I never understood how hard coaching was until I started doing it myself. I’ve been a coached athlete since I was 13 years old. High school football, wrestling, track…and then Olympic weightlifting. I’ve had a lot of coaches throughout those years, so I saw the job they did.
 
They work tireless hours. They pour all their energy, heart, guts, intelligence, and effort into making their athletes successful. When things go bad, they feel it, too. As an athlete, you’re not the only one hurting when you blow it. The coach hurts, too. I probably realized that for the first time when my freshman football coach punched a hole in a locker room chalkboard after we lost a game.
 
So I’ve always known it’s a brutal job, just like the life of the athlete is a brutal road. Most of you are or have been competitive athletes, at least at some level. Many of you are competitive Olympic lifters, obviously. And a large number of you are also coaches.
 
Let me tell you a quick story to lead towards what we’re going to examine in this article. I had my first paid coaching job when I was 19 years old. I was an assistant strength and conditioning coach at a Division 1 university, primarily working with the football team. I remember what those workouts were like when the team came to the weight room. For three hours, I was on my feet (along with all the other strength coaches) running from platform to platform, fixing bad power clean technique, barking at the lineman to sit all the way down to parallel on their squats, answering questions, shouting and whooping to keep the atmosphere intense, etc. By the time the workout was over and the guys left, I felt like a damp sponge that had every drop squeezed out of it.
 
And then…I had to do my own workout. Keep in mind, I was 19 at the time. I was still a young, developing Olympic lifter on the way up, and my coach had high-intensity workouts programmed for me.
 
Trying to flip that switch mentally and physically and get myself ready for heavy snatches, pulls, and squats 20 minutes after coaching those football workouts was awful. I got it done for almost two years, but it wasn’t pretty. My lifting was stagnant during that time, and I didn’t make any progress until I moved to Washington and started training with the Calpian weightlifting club, where I could focus entirely on my own lifting with no coaching distractions.
 
I want to talk about what it’s like when you’re trying to coach and pursue your own athletic career at the same time. We need to look at this both in daily training and competition. Olympic weightlifting is unique, because it’s one of the few sports where coaches are often still competing themselves. No football coaches are still actively playing. Same goes for basketball, hockey, boxing, and most other sports. You become a coach when you’re finished with your competitive career in those fields. But in weightlifting, there’s often overlap. Can it work? Yes, it can. Can it crash and burn? Absolutely. Let’s figure out how to avoid the catastrophes.
 
A Checklist of Training Factors

The easiest way to attack this subject is to break it down into separate issues. Here’s a list of things you’ll need to account for if you want to coach and lift at the same time:

• Train before your athletes

As I mentioned in my story, doing your own training after you’ve done your coaching is possible, but far from ideal. You’ll be sapped, in body and mind. The only way it can really work is if you’ve got a long stretch of time between the two, like if you coach your athletes from 10:00am-1:00pm and then you do your own workout at 5:00pm. It’ll still be tough, but that extra few hours of recovery might save your bacon. If your schedule doesn’t allow this and you’re simply forced to train immediately after coaching, you have my sympathies. It’s a tough turnaround.

• If you’re planning to train right after coaching, don’t half-ass your coaching

This can be an easy trap to fall into. You’ve got a big workout of your own scheduled right after your coaching, so you do all your coaching sitting on a chair to save your legs and limiting your input to conserve energy. Not a good look. When you do this, you’re shortchanging your athletes. If you’re going to coach, do it right. Give your athletes the level of effort you would expect yourself.

• Don’t train with your athletes

This one can have an asterisk next to it, because it might be okay occasionally. And when I say occasionally, I mean it. “Occasionally” doesn’t mean once a week. No matter how you try to talk your way around it, you’re not coaching worth a damn when you’re working out. You’re focusing on yourself. It just doesn’t work. If you want to lift with your athletes three or four times a year, that’s fine. They’ll probably get a kick out of it (unless you suck), and they won’t mind the lack of coaching on those rare days. But if it gets to be a regular thing, that’s not awesome.

