
 
Understanding the Landscape…
First of all, let’s establish some terminology:
 
Sleazeball coaches. These are coaches who know their business, but they’re basically degenerates. They have the experience, skill, and technical mojo to design a program that’ll take you to the top, but they’re not exactly quality people. If you do a little digging, it’s not hard to find sketchy business practices, highly questionable personal lives, and a willingness to make dishonest moves to gain an advantage. These coaches are relatively rare, but they’re out there. You’ve probably seen one or two yourself.
 
Shitbird studs. I apologize for the language, but I think it’s appropriate in this case. These are lifters who have outstanding physical talent, but they’re basically the athlete version of sleazeball coaches. They don’t just make occasional lousy decisions. They’re lousy human beings. They just happen to have freakish ability.
 
Squirrely studs. These are very different from shitbird studs. Squirrely studs make a lot of bonehead moves, but they’re not bad people. They have good hearts. They’re just immature, reckless, or whatever. When they screw up and you discipline them, they’re legitimately sorry and they truly want to do better next time. They test your patience because they’re knuckleheads, but you wouldn’t describe them as “toxic.” **NOTE: Squirrely studs often become successful and awesome, once they grow up.
 
Robots. These are the athletes who never, ever screw up. They’re complete rule followers, like little church mice who like to do snatches. Sometimes you’ll see one with freakshow talent, but not often (in weightlifting at least). It’s nice to have a large gang of these in your gym because they keep you sane while the squirrely studs are twisting their ankles a week before a meet because they tried to jump over their car or something.
 
If you run a quality program, it’s going to attract the kind of people you want to work with. There are plenty of squirrely studs out there, and they usually want to be somewhere with structure and strong leadership. They’re quirky and frustrating because of the dorky stunts they pull, but they’re good human beings. You can train them. And even if they’re a little on the dumb side, they’ll still have enough instinct to tell a sleazeball from a quality leader. If they start out being coached by sleazeballs because that was just the gym they happened to find at the beginning, they won’t stay there. They’ll leave and migrate to standup coaches who run non-sleazeball programs.
 
The shitbird studs will go to the sleazeball coaches, and that’s the way you want it. It’s good to keep all the turds confined to one area. You don’t want to build your coaching record on shitbird studs, no matter how ridiculously gifted they are. Because I’ll give you a tip about the shitbird studs: most likely, they’ll eventually screw you over anyway. You’ll spend years of your life building them into champions, selling out your morals and values every step of the way, and then they’ll ditch you as soon as they see a better bowl of food across the street. Then you’re left with nothing: no championships, no self-respect, and no more athletes.
 
Wait. Why would you lose the rest of your athletes when you sell your soul to the devil? Sure, everything collapsed with the shitbird stud, but what about the other fifteen people you coach? You’ve still got them to fall back on, right? Wrong. They all left you too. Want to know why?
 
Everything you do is being watched
 
The way you coddled that shitbird destroyed you in the eyes of your lifters. I’ll give you an example to illustrate this. Let’s say you always discipline your lifters if they blow a gasket and throw fits in the gym. You preach mental toughness and temper management, so you don’t allow your athletes to scream and kick stuff when they have bad workouts. You’ve always been consistent about this, and anybody who steps out of line receives a firm lecture. It’s become a gym expectation. When a guy gets pissed after missing a snatch and throws his belt, everybody else cringes and says, “Uh oh. He’s in trouble.” They expect you to drop the hammer, and this is a sign of a great gym environment.
 
But then your stud blows a gasket, and you don’t use the same level of discipline. You let them get away with it. At that moment, you screwed yourself in a couple of different ways. First of all, every one of your lifters saw it, and they lost some respect for you. They know you’re going easy on the stud, and now they doubt your character. Second, the stud just learned he can get away with things other people can’t. Where do you think that ends? Nowhere good, I can promise you.
 
I’ve seen lifters quit gyms and switch coaches over things like this. When athletes lose faith in you, they’re going to start looking around. You’re risking your entire program if you’re not consistent. You absolutely MUST apply consistent handling to everybody, from the top of the ladder all the way down to the bottom. And keep something else in mind: if the athletes in your program see you handle the stud with the same discipline you use on everybody else, their respect for you will grow considerably. They know you’re a strong leader, because you’ve shown them your values and principles are more important than coddling a bratty potential Olympian. You just made some of them loyal to you for life.
 
Everything you do and say is under a microscope when you’re a leader. I know that sounds intimidating, but it’s actually pretty easy to handle. All you have to do is communicate your expectations clearly, enforce your standards fairly and consistently, and make sure you handle all of it in the most positive way possible. Coaching is an enormous responsibility, but you can alleviate 90% of your headaches simply by following these steps.
 
It’s getting tougher, in my opinion
 
Sometimes I think Instagram is making all this worse, because people nowadays live in these little cocoons of self-indulgence. They see themselves as the center of the universe, and it just seems like that has to trickle over into their gym behavior. But then I also wonder if I’m right about that, because I’ve coached a few lifters who were full-blown Instagram attention mongers, and they were still great to work with. So my fears are probably just coming from being a grumpy old dude.
 
I’ve seen coaches sell their souls to the devil, like I’ve described here. I’ve actually watched it play out in the gym. It’s rough on everybody, and I’ve rarely seen it result in anything good. Usually, the shitbird doesn’t pan out anyway. They’re weak inside, and weak people don’t last in this sport.
 
However, we need to finish with an important point. Sometimes, you can also have situations where coaches know they have shitbirds on their hands, but they consciously make a decision to work with them and try to turn them around. Instead of just classifying them as dysfunctional trainwrecks and writing them off permanently, the coach decides to make them a project. They don’t coddle the shitbirds, and they don’t let them get away with anything. They swat them on the nose when they’re bad. But they don’t kick them out. The relationship turns into a long-haul effort to develop this person into something better. Just like you spend years making somebody a better snatcher, coaches sometimes spend years trying to make somebody into a better person.
 
As long as the rules still get enforced consistently, I think this is the best thing a coach can do. When I was coming up as a young lifter, I was a behavioral problem. I was probably somewhere right on the line between shitbird and squirrely stud. I don’t think I was a bad person, but I know I made a lot of dysfunctional decisions. My coach didn’t give up or kick me out. He kept working with me. He threatened to kick me out a couple of times if I didn’t get my act together, and it worked. I changed myself because it meant so much to me to be in his program. Eventually, I think I turned out okay, and it happened because of his effort.
 
And now, years later, I look back on his leadership as one of the essential components of my life. This is what you should strive for as a coach. When you make somebody into a better lifter, that’s awesome. But when you make somebody into a better human being, you’ve done something truly special.