How Does Your Coach Stack Up?

In this article I am going to give parents, athletes and personal training clients a simple system that they can use as a tool to determine if someone is a good strength coach and/or personal trainer.

I have no idea how to tell you who the best mechanic is, just like most people don’t have the knowledge base to determine if someone is a good trainer or not.  The same way I pick a mechanic is the same way people choose personal trainers: 1. Do I feel like I can trust them, and 2. Do I like them.  Although these two things are important, they are an unreliable system for picking a good trainer.  I trust, and like my wife but I don’t want her working on my engine.  The difference is that if she messes up and ruins my engine, then I can just go to a real mechanic and have it fixed.  If you choose the wrong trainer and ruin your body or don’t improve your performance, you can’t buy another body or get back that lost time.  Unfortunately, we see a lot of clients that have wasted time or gotten hurt using other “certified” trainers.  This awful situation is something that we would like to put an end to, so we are giving you a system to judge trainers by.  With the base certification to be a trainer being so easy to obtain, anyone who wants to can do it.  Luckily, from now on you will have my system to use as a way to vet out whether you are talking to a good trainer or if you are just talking to a personable smile with a certification.  At the end of the day it doesn’t matter to me if you train at The Spot Athletics or somewhere else, but it does matter that everyone is seeing a good trainer.  This allows our profession to be viewed in high regard and it stops me from having to fix needlessly injured people.

I see how dreadful most of the trainers are when I travel and have to go to a big box gym.  I wonder how they have jobs or why people even listen to them.  These inadequate trainers seem to be busy and their clients don’t even know that they are getting worthless training.  These trainers should really be called entertainers and not trainers.  They just apply useless gimmicks to keep the client entertained and not focused on the real goal -- results.  This really bugs me as I have spent the last 20 years of my life becoming one of the most educated, intelligent and well-rounded strength coaches and personal trainers in the world.  Yet, some weekend certified guy down the road is training clients and telling everyone they are “good”.  With the following system, you will be able to determine if they are really good or not.  Hopefully, if you use this system and your current trainer doesn’t pass, then you will call us so you can start working with a good trainer and actually start getting results instead of entertainment.

The system has 3 qualifiers and 1 eliminator.  The qualifiers determine if someone can be considered for the good category and the eliminator determines if they are truly good.  If someone can’t get by the qualifiers, then the eliminator doesn’t come into play.  You cannot skip steps in this system or a bad trainer may end up training you or your athlete.   This mistake will mean little to no results or possibly getting injured.  The 3 qualifiers are: 1. Education/Experience; 2. Who did they learn from (coaching tree); and 3. Who have they coached/trained.

1. Education/Experience - This is number one in the qualifiers because it is the base for which everything is built.  Education can come in many forms and I regard time under the bar as much as letters behind a name.  Having lots of letters behind your name is impressive but it does not mean the person knows what they are doing.  It just means they can pass a test.  Although education isn’t everything, it does show that there is a base level of knowledge.  When I talk about education for a trainer I like to see a college degree in exercise science or a related field or I question their level of education.  Certifications are too easy to achieve, so I want to see that they have a degree.  If they do not have a lot of fancy letters behind their name then I look at the other qualifier which is experience.  If someone has been a trainer for a long time, it at least that shows that people like them.  If they have been training for a long time and I can’t find anything about them on Google, then I don’t regard their experience as valid.  If someone has been doing this for more than a few years and all you can find on them is their Facebook, Twitter or work webpage, then that means they aren’t very good at what they are doing.  So I put Education and Experience together because I know people without degrees that are genius trainers and people with Masters degrees who I wouldn’t let be an intern at The Spot Athletics.


2. Who did they learn from (coaching tree) - Every good trainer comes from a good coaching tree.  If you ask someone who they learned from and they can only tell you the certification that they have, then there is a big problem.  The people I learned from are people who are regarded as legends of the training business.  I did an internship with one of the top Sports Medicine doctors in the world.  The guys that I came up with are at schools like Utah and Wisconsin or working for professional football or soccer teams.  My coaching tree includes the best and the brightest that have been around training and because of this, I am one of the best in the world.  Without having the coaching tree that I have then I wouldn’t be near the trainer I am today.  If a trainer doesn’t have a great coaching tree, then they are not a good trainer.


3. Who have they coached/trained - If a trainer is worth their salt then they should be able to name several great athletes that they have trained or give amazing stories of personal training results.  Although these things do mean something, they don’t tell the whole story by themselves.  The great athlete they trained might have been great before they started working with them.  The personal training client might have been at a perfect storm of events where their results would of happened no matter who was training them.  That is why I also look at who they have under them in their coaching tree.  If someone can name people they have trained but they cannot name any trainers that they have helped develop, then I would seriously doubt their knowledge as a trainer.  Once you reach a certain level of knowledge it becomes a natural progression that other trainers will want to learn from you.  If someone doesn’t have anyone under them in their coaching tree, then they haven’t reached that level of knowledge and aren’t a good trainer.

The Eliminator:

Does the trainer/strength coach TRAIN on a weekly basis themselves?

If the person you are considering training with or are currently training with does not TRAIN on a consistent basis then they are not a good trainer.  I say train and not workout because working out is just hopping on a treadmill or randomly grabbing some weights and moving them.  This is what poor trainers do and have their clients do.  Training is exercising with a well thought out program and an end goal in mind.  If your trainer doesn’t train for goals, how will they be able to teach you to reach goals?  Most people state that they like their trainer because they keep things fun and parents like workouts for their kids where the kids stay busy.  Well a good trainer is neither an entertainer nor a babysitter.  The workouts should definitely be engaging but with the end goal in mind, not merely with the purpose to entertain or keep busy.  A movie is entertaining, but it will not get you in shape.  Neither will going to the gym and just randomly being entertained.  The same can be said for young athletes training.  Results and proper skills being learned should be the judge of their program, not keeping them busy.  Anybody can keep your kids busy by having them randomly running around but they will not become a better athlete.  None of this matters to a trainer who doesn’t train.  They never try to reach goals, so they can’t understand what it takes to get an athlete or a personal training client to a goal.  This is why the eliminator is so important in the decision making process.  My advice is that you ask the potential trainer or your current one “what they are training for”.  If they say nothing, then you need to make a switch.

So there you have it -- a system that allows you to decide whether someone is a good trainer or not.  Are there still people that can sneak through the cracks and not be good? Maybe.  But if you use this system then that is a lot less likely to happen.  Good luck and remember, choosing a good trainer can be a life changing decision.  Do not take it lightly.