• Don’t compete with your athletes

I’ve seen a few situations where the coach felt a burning need to be the one who lifted the biggest weights in the gym. No bueno. Now, there’s always something positive when the athletes see the coach as a proven expert with credentials. Lifters like knowing their coaches were/are studs. My coach was a former national-level lifter who had competed in two Olympic Trials, and that made me feel more confident in his guidance. But that’s different from a situation where there’s an ongoing neck-and-neck competition in the gym, and one of the competitors is the coach. This can make the athletes lose trust in the coach because they feel like they’re being trained to stay at a lower level, and it makes the coach look terribly insecure.
 
These are probably the biggest considerations for regular training that will come up in the “coach is still competing” situation. When it comes to meets, that’s a whole other bag of bananas.
 
Keep the Meets Separate
 
The best way I could make you understand this part would be to actually have you experience one of the following two situations:

1) Find a local meet and have five of your lifters enter it. Coach all five of them in the early session, and then jump in the last session and compete yourself.
 
Or, even better:
 
2) Take a team of lifters to a national meet. Spend the whole weekend coaching them, and then compete yourself on Sunday.
 
Let me openly say that IT IS POSSIBLE to pull these off and get great results for everybody, yourself included. But there’s a 7,000,000% higher chance that you’ll be shot to hell and compete like a bag of ass when it’s your turn.
 
I’ve done both of these, and they turned out okay, but only because I was in the twilight of my career when I did them and I didn’t really care if I lifted big weights in the meets. I was highly experienced and older, which made the competition experience much easier for me. In a nutshell, I was in my 40s and I was just competing for fun, not going for any big-time results. It NEVER would have worked back in the day, when I was going after my lifetime best numbers.
 
It’s unbelievable how much coaching at meets drains you. Almost every coach I know is a former national-or-higher level lifter, and every one of them says the same thing. When you go to a three-day national meet and you coach multiple lifters on the first two days, you’ll feel like you’ve been through a gang fight by the third day. You’re constantly on your feet. You’re stressed and focused, burning through mental energy like dry grass in a brushfire. You walk back and forth from the score table to your lifter’s warmup platform 800 times in one session. I’m telling you, folks. It might not look like much, but give it a shot and see how you feel at the end of it all. My guess is you won’t feel like doing a PR clean and jerk.
 
Just do yourself a huge favor. Schedule your own meets separate from your lifters. It’ll be best for everybody. And they’ll love it because they’ll be able to come support you when it’s your time!
 
All of these can be violated
 
Every rule has an exception, obviously. I’ve known a few situations over the years that contradicted some of what I’ve written here, and everything worked great. It’s a big complex world out there, and anything is possible.
 
But I think you’ll find these guidelines are accurate MOST of the time. Some of you might even have your own experience in this area already, and I’ll bet my lunch money you’ve been nodding your head as you read this article. I’ve spoken with countless lifters and coaches over the years, and they’ve all basically said the same thing.
 
If you’re a coach, don’t let any of this dampen your competitive goals and dreams. You don’t have to hang up your spurs when you start coaching. You just have to prioritize everything correctly and use really strong time-management skills. Trust me, your lifters will love it if you’re an active lifter. If you handle it the right way, it can be a valuable tool in the work you do with them. As long as they know you’re giving your best efforts to get them to great results, they’ll trust you.
 
Is it hard to give them everything, and still put everything into your own lifting? Yeah, for sure. There’s only so much “everything” to go around. If you feel like you can’t do both, be honest with yourself and make some decisions. I was coaching and competing when I was young, and I couldn’t do both effectively. My own lifting suffered. So I thought long and hard about what I wanted, and then I made a decision. The best thing for me at 21 years old was to put coaching on hold and go full blast into my own career. But now, 25 years later, it’s a different story. I had my time in the sun, and now I can devote myself to my athletes without hampering my own goals. I still compete, but just for fun, and there’s no conflict anywhere.
 
Your situation will be unique, and you’ll have to think on your feet as you’re presented with the challenges this business brings. Use your head and listen to your instincts, and you’ll be successful in whatever role you choose to tackle.