For many in the weightlifting community, time on the platform is the one sacred time in their week that is totally dedicated to them. It is an hour or two to clear their mind, release some tension, and get an endorphin hit to take the edge off the following day’s challenges. For others, weightlifting is their career and each moment on the platform is an invaluable opportunity to take another step toward fulfilling their competitive goals. Either way, it is imperative that as a coach you do everything possible to ensure the quality of the time spent on that platform. The following are the tricks and techniques I use to keep my athletes excited about their training and motivated to come back for the next session.

1. Training the Olympic lifts can get pretty repetitive, especially if like me, you believe in keeping training plans simple. It’s critical that you keep things varied and be creative with your session planning. Although there isn’t always much we can do to vary the actual exercises we program, there are elements of the workout we can shake up. No one particularly enjoys the warm-up, but it needn’t be that way. A warm-up can be literally anything that gets the blood moving and muscles warm. For example, teaming people up with each other and having a limbo competition with broomsticks in the squat racks gets people moving and laughing. The first time I used limbo even I thought it seemed crazy, but the great thing was that because my athletes were smiling during the warm-up I had created a positive atmosphere early for the rest of the session.

2. In Olympic Weightlifting, the difference between success and failure is often simply a matter of attitude. This is why it’s critical that you play games and have fun to foster a positive attitude. Most people assume that adults will feel awkward and be reluctant when it comes to playing games, but this could not be further from the truth. Simple games such as doing plyo jumps in a Mexican wave while standing in a line or Medicine Ball Netball can really lift people’s moods and help embed a positive attitude in advance of challenging sessions. Having fun together encourages the release of ‘happy’ hormones such as Oxytocin among your clients, which will help to physically alter their emotional balance for the better and in my experience when people feel happy they are easier to coach! My advice is to try including games in your sessions but to introduce them with an abundance of positivity and see for yourself how much more involved your lifters become in the training that follows.

3. I like to use teamwork in the warm-up and throughout the session because it encourages the athletes to communicate from the get go and helps to establish and build relationships. I firmly believe that the allure of the sport alone is not enough to sustain most people’s interest and that having teammates is what nurtures individuals through the tough periods.

That said, it’s important to choose your pairings and groups carefully to ensure success. For strength work you should always group athletes with similar numbers. Otherwise there’ll be lots of lost time swapping plates between sets. However I would urge you to consider pairing experienced lifters with less advanced partners for technique work from time to time. Doing this is a huge win-win as the learner gets great tips and support that you can rely on and the more experienced lifter will be forced to reflect more deeply on the cue or movement pattern in order to give advice and guidance on it, thereby increasing their own understanding. Personality should also play a preference in the selection of partnerships so always consider the effect the interacting characters will have on each other. For instance, you might avoid coupling an introverted person lacking in confident with one of your ultra competitive athletes as frustration and despondency may follow. However, it might make sense to group a ‘lazy’ lifter with someone with a great work ethic in order to demonstrate the type of commitment you’re looking for in an athlete.

4. Get personal. If you’ve coached for any amount of time, you’re likely aware that this is a tricky area. When you become a coach you suddenly have professional and legal boundaries you need to maintain, but the athletes you coach are humans with feelings and issues just like you. In a perfect world real life cares and worries wouldn’t make it past the gym door and your lifters would bound over the threshold ready to obey your every instruction. As it is, you should make the effort to get to know everyone you coach (maintaining the boundaries that you think appropriate). Each client will have different needs in terms of encouragement and instruction. Understanding the individual personalities in your groups helps you find the motivating factors most potent for them. And expending that little bit more effort on interpersonal relationships helps you draw your coaching boundaries and protect yourself when you need to have a difficult conversation. Personally I am always kidding around, rarely does a serious sentence pass my lips, but I’ve learnt from experience that not everyone responds well to my sense of humor and that I can save myself a lot of heartache by getting to know someone a little before being totally myself!

