I’ve been avoiding starting this article like I’d avoid a heavy squat session on the Saturday morning following a serious Friday night on the town. The problem is I need to talk about how and why I have ended up on this path and I’m just not really sure how it all happened. I was present at all the events and moments that led here, but I’m stuck chasing the words around the page like a badly caught snatch! I would be willing to bet that this is a pretty common experience for a coach; there isn’t a single event or choice you make. One day you realize that a coach is what you are, or at least what you’re becoming. In my case I was lucky enough to have my coach Jon White to tell me when it was time for me to step up.

Perhaps coaches are self-selecting? If you have an analytical mind and an ability to communicate efficiently with people, you’ll probably find yourself talking to other lifters and helping them understand how to make improvements in their technique. The problem with self-selection is that it can be a double-edged sword. We all know a drive-by coach; hell, most of us have been guilty of drive-by coaching at some point! Helping each other out is fine and I encourage it, but some people are better at it than others and getting feedback from a mentor is a great way to make sure you fall on the right side of the drive-by coach divide.

The self-selection I’m talking about is passive inasmuch as a natural coach lends an opinion for truly altruistic reasons and furthermore holds that opinion lightly. The undesirable breed of drive-by coach is the armchair expert who has all the solutions but never seems to apply them to their own work. Ultimately if you want your eligibility confirmed have an honest conversation with your own coach.

Motivation is a key issue here. There is an old expression ‘Those who can’t, teach.’ I think it’s time to revise this to ‘Those who can’t stand to see others struggle, teach,’ because in my experience the desire to teach or coach or nurture comes from a deeply held belief that everybody deserves to fulfil their potential. I’m going to make a bold statement here: If this isn’t your primary motivator, then you have no business teaching anybody anything! Without a heartfelt desire to improve the lives of others, the sacrifices you are going to have to make just won’t seem worth it.

This all warrants a discussion of the soft skills that will help you impart your knowledge. As an Olympic lifter, you can have all the knowledge and experience in the world, but if you cannot communicate efficiently you will achieve nothing. I use the term ‘efficiently’ because the most effective way to convey complex information is by making the complicated simple. However, this skill alone is not enough. You’ll also need to be able to nuance this efficient communication to suit the mood, gender, age, physical, educational and experiential level of the individual, and so forth (and multiply that by up to twelve individuals per class). Tailoring your training might just be the most challenging aspect of coaching for most club coaches; financial realities will dictate that opportunities for genuine one on one work will be few and far between. So tailoring a session to a group of individuals whilst keeping things within the time constraints is a skill that needs to be developed quickly. It is all too easy to expect all new starters to attain the same dizzying heights!

You may have noticed that I haven’t even mentioned personal lifting ability yet. I think that I would place primary importance on the things I’ve mentioned so far. However as a coach your own Lifting will be under scrutiny, and rightly so. As a rough guide, most level one coaching certificates require a minimum of one year of personally learning and practicing the Olympic Lifts, and believe me I’m wishing already I’d had a longer period of care-free lifting before embarking on this journey. It’s also preferable to have experienced first hand everything that your students are going to go through, both for reasons of personal integrity and for purposes of practical insight. Suffer what they will suffer and find common ground in that.

Given all of the above and the fact that I don’t seem to have actively made the decision to become a coach (at least that I can remember) the question remains: why coach? Well, because as much as I adore Olympic lifting and everything it has brought me and taught me I think I love the feeling of sharing this incredible sport with others just as much. I get genuinely warm and tingly when a lifter I’m working with smiles from ear to ear after a great lift and I am not given to being publicly warm and tingly (I’m English). And the fact that I have written all this without once mentioning money is because money ain’t gonna be the driver for most of us. There’s a reason coaches wear tracksuits and not pinstripe suits to work!

All that said, if you’re worth your salt then you’ll know that money and peer approval is rarely a good reason to do something. If you are going to be a coach you probably already sense it on some level, so I urge you to find a mentor and get that sense confirmed and do something with your talents. So far coaching has only fed my passion for weightlifting and enriched my life. I love that I get to see weightlifting changing other peoples lives like it has changed mine.

Now I have brought you up to speed with how and why I came to be on this coaching path, next month I will catch you up with how it’s all going. I hope to share the challenges and high points with you as well as the practicalities as I shift in to my new role coaching people who I also still train with.