The following was written by my coaching partner, Coach Zhang, co/author of several other articles on my blog. He has also trained in China and we have coached together for nearly a decade.
How can you tell if someone is or will be a good coach? What elements of their personalities, experiences, and abilities can you look at in order to form a solid first impression? Let’s start with one extreme and work backward.
A great coach is someone whose wisdom can simultaneously contradict, validate, and reframe an athlete’s perspective. They have come to that wealth of knowledge from a lack of ego. They are self-evidently excellent at their craft and don’t need fancy certifications or titles to prove it for them. They may not have many followers on social media but excel at building trust and community without the help of an algorithm. They recognize that the art of coaching is a function of one’s own development as a person, so their wisdom often extends into broader life.
But for how many coaches is this currently true? I can only name a few. None of them is famous, and for the sake of my own development I’ll always need to set the bar high enough that I don’t consider myself one. It follows that I am extremely wary of internet-famous coaches; social media has a way of providing followers to those who can attract as opposed to those who can give.
I want to provide an example of a question whose different answers can help illustrate the many levels of pure coaching ability: Should you pull with your weight on your heels?
A new coach may teach people to pull from their heels. They don’t know why other than the fact that it is what they were told.
A coach with some experience may begin to doubt themselves. They may begin to doubt themselves as they realize their athletes are having trouble fully extending, or consistently jump backward/forward. This doubt may extend to derision for their old style as they become an adopter of the new.
A coach worth their salt will have tried both and likely come to the conclusion that pulling from the heels does not work. Maybe this coach has also sought out outside information and can offer some context.
A truly good coach can explain, without judgment or harshness, why it is worth keeping a more forward balance on the foot, and will teach it smoothly. If they are a student of the sport, they may understand the historical and practical reasons why people like to teach heel-centric pulling. If they were never taught heel-centric pulling, as is the case for many foreign coaches, they may try it anyway in the interest of experimentation. They know from experience that a priori reasoning may not lead to the right conclusion if one’s premises are wrong.
In the case of coaches 3 and 4, we begin to see contradiction, validation, and reframing. These are people from whom we can actually learn.
What we seem to have in the West are highly esteemed coaches who have not advanced beyond stage 1. They are as full of confidence as they are of contempt for anyone training under a new or different style. These are the coaches who say that Chinese technique simply won’t work with longer-legged lifters. They say that technique only needs refinement after a lifter has gotten strong. They may justify the poor technique of their athletes by saying it’s the athlete’s individual needs that necessitate inefficient lifting (reflect on the cruelty of this statement: you are so uniquely bad you need to lift badly too).
Sure enough, the field begins to move on from them. When a “new” style seems to work, they will say that it’s what they taught all along. And the irony is that these styles, whether it is ball-of-foot-centric pulling or internal rotation overhead, were the norm the whole time in every successful country elsewhere. It was never new; rather, the “old” style was taught in isolation away from what worked. Other times, these ideas truly are new to the whole world. Take the concept of RPE, whose application to strength sport only came in the last decade. How many weightlifting coaches do you know programming with RPE? But how many powerlifting coaches do you see using it? Every PL coach I know sees RPE as a godsend, yet WL coaches are generally still in the dark. PL coaches often take inspiration from WL, and the recent trend toward higher frequency in the PL world is owed in part to this. Every powerlifter knows who Lu Xiaojun is. However, weightlifters seem to hold little but derision for powerlifters. A prohibitive culture is passed down from above.
Let’s focus on the good coaches once more. Every fellow coach who has earned my respect has this one trait, among a few others, in common: openness. You can see it in the communication they have with their athletes; are they collaborative or directive relationships? They are open to athlete feedback. They are open to feedback from other coaches, and often seek them out. They are open to ideas from other sports. They apply and study in reciprocal fashion, and they can learn something from anything.
Some years ago, I showed my coach in Shandong a video of a high-level American lifter jerking: with their extreme lean-back and external rotation above, it looked like they were bench pressing the bar in a split. I was hoping to goad him into passing judgment on this lifter due to my immaturity. After all, what better validation is there for my own ideas than to have a bonafide Chinese coach on my side? Though he initially disapproved, he then asked me if I had personally tried this style, and innocently wondered if this lifter was using their superior upper body strength to their advantage.
This openness extends to demeanor. It seems there is a problem among famous Western coaches who try to cultivate an unkind, hardcore, or otherwise abrasive public image--it’s their team, their style, we get results, unfollow if you don’t agree. What is the likelihood that this coach is open to new ideas? The teams under these coaches learn similar behaviors. Meanwhile, every good coach I have ever worked with made sure to foster a healthy training environment. (A rule of thumb: there are many serious women in their gyms, who often contribute immensely to the community atmosphere. Bad training environments tend to preclude women.) After all, a cohesive community with strong core values keeps people coming back to train. On the other hand, cortisol kills gains.
But I don’t want to sound like “niceness” indicates a good coach either. Rather, it was common among the worst coaches I have worked with to try to be too nice, and it seems to be an attempt to cover up the fact that they don’t actually know what to critique--or worse, they haven’t learned how to give feedback period. It is in their gyms that communities will initially form because of the positive training environment, but the more serious athletes end up leaving when they realize they haven’t made progress. And without veteran lifters who can serve as effective ambassadors and mentors, the community falls apart anyway. What’s more, I have seen these “nice” coaches get just as defensive upon being challenged as the more abrasive ones. It seems that underneath lies the same incompetence.
