Bob Takano has a new article up at his blog in which he mentions a talk he gave to a bunch of parents of volleyball athletes about the importance of determining whether your son’s or daughter’s strength coach is qualified to do what it is your child needs done.  Good strength coaching is becoming a serious factor for parents who are hoping that their kid will get a sports scholarship when they go off to college. And if your athlete is on the verge you need to take the choice of strength-performance coaches seriously.

Here’s a quote:

I spent some time discussing the range of abilities presented by people calling themselves personal trainers and how widely those abilities and backgrounds could vary.  I told them to ask questions about prior experience working with athletes, the success levels of those athletes, injury rates of their athletes and what factors would be improved besides vertical jump.  I provided them with an arsenal of questions to help them determine the competency of any strength and conditioning coach or personal trainer they might encounter including whether or not they were certified.

The truth is, it isn’t always easy to find a serious strength coach who has the knowledge of the unique demands that a competitive athlete faces.  These include massive time demands (school, work, practice, girl/boy friend, smokin’ weed with their buddies … but you aren’t supposed to know about that one!), serious risks of over-training due to the overload their already getting from their sport-specific coach, and risks of sport-related injury that could kill their chances at a scholarship.

If you walk into any “normal” big-box gym you’ll be hounded by a slew of “trainers” who look about the same age as your kid!  They’re all excited and jovial, no doubt, but they rarely are going to have a clue what they’re doing (certified or not). Not good.  But, where would you find a qualified coach, and what does “qualified” even mean?

To follow Bob’s lead (again … and yet again I’m using the “5 tips” format! … oh, heavens), I’ve got my own small list of things I’d want to know about a potential coach for my kid (assuming I had a kid).

1. Did you find the trainer in one of those large commercial gyms?  If so, we may have a problem. Not only are the trainers at these places usually grossly under experienced, the gyms themselves are understocked with what I would consider necessary equipment:  platforms, bumper plates, chalk, etc.  If the gym you’re taking your young athlete into doesn’t have at least those three things prominently displayed, then you’re unlikely to find the coach you’re kid needs either.  Sports performance training is a completely different animal then so-called bodybuilding training.  The trainer should know the difference.
2. What certifications does the coach have?  If it’s ACE, turn and RUN.  Trust me on this one. I would only be comfortable with one (or both) of the following:  1) USA Weightlifting’s Sports Performance Coach certification (or equivalently, USA Weightlifting’s Olympic Club Coach certification) OR 2) NSCA’s Certified Strength and Conditioning Coach certification.  That is, the coaches business card should have “NAME, USAW” or “NAME, CSCS” on it.  Oh, and a college education wouldn’t hurt.
3. Was the trainer an athlete?  If they weren’t, that isn’t necessarily a deal breaker, but it could be a sign.  There is not much like personal experience to teach someone what NOT to do.  If the trainer feels they could have been a “champion” if only they’d had the right coaching, then maybe they’ve developed some idea of what “the right coaching” is.  The strength coach Mark Rippetoe once said, “The best coaches were mediocre athletes.”  They know what it’s like to struggle, to suffer, and to be defeated.  Combine those things with a positive attitude and an inquisitive mind, and you’ve got yourself a good coach … which lead me to:
4. Make sure the performance coach is a “thinker”.  OK, this can be hard to gauge in a quick meeting.  But, designing programs (not just routines) for an athlete requires taking into account a large number of variables, all of which interact back with one another.
5. Is the strength coach a “yeller”?  I know that we all have memories of our high school coaches yelling and screaming at us. And in the movies it’s certainly more fun to have a guy like Mickey from Rocky – red faced, spit spewing from their mouths, veins popping out off their forehead. But, the reality is that most great strength coaches can get their point across without needing to yell.  This is particularly important if your kid is a daughter.  Girls rarely respond well to aggressive screaming.  You know that line, “you’ll catch more flies with honey …”

I could come up with a lot more, but this will have to do for now.  The underlying point is to keep your eyes open and ask a lot of questions.  Anyone who is worth it will more than happy to answer any questions you have.

If you ever need motivation to lose weight, try this one:

As a Weight Watchers group gathered for a routine weigh-in, the dieters got an idea of how far they still had to go: The floor underneath them collapsed, a Swedish newspaper reports.

“We suddenly heard a huge thud; we almost thought it was an earthquake and everything flew up in the air,” one of about 20 group members said to the Smalandsposten newspaper. “The floor collapsed in one corner of the room and along the walls.”

Robert Taylor discusses the importance of actually using basketball as a part of a basketball players conditioning.   I know that may sound obvious, but the fact is, we weightlifting coaches are rather weightroom centric. 

Unfortunately, the way sports performance is approached today, strength coaches almost never have any contact with sport coaches.  Be sure to ask your athletes for a detailed description of their sport specific weekly load so that your strength programs are properly in line with that and don’t over train them.

