Okay, listen…the subject of this article has the potential to offend some people. And as I’ve gotten older, I’ve been working harder on not saying offensive things. When I was twenty, I thought it was funny to make belligerent comments and shock people. Unfortunately, that’s probably part of being a young meathead guy with an underdeveloped brain. Now, being a wiser mature man with a really sensational personality, I try not to piss people off with unnecessary remarks that could be considered vulgar or cruel.

But for the subject I want to examine this month, there aren’t many ways to dance around the issue. Let’s get to the point and you’ll understand my concern. This article is going to be about the difference between coaching intelligent athletes and unintelligent athletes. See what I mean? We’re going to try to take a serious look at how coaching skills have to be applied to smart athletes versus dumb ones. Like I was saying, there are all kinds of possibilities for insults and inappropriate words. I mean seriously, how can we do a productive training analysis when we’re basically labeling some of the people we work with as dumbasses? Well, the first thing we’re going to do is avoid insulting names like the one I just used. I know many of us probably use words like “idiot” and “retard” on a regular basis. You say no, you don’t do that? How about when you’re alone in your car and bad drivers are all around you? Yeah, I rest my case. Most of us do it, but we probably don’t make a habit of peppering our conversations with comments about how moronic and stupid other people are. It’s a social turnoff, so we try to be polite and non-judgmental when we’re talking about those special souls who don’t exactly have brains leaking out of their ears.

Seriously, I think we can have a frank discussion of how intelligence plays into the training of an athlete. Let’s quit tip-toeing around something that’s pretty obvious and just take a blunt look at it. Many of you are coaches, apparently. If you’ve been doing this for a while, then you have to agree that you’ll have a wide range of talents, both mental and physical, who join your program at different times. I’ve coached a few people in my career who were borderline geniuses, with the qualifications and stats to back up that title. And yes, I definitely have to also acknowledge that I’ve coached people who were on the far opposite end of the intelligence spectrum. Because we all know that coaching has an awful lot to do with how you merge your personality with others, it’s fair to say that there are going to be differences in how you interact with these polar opposites. So, how can you pull this off? How can you successfully coach people with lower intellectual capability without making them think you’re being condescending or mean? Likewise, how can you successfully coach people with higher intellectual capability who might be five steps ahead of you mentally, even though you’re the coach and the authority figure?

Lots to think about, that’s for sure. We should definitely start by not underestimating anybody, regardless of how light we think their brainpans are. As Alan from The Hangover reminded us, “Rain Man practically bankrupted a casino, and he was a……” See? I’m not going to say it. Aren’t you impressed with how sweet I am?

A Quick Word About Stereotypes

I’m not sure where it started, but there’s this old stereotype that jocks (power athletes in particular) are unintelligent. You’ve come across this, right? It seems like even back when I was a kid, the football players and weightlifters you saw in movies were always portrayed as Neanderthal dolts who weren’t smart enough to do anything besides eat red meat, beat people up and make weird grunting noises that sounded like a rhino having sex. I think a lot of it might come from the old days when high school athletes didn’t have to pass their classes to participate in sports. Or maybe it’s just the common belief that athletes spend all their time working out and practicing instead of reading books or studying. Whatever the origin, a lot of people still think you have limited mental capacity if you look strong or muscular.

Back when I was in college, I can remember professors who openly tried to talk down to me and throw snippy little insults my way before they even knew anything about me. I looked like a weightlifter/football player, so they tried to hold this intellectual arrogance over me. There was one time when I had won the collegiate national championship and the campus newspaper ran a little story about it. One of my instructors approached me a few days afterwards and asked, “Hey, you’re that weightlifter, right?” I said, “Yeah.” He chuckled and asked, “What are you gonna do when you turn forty and all those muscles turn into fat?” This was a college professor asking me about something that’s biologically impossible, and trying to have a little laugh at my expense. I knew he was responsible for my grade and I didn’t want to make him mad, so I just said, “When that happens, I’m just gonna kill myself.” He didn’t talk to me the rest of the semester, which was what I wanted.