I once witnessed a coach backstage point to Yatsek and whisper to his youth lifter a few times, verbatim, “Isn’t he scary? Aren’t you glad you’re with me?” As I am Yatsek’s coaching partner and am constantly subject to his taciturn exterior (he’s a very warm person; he’s just Polish), this naturally piqued my curiosity and so I turned to look. The coach and lifter were from a prestigious local team with their own facility and so on. Just from this young athlete’s technique, it was clear that this coach was doing them a disservice. And besides simply being an odd thing to say, the coach’s defensive statement was preemptive; we had been nothing but accommodating to this pair, sharing a platform with them.
It was clear the real sentiment behind the comment: I am intimidated by this man’s ability. It was also clear the real reason for the comment: Yatsek’s youth lifter looked excellent. There was a certain gravity to their attitude in the warm-up room because Yatsek takes his athlete seriously and together they have learned that this is what she prefers. The effort it takes to build this kind of connection with an athlete reflects a sincere and secure kindness that can subvert a first impression. In other words, find a coach who is kind enough to take children seriously.
“Thanks Eddie. As my coaching partner, you have to make me look good. ”
Passion is also key. When watching someone coach, do they seem to “wake up” the moment they get into the gym? Do they share in the joy and the pain of their athletes, or does it all seem a few layers detached? Is the coach sitting down, on their phone? When you watch training videos, do you see the coaches providing feedback after reps, thereby allowing the athlete to improve within a set and not just session-to-session? When an athlete seems to be upset, is the coach communicating with them, or on the other side of the gym?
I once heard something that has stuck with me to this day. “Treat everyone like they have the potential to be a champion.” This is a ridiculous statement on its face and of course we shouldn’t be so delusional. But then--why not? In a country whose weightlifting athletes are almost entirely recreational, we don’t have the luxury of picking talents out of a line-up of farmers’ children and discarding the rest. As a Western coach, even if your intention is to produce champions, you have to make it worth it to keep coming back to you, and not move on to some other sport. I make it a point to be impressed by the progression of my newer athletes. Sure, I have seen it happen a million times, but they have only seen it once. And to a good coach, it should never get old.
Here is another story: I was coaching a lifter at a state championship some time ago. We shared a platform with a new lifter, there alone, whose technical inconsistency meant he was missing easy warm-ups. I asked him how long he’d been lifting as a segue into potentially helping him out, as he looked frustrated. He said, “About four weeks.” Four weeks? This raised several questions: as a coach, how could you let this lifter compete after a month of training? A judoka would still be learning to fall at this stage in their training--would you send them into combat? Third: where was the coach himself? Sure enough, his coach was the head of another big-name local team, but hadn’t even bothered to show up until five minutes before this lifter was due to step on the platform--and when he finally appeared, it was with nary a word to his athlete. Instead, he went around speaking to higher-level athletes on other teams. I ended up handling his athlete for him in the first half of the meet, and it’s unclear if he noticed.
And then the fourth question: where was this (USAW international) coach’s passion? For all we knew, his athlete could have been a champion. But one cannot make a champion without being accountable to them, and choosing to hold yourself accountable to someone who may not be able to do anything for you in return takes passion. Look for a gym whose coaches are passionate about developing beginners and youth, and whose veterans started at that gym. If the vets mostly started elsewhere and the beginners seem to be there no longer than a month before another batch rotates in, this is a sign you are looking at a gym whose coaches are more interested in marketing to big names than actually coaching.
What about a coach’s raw technical intuition? Unfortunately, this seems to be an area where a coach will simply have “the eye” (“the sense” of what to fix) or not at all. Either way, developing the eye takes a long time. But this is also why I place this last in a list of things that make up a good coach: do it long enough and you’re going to get good. One’s experience is the key, and the so-called “soft traits” like openness, accountability, sincerity, and passion allow one to accumulate experience long enough to get good (not to mention faster, too). Some coaches stagnate--in my opinion there is something about their development as a person outside of the gym that prevents them from taking in and synthesizing new information beyond a certain point. Perhaps they received official validation too early in their career, or they are too invested in dogma to break through to the next level. Other coaches are content with anonymity if it means they can continue working their craft in peace, free from the demands of a follower base; as mentioned before, the best coaches I have ever worked with have almost no name-recognition in the US.
This may have lead you to some critical thoughts about your own coach, or if you are one of my athletes, about me. That’s okay. A good coach is able to welcome feedback and above all recognizes their responsibility to improve. If there are things on which you don’t quite see eye-to-eye with them, please make these things known. The long-term goal of every coach is to form partnerships with athletes in which we grow too.
If you are a coach yourself, I hope this was helpful. Coaching is a multifaceted art, and the client-coaching relationship inherently contains a dynamic of power that we must honor by holding up our end of the bargain. I’ve found that the best thing I can do for my athletes is to set a good example of how to meet challenges in the gym, if not in life. Getting stronger shouldn’t just happen in the training hall--it’s a metaphor, after all.
Anyway, link in the bio for coaching.
Just kidding.
Eddie