5. If you know your athletes at a personal level then you’ll know when to push and when to back off. This is a critical skill and requires that you read the mood of the athlete carefully. If at all possible, I always try to finish a session on a high. Most committed Weightlifters will try to fight through a frustrating session but this can be detrimental to their mental game. Sometimes athletes are their own worst enemy and as their coach you will need to take responsibility for the success of their training session. Sometimes this means talking a lifter into starting the next set of triples, other times it’ll mean sending them home early to watch movies and eat donuts.

6. The best way to incite progression in your athletes is to get them to push themselves. I like to encourage healthy competition and give awards. Allowing competition between athletes who train alongside each other can be a double-edged sword. After all, people who train together are often teammates and fierce rivalries may destroy the kind of supportive relationship that’ll be critical to the team in a stressful competitive arena. Furthermore some lifters do not respond well in an overtly competitive environment and indeed you may find that it erodes their confidence.

On the other hand, competition can create a lively atmosphere and fosters high levels of engagement. To keep things relaxed I make sure any contests I program in to training sessions are group=based to avoid focusing in on individuals and keep it non-serious by making it boys versus girls or heavyweights versus lightweights and basing the scoring around accumulated totals or total number of successful lifts wins (with a handicap applied where necessary). I think it’s important to have something tangible as an award such as our ‘Weightlifter of the Week’ trophy (a hideous plastic engraved trophy that cost around $10 that the winner gets to personalize in some way) or a forfeit for the losing team that the winners can choose.

7. Buying a $10 trophy is one thing, but it’s important to invest in the training environment, too. Renting a space and running a gym is expensive and obviously good quality equipment is a priority but don’t forget to decorate the place. I’m not talking about buying framed artwork for the wall, but I think displaying images of your athletes enjoying their training or achieving goals in competition encourages a sense of pride and ownership in the club among the community. Additionally creating a space people can relax and get to know each other can help your clients feel connected to your business or club.

8. All that covers what to do to motivate your athletes, but what about you? Being a coach can be wonderful, fulfilling, and inspiring but it can also be tough. It can feel as if weightlifting is taking over your life and it can be very challenging to keep your own fire stoked. Be aware of how you feel about your sport because if you feel demotivated the chances are your clients will pick up on it.

Personally I have found two things help to remedy a weightlifting malaise: A change can help. Go and train at someone else’s gym, train a different sport for a couple of weeks, change up your own training program, or do something else that’ll break the pattern that you’re disillusioned with. Alternatively, you could take a break. I can almost hear your gasp at that very thought, but keep reading. A couple of weeks off can be incredibly freeing. Your body will fully heal, and you’ll suddenly have free time you wouldn’t normally for normal things like watching movies or spending time with non-weightlifting friends. And because you’ll actually have time to miss lifting, you’ll begin to remember why you love it.

As a bonus tip I want to offer a couple of techniques I have for dealing with people who have a tendency to sap positive feelings from the atmosphere. If you coach, you will know what I’m talking about. Any parent will tell you that there are two ways to deal with a child’s negative behavior: you can ignore it or you can confront it head on. Which technique you use depends on the circumstance. If you have a client that has a negative attitude and is reluctant to join in and less than committed to the session program, then I would generally ignore it and you will find that your other athletes will ignore it too and therefore be unaffected by the dark cloud. Most people are self-aware enough to recognize that their behavior is eliciting a negative response from others and adjust their output accordingly.

If you feel that an athlete’s negative behavior has become difficult to ignore then you need to have an honest one to one conversation with them about it. Offer them your perception of their behavior and how it affects you and others, explain clearly what you expect of them. If you have taken my earlier advice to ‘get personal,’ then this conversation is likely to be successful. When you have this conversation you must be open minded though, and not judgemental; people are complex and sometimes there is something else going on behind the behavior. At these moments its important to establish the boundaries firmly and respectfully set out some ground rules.

Fundamentally, the atmosphere and level of motivation among your athletes will be a direct reflection of your own attitude. In short: What you give out you will get back. Look after yourself and your own attitude, offer your clients respect and support, and try to relish your time coaching them. I guarantee you will get the same effort from them in return!