I’ve never thought I was a genius, but I also know I’m not an idiot. Many of you might fall into the same bracket I’m describing. You’re sharp enough to qualify as a bright human being, even if you’re not Aristotle. So let’s look at some benefits and hazards to working with athletes who fall above the average mark on the intelligence scale.

Brainy Benefits

There are some pretty obvious benefits to working with intelligent athletes. One of the easiest ones to look at is memory. Smart people generally have pretty good memories. Maybe not photographic or anything, but they can definitely remember the important things you tell them. Here’s a little training example of what I’m talking about. Let’s say you’re teaching somebody how to snatch a barbell for the first time. Before you can really start getting into the teaching of proper pulling mechanics, turnover, etc., there are a few little basic things the athlete has to remember on each rep. We’re talking about how to set up, grip the bar, position the feet, and flatten the back. Every time the athletes go to perform a snatch, they need to have their feet set at a proper width that you’ve shown them, and they need to have their hands evenly gripped on the bar at a width that you’ve determined for them. You probably even gave them landmarks on the bar for where they’re supposed to put their hands.

Have you ever worked with an athlete where you had to remind them every…single…time… to put their feet in the right place and grip the bar in the correct spot? Rep after rep after rep, they just don’t catch on. You’ve patiently told them where to put their feet and hands, but they just keep forgetting. It gets to a point where you’re having a really hard time teaching them anything about extending the body, jumping and shrugging, keeping the bar close, etc. because you have to constantly stop and remind them about their feet and their hands. I taught a young lady to do power cleans a few weeks ago where I literally had to repeat, “Point your toes straight, wrap your thumbs around the bar, straighten your elbows, and close your mouth” every single time she attempted a lift. The last command on that list was needed because she kept opening her mouth as wide as possible before each lift, and it was bugging the living crap out of me.

Some athletes are different (and much easier) to work with. After you’ve told them once or twice about getting their hands and feet set properly before each lift, they’ve got it. They remember what you taught them, and they do it right every time. This makes it a lot easier because then you can move on to teaching them more. To state it all very simply, intelligent athletes can memorize technique much easier. Because they have strong memory skills, they’re able to process your instructions and execute them consistently. They also recognize little coaching cues better. If you say “tight” or “extend” to them, they’ll understand what you’re trying to get them to do. There’s nothing worse than working with somebody who looks at you questioningly when they’re in the middle of performing a lift. These are the ones that just cleaned a bar and they’re getting ready to jerk it. You yell out, “Dip and drive!” to them and they look over at you (with a heavy bar sitting on their shoulders) and say, “Huh?” Ouch…

Now, there’s an interesting point to mention here. Some of us have worked with people who are highly intelligent in some kind of intellectual field, but they’ve got absolutely no athletic intelligence at all. This is the PhD in biochemistry guy who decided he wanted to learn weightlifting, but you tried to coach him and he was as physically clueless as the ones we just mentioned. Conversely, there is no denying that there are some mental midgets running around out there with flawless technique and huge lifts. What the heck? How does this get explained? This is where we see that there are different types of intelligence. Gardner’s theory of seven different types of intelligence tells us that human beings are usually more gifted in some areas than others. Some people have highly developed linguistic intelligence, and others are strong in mathematical intelligence. There are other types such as interpersonal, musical, and bodily-kinesthetic. People who have high levels of kinesthetic intelligence simply have a knack for knowing how to use their bodies. They can see somebody perform an athletic skill and then simply make themselves mimic that movement with very little coaching.

Whatever the particular composition of an athlete’s brain might be, it’s obvious that there are some big benefits if they’re smart. Intelligent athletes will often know how to listen to their bodies a little better, which can lead to avoiding injuries. When they’re sore or fatigued, they know it’s just something they have to work through. When they’re legitimately injured, they know they have to see a doctor and get it looked at. Lower-intelligence athletes can have a higher risk of handling this difference the wrong way. I once knew an athlete who injured his elbow on a second snatch attempt, lied to his coach and said he was okay, and then went out there to attempt a bigger weight on the third attempt. Result? Dislocated elbow; career-ending injury. Using some common sense would have kept this athlete safe, but it just didn’t work out.

