If you have been training with us for over a year, you have probably noticed that after your first few weeks here we are fairly hands off as far as coaching goes. We may watch your individual lifts and make sure you are hitting depth, or bracing properly, or your stance is correct, or just general technique, but overall we present you the workout and leave you to it. During your first couple of months with us we are much more hands on, watching everything you do and making corrections. So why do we suddenly just let you fly on your own? Because one of our coaching philosophies is to teach you how to train.
Unlike most trainers and coaches, we want you to be able to workout on your own with minimal supervision and just a bit of guidance and minor corrections. If you have been with a coach for more than six months, and that coach still needs to be next to you during every workout, then your coach has not properly taught you how to workout, how to train, and how to lift. That is the wonderful thing about working out with us and training under us (Doug and Lindsay), once we teach you how to lift, how to follow a workout, proper rest times, and we teach you why, why your program is setup a certain way, you will be able to workout on your own, with just a little guidance and a technique correction here and there.
Yes, we are here to motivate you and to encourage you, to praise you when you do well, and yes we are here to correct you when you are doing something wrong, and we are here to pick you when you fail and push you to keep going. We are coaches, we are not cheerleaders, we are not babysitters, we don’t count reps, and we aren’t going to hold your hand through every workout. We want to make you strong enough, and arm you with the knowledge, to know how to move your body and how to move weight, to be able to workout on your own, but we will always be in the background when you need us. We want your motivation to come from within, we want you to love lifting and working out, we want you to set high goals and push yourself, we will always be here to give you a little extra push when you really need it, when you think you can’t give any more we will show you that you are capable of more, but we want that fire to burn within you, because we may not be able to be with you all the time for every workout.
If you are reading this and you do not train with us, if your coach wrote a workout for you could you do it on your own or do you need them with you the whole time? If you have not learned how to train, then your coach has not done everything they can for you. A lot of coaching isn’t just writing programs and telling you what to do, a large part of coaching is imparting the knowledge we have gained over a decade of training and coaching, sharing that knowledge with you. Knowledge is power!
