If you have been in this field for a long time you have gone through the curve. This is: thinking you know everything, thinking you know nothing, getting settled with what you believe and what you do.
For those at the later part of this curve (those with years of daily experience) you quickly realize that “best practice” often isn’t possible. I call this: Ideal versus Real.
Coaches and writers often only write about best practices. Articles and books typically cover the best way to organize training and the best methods to use. It is important to know these. But as coaches, we often see this and feel stuck when we cannot do it, or worse, we feel like less of a coach. Or sometimes even inferior. Mike’s article illustrated that even the best coaches, (in this case the one who literally wrote the book on best practice) adjust what they do depending on their population, equipment and training age.
This article is here to simply give you permission to not feel bad if and when you cannot follow the perfect template. Here are a few examples from Mike himself:
Normally Mike recommends foam rolling every day. Yet, with his overweight clients, he realizes foam rolling is not practical and simply skips that part. You may feel behind if you cannot get your clients or teams to roll because of budget or time. Get over it. This doesn’t make you less of a coach.
In his training kids article, he realized a lot of things that I’ve had to adjust as well, over the past 8 years with my middle school class. Foam rolling, stretching and activations are a stable of MBSC. You may feel you have to do them with everyone. Although this is his/there preferred warm-up set-up, he realized that after practice he only had 15 or so minutes so they by-passed all of that. Ideal, no. Real, yes. If you coach a team that has limited time, you may not be able to do the perfect warm-up.
As Strength Coaches and personal trainers we love what we do. We spend an absurd amount of time reading about perfect templates, best lifts and proper flows. We are always thinking about where to put activation exercises, and how it’s best to tri-set. Once you start working with middle school aged kids however, you quickly realize you cannot keep their attention for 3 exercises at a time, all the time. That may be true with adults as well. Adjust. Don’t feel that you have to stick to the textbook format. Adapt with the personality of the people you are training to get better results.
You have Permission to adjust things. The Perfect Planning Police are not going to come and take away your strength coach card.
Use the resources and intelligence of coaches with experience here, but also realize that if they were in your situation, they would probably do the same thing as you are doing. They would adjust.
- If you don’t have anything to jump on, sometimes you cannot do box jumps. No biggie.
- If you don’t have weights that go above 25 lbs., you can still create better moving people.
- If you are one coach and have 25 people you are working with, you have to reduce exercises progressions to the best choice for everyone as a group.
This is being a good Strength Coach. It’s not about doing everything as written. It’s about applying those principles to your situations.
Go and train. You have permission not to worry. You are doing a good job!