This is one of the great benefits Olympic Weightlifting coaches have when coaching their own guys than when we are coaching other athletes.   With Oly lifters, all conditioning and strength work is done “in house”.  It’s as though the football coach also did all the strength coaching. 

And don’t get me started on how hard it is to design good programs for “recreational” athletes like rec-league softball players, roller derby, rugby, and golf.  At least in school-based team sports environments they are supervised by a coach who keeps their workload in check.  For the recreational athlete, there is no such supervision.    And far too often the athletes don’t know how to stop themselves from overworking.

Check out the new website for the Oceana Weightlifting Federation.  OK, it’s not the sleekest thing on the planet, but it’s better than what they had.  And I still think it’s easier to navigate than the USAW site. 

Now I’ve heard it all.  A woman was diagnosed with lachanophobia, or a fear of vegetables.  I didn’t say that she doesn’t like them … I mean she is flat out afraid of them.

“Every time I would see vegetables not just on my plate, but anywhere I would get feelings of panic, start sweating and my heart rate would shoot up.

“People might think it is a bit of a laughable affliction but I have a genuine fear of greens it’s not just that I dislike the taste of sprouts or broccoli, but the actual sight of them fills me with dread and I could never touch them.”

Hat tip: Bradley Simpson at Kitchenpt

I’m the guy in green with the knee-wraps down around my ankles.  Chris is in Red, and had a great meet.  My fiance Leslie, far left, front row, got first in her weight class.

And here’s the new lifting schedule for the 2010 Oregon “season”.  My team will be competing again on February 6th.  I won’t be, since I’ve got 2 new guys competing for the first time.  I don’t like to compete when I’ve got newbie’s, it’s important that I help them pick the right warm up weights, and help them choose their 2nd and 3rd lifts.  Your first time competing can be a bit hectic, and having your coach there to spur you on makes a difference. 

I didn’t know that Mixed Martial Arts training is illegal in New York until I ran across the page on Ross Training.  I wouldn’t get involved myself … I’m WAY too wimpy.  But, it’s just stupid for it to be illegal there. 

Check these video’s out:

This has happened to me so many times on all of my wordpress sites, that I figured it was time to tell you how easy it is to fix.

The error message reads something like this:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted

Now your site is all messed up and won’t work.   Here’s what you want to do.  Go into your main wordpress folder in your file manager.  Scroll down until you get to a file called

wp-settings.php

Open it in an editor (bluehost has one built in which is fine for this purpose).

You’ll see the following line of code:

if ( !defined(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’) )
define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘32M‘);

Notice I bolded the 32M.  Change that number to 64.  Click save.  Done.  Your site should work fine.

Now you can get back to blogging about what you care about, which for me is fitness.

When you’re in doubt about a course of action in your exercise routine, just follow the advice given by one of the (undisputed) greatest coaches of all time, Old Jingle:

“Jump with the Nose!”

Bob Takano responds to questions on Yahoo Answers.

Yesterday I happened upon a query on Yahoo in which someone named Pasquale asked how to become an olympic weightlifting coach.  These were his/her specific questions:

How to become an olympic weightlifting coach?

Do you have to go to school (college)?

If so what colleges offer them (if any)

Do you have to get a certification? If so how?

extremely curious!!!! want to know how to become one.!.!.!

Now aside from the overuse of exclamation points, this person asks some basic questions that Bob was delighted he even knew to ask. 

It was interesting to me became it wasn’t very long ago that no one even knew that weightlifters were coached.  On some social occasions I’d end up in a group of non weightlifters, and I’d really try not to bring up my weightlifting activities because it would end up in frustrating conversations.  Someone, however, would know that I was a coach and introduce me to strangers as a weightlifting coach.  I would usually get one of two things (or both) said to me.

“How much do you bench?” (This one is losing popularity)

OR

“You don’t look like a weightlifting coach.”

Sadly, I’ve gotten the same far too often.  But, Youtube has made serious strides in making our sport accessible to the public.

Coach Takano continues.

One person (wsguy198) responded, “My guess is to become an Olympic weightlifter first.  Just a hunch”

Now wsguy198 was probably being a wise guy, but he was right.  Pasquale knows nothing about the coaching education program or the protocol for classifying coaches by proficiency levels developed by USA Weightlifting, the national governing body for the sport.  He would know about these things if he were a member of the organization and had competed in sanctioned competitions.

Dan John has said that if you want to coach something, you had better know how to do it. (Or, something to that effect.)   You don’t have to be great at it.  There are always genetic limitations.  And people who are serious about coaching tend to have personality traits that are the exact opposite of the personality traits most needed in a top-level athlete, and that often holds back their ultimate progress.

But, none of that changes the fact that a coach had better be able to practice what they preach.  We all have had an out of shape P.E. teacher who couldn’t jog a lap if his life depended on it.  Hardly inspiring.