Big Brain, Potential Obstacle

Okay, let’s just go ahead and admit it. There’s also such a thing as being too smart for your own good, don’t you think? There are some potential hazards that can go along with being an intelligent athlete, and overanalyzing is probably the biggest one. Aaahhh, I’ll bet I’m hitting close to home for some of you. These are the people who practically paralyze themselves because they’re just thinking way too hard. You give them some simple instructions, and then they dissect those instructions like a science lab frog. Please forgive me for sounding sexist here, but I think women battle this more than men do. Most of the gals I’ve known in my life have told me that females tend to over-think things, making their lives a lot harder than they need to be. Guys, on the other hand, don’t seem to do this as much. I’ve said for years that men are a lot simpler than women think we are. We really only think about three or four things, and our women agonize over stuff that never even occurs to us. But I digress…

Intelligent athletes, both men and women, can suffer from the same mental overheating. Here’s another way of looking at it. Let’s say you’ve got a smart athlete who is getting ready to attempt a heavy snatch in competition. The lifter stands on the platform, staring at the barbell and trying to concentrate on technique, and thoughts keep popping into his head about how many times he missed this same weight in training leading up to this meet. His acute memory is working against him in this case, because he recalls multiple missed attempts with this weight and now he’s starting to doubt himself. He walks up to the bar, and he’s trying to ignore thoughts like “damn, I haven’t made this weight in three weeks!” instead of focusing on his technique like he’s supposed to.

Athletes with lower intelligence levels can actually have an easier time in this situation. They stand there on the platform looking at the bar, and the only thing that goes through their minds is, “I’m gonna snatch the hell out of this thing, and then I’m gonna go have a burrito.” The fact that they missed this same weight nine times in training doesn’t even enter into the picture. Many years ago, there was an elite American athlete who most people considered pretty low on the brain scale. I remember being at a meet once and watching this guy getting ready to attempt an American record. My coach leaned over to me and said, “The best thing about this guy is that he doesn’t know he’s not supposed to be able to do the things he’s doing.” Stop and think about that sentence for a minute. It made a lot of sense to me, then and now. This guy had a short memory, so he didn’t remember prior failures. That kept him confident. He also had no fear of anything, which is one hell of a quality to have as a weightlifter. So…we’ve now got a situation where the qualities of lesser-intelligence athletes, like fearlessness and no comprehension of limits, are some of the best weapons you can have in your battle for maximum lifts. What’s going on here? I thought this was going to be about how smart people are always at an advantage?

The Answer to the Riddle…

Listen, being smart is better than being stupid. I don’t think I’m wrong about that. However, being smart doesn’t always guarantee you an easier ride in weightlifting, or anything else for that matter. Your big intellect can get in your way sometimes. People with superior intelligence have ideas and thoughts hitting their brains so fast that they sometimes can’t keep their minds clear and organized. We’ve all known at least one genius-type person in our lives who was socially inept, right? These are the people who can analyze calculus on a Good Will Hunting level, but they couldn’t get a date if their lives depended on it. Remember those kids in high school who didn’t fit in with the crowd at all, despite the fact that they had special mental gifts? Were you one of them yourself? These people usually hit their life peak a lot later than high school. And I’m pretty sure that’s a good thing.

Which ones are easier to coach, smart athletes or dumb athletes? As with a lot of the things we examine in The Performance Menu, there isn’t a clear-cut answer. Being intelligent doesn’t mean that the individual is going to have the mental qualities to be a good weightlifter, and being unintelligent absolutely doesn’t doom an athlete to failure. That kid who appears to have some serious cranial deficiencies? He might also have some amazing characteristics that will give him a big advantage in this sport. You can never really tell for sure. All you can do is give every interested newcomer the same treatment. You should always have the same positive attitude towards everybody, even if the person happens to be a freaking moron.