One thing I cannot tolerate is laziness. When I am not coaching,like this period of time right now, I grow very angry at coaches and athletes that I observe phoning in workouts, practices, training plans and programs. Let me start with the athletes for right now.
One trap that many athletes fall in is the idea that "the grass is always greener". Rather than, to put it bluntly, shutting up and doing their training, some athletes want to scrutinize every single drill, workout, and practice looking for things that they can disagree with. Maybe they read a blog, or watched youtube, or talked to their buddy who competes for All-America Awesomeness University and found out that they do things quite differently there. One thing I have always told my athletes is to walk into your workouts with a good attitude and know that most coaches want their athletes to succeed. Sometimes an athlete becomes so convinced that what they are doing is wrong that they convince themselves that their coach's main goal in life is to hold them down and make sure they don't improve. There is a lot of "blind leading the blind" going on nowadays in sports and training, any fool can publish a workout, or training philosophy to a website with no credentials whatsoever. When I get challenged on a topic by one of these "gurus" I always have one and only one question..."Who have you coached?". I attach this point to the "athletes" section because nowadays everyone sees themselves as an expert, and both coaches and athletes need to make sure they are always furthering their education.
To the coaches, some of them, you know who you are. Don't phone in workouts, it's frustrating. I had the "pleasure" of working with a coach who was AMAZED that I write my programs weeks and months in advance. As the coach said to me "wow, sometimes I don't even know what I'm doing an hour before practice!" I would like to say that this is an isolated example but it's blatantly obvious to me this example is the status quo for many programs across the country. Here is an example of a training program for weightlifting I have observed all too often.
Week 1 3x12of 10 lifts
Week 2 3x10 of 10 lifts
Week 3 3x8 of 10 lifts
Week 4 3x6 of 10 lifts
...and the program continues like this all season long. One area of my coaching philosophy I feel I have a great grasp on, is to acknowledge that I don't know everything and I can always learn something new. This does not mean that I will be like some, and throw out my whole program and adapt a whole new training scheme, it means if I learn something new I will research how to implement it along with what I already know. Another example is a coach whose athlete posted on their facebook a youtube video of a hammer thrower doing various core lifts for training, the coaches response was "this looks good, we will do all of these for 3 sets of 8 next week". Really? Come on. No research? Are you that insecure and have that little confidence in your program that you will redo everything at the drop of a hat?
In conclusion, the main thesis of this post is to constantly learn and constantly go into things with an open mind. If you are stubborn and hard headed you will never grow as a coach or athlete. A quote I love (because it's one I came up with myself) is what I will close with. The day I stop being a student, I will also stop being a teacher.