Learn the lifts, compete, and suffer the way your athletes are being asked to suffer.  They don’t need to look up to you as the greatest weightlifter who has ever lived.  But, they do want to know that you understand their pain from experience.  You may never be a national champion, but you’ll know what it’s like to stand on the platform in front of 3 judges with red-button trigger-fingers. 

To the Pasquales of the world, there were weightlifting coaches before there ever was an organization to annoint them or recognize them.  For thousands of years humans have immersed themselves in activities that they were passionate about and committed to and developed enough mastery and expertise to be considered experts, and teachers and mentors.

Indeed.  I coached for a year before I ever got certified.  By the time I went through the certification process, it was a simple formality.  I had been competing for a few years, coaching for 1, and was fully comfortable with moving a new beginner and preparing them for their first contest.  

USA Weightlifting has levels of certification, the first one being for club coaches who are involved in training primarily beginners and intermediate weightlifters. As you move through, and your athletes improve, you become eligible for higher level certifications.

What I find strange, though, was the idea of using the certification process (primarily) as a “learning” process.  That is, a lot of the people going through the weekend long seminar that you must go through to get certified, were totally knew to the lifts!!  Crazy. 

I saw it as a test.  And like all tests, I’m far more comfortable taking it when the information has become trivial to me.  You can only learn so much in a single weekend.

Over the last number of years, as coach of the PDX Weightlifting club, I’ve learned a lot about things that work with both beginners and intermediates, and things that don’t work.  In training intermediates, I’ve had to go through a number of years of writing yearly periodized  programs to find out what has and hasn’t worked in both the short term and the long term. 

For beginners, I’m now confident that I can teach ANYONE (without a physical disability) to do a passable power clean and power snatch in under 1 hour.  Period.   Sure, they’ll need lots of work to become truly efficient.  But, the foundations are laid quickly, and they can begin the work without a plethora of bad habits.

But, this is only possible because I have spent a number years at it.  And I’m new, relatively speaking.  I’ve got a long way to go to become a national level coach.  That will, itself, take even more years and more work. 

So, I must say to Pasquale that there is a path to becoming a weightlifting coach.  It begins by becoming a weightlifter and accepting the addiction to the sport that will carry you through the drudgery involved in developing any kind of mastery of any endeavor.  The early stages of the development will involve some formal education or courses or clinics, but above all it involves a great deal of coaching and entering your athletes in competition to see how they perform against others.  There is no other metric of any significance.  But first you must become involved with the sport.

Bob Takano has been around a while.  Times have changed, and for weightlifting, I’d say they have changed for the better.  But, some things haven’t.  You’ve got to actually do something to know how to do something. 

Coach Takano answered most of the above questions, but didn’t do so in a very explicit way. So, I will:

Answers

1. How to become an olympic weightlifting coach?
2. Do you have to go to school (college)?
3. If so what colleges offer them (if any)
4. Do you have to get a certification? If so how?

1. See my outline below for a path to that goal. But, basically, start by competing, then trick your spouse into competing so you can coach them.

2. No.  There are no higher-ed requirements officially.  But, I would certainly recommend that you get a degree in something “science-ish”. I have a degree in Mathematics, and am getting a masters in Math with a focus in mathematical biology.  It may sound like it isn’t relevant, but it is.  Science and math training makes you smarter the way that strength training makes you stronger.  The more attuned to complexity you are, the better a coach you will become.  Olympic weightlifting isn’t rocket science, but it is biology and chemistry and physics. 

3. If you want a specific exercise science degree, there are tons of schools that offer them.  Here in Oregon, Oregon State University has a program. And Portland State has a Masters in Public Health with an physical exercise focus.  Your state probably has many similar programs.  But, when in doubt, just pick a science that you like, and learn whatever you can.  I promise you can find a way to make it improve your coaching.

4.  Yes.  At some point you do need to be certified.  You can’t run an official USAW registered club if you don’t have a certification through USAW. 

If I was going to outline a linear path for you if you’d like to coach a weightlifting club, I’d say do the following:

5 Tips for the Weightlifting Coach

1. Start competing as a weightlifter (fully accepting that you’re going to get your butt kicked)
2. Try to become as technically proficient as you can be, and take careful notes of how HARD that is, and what things you found to be the hardest.  You have to understand what your athletes are going through. 
3. Start coaching the instant you can find a Guinna pig to coach.  There is a long tradition in weightlifting of early coaches tricking their spouses into competing.  Mike Burgener famously has coached all of his kids.  Friends and family are a great resource for your early experiments into what might work, and what doesn’t.  Learn by teaching.
4. Read everything you can get your hands on, not just about Oly lifting, but about strength and conditioning in general, and biology, chemistry, and physics.  Olympic Lifters are athletes, not just weightlifters.
5. Get certified once you’ve actually learned something.  That way the certification is meaningful.