Do You Have a Strength Coach? Well You Should...

Many great coaches, researchers, and educators have since contributed to the growth of the profession of strength and conditioning far beyond its pioneers’ perceived expectations.

There are some phenomenal coaches out there doing phenomenal work. Of all the athletic performance coaches out in the field, I pay particularly close attention to Ron McKeefery, Brett Bartholomew, and Altis World. I’ve mentioned Ron McKeefery and Brett Bartholomew in previous posts but they deserve endless mention because besides having reached the pinnacle of what ambitious strength coaches hope to reach in their careers, they are pioneers-turned-activists, giving back to the profession by educating those following in their footsteps. After having met and conversed with both of these men, I believe they genuinely want the best for all those aspiring to be strength and conditioning coaches and I especially respect their efforts to challenge many of the stigmas surrounding strength coaches.

Altis World (Altis for short) is right up there with McKeefery and Bartholomew in their efforts to fill the profession of coaching with evidence-based practices. Altis is continually researching traditional methods of training athletes and coaching sport with intent to evaluate their efficacy within modern systems. If you have never heard of them, I encourage you to check them out however, I will warn you that a lot of the information they produce can easily go over the head of a person of even above average intelligence. They may come across as a bit grandiose in their knowledge but keep in mind that they are attempting to challenge practices that have been in place for decades and bring to light a profession that operates primarily behind the scenes. With coaches and organizations like these dominating the industry, athletic performance coaches are only becoming more and more valuable to the athlete and the governing organization. I argue three encompassing reasons why strength and conditioning, or athletic performance coaches, provide tremendous value to an organization.

Reason #1: Time

Seventy-plus hour work weeks...weekends spent traveling to games...holidays...summers...I have learned that being a strength and conditioning coach requires more time and dedication than I ever had as an athlete. You can liken the job of a strength coach to that of a school teacher’s. Instead of creating lesson plans, we create training programs. Rather than a classroom, we teach out of weight rooms. In addition to teaching from fall to spring, we also teach from June on through August. The modern system of athletics calls for athletes to train for sport year round and it is our job to see that the athletes get what they need to be prepared for their athletic seasons. Its exhausting just thinking about how much time it takes to prepare an athlete or a team for one training session, let alone an entire annual program. Time is often the most valuable asset to a human being and it can be a strong indicator of what is truly important to that person. Nearly all of a strength coach’s time is spent to benefit other people. There is no commission for how many athletes we train, or bonuses for the ones that go onto professional careers. We simply work to empower those who are within our sphere of influence so that they might achieve something they thought they  otherwise couldn’t.

Reason #2: Injury Prevention

With the advent of year-round training and early sport-specialization, strength coaches are tasked with maintaining the health of the athlete while simultaneously improving performance.  A major concern for parents placing their children is sports is the likelihood of an injury. Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL) tears are among the most common injuries suffered in field and court sports. The power of research has shown that ACL injuries, which are often traumatic and devastating to an athlete’s career, are preventable through adequate training strategies.2 The practitioners that are most equipped to implement these strategies are strength and conditioning, and or, athletic performance coaches. We can even utilize assessments such as the Functional Movement Screen (FMS)1 to determine an athlete’s propensity for injury and estimate the likelihood of experiencing an ACL, or other traumatic injury.3 From there, we can prescribe the proper methods to address any weaknesses and avoid, as best we can, an athlete being injured in some terrible way. Understand that the ability to perform these tasks requires a professional with higher education as well as high-quality experience implementing such practices. If you are a young coach, I cannot stress this enough; it is vital that coaches in this profession continue their education. Learn to love learning! Use the tools that are available to you and allow them to help perfect your craft. Your job will depend on it and so will the health and well-being of others under your care.

Reason #3: Recruiting

If you were to go on YouTube and search “strength and conditioning facilities,” you would find videos giving tours of weight rooms containing millions of dollars in state of the art training equipment, turf fields, athlete nutrition centers, and tons more. Some of the shiny, expensive toys we get to play with has to be one of the best things about being a strength coach! But I digress. As mentioned earlier, strength coaches spend an awful lot of time in these facilities and their “Iron Castles” become the hub of off-season recruiting. In my "pre-NARP" (Non-Athletic Regular Person) days, I remember the “facilities pitch” being a major selling point for me as a recruit. USA Today produced an interesting article examining the role of strength and conditioning coaches in recruiting and that being a large reason as to why some coaches at the Division I Football level are making six and seven-figure salaries. It more than explains a school’s inclination to pour millions of dollars into a facility in which the institution’s “money making” (for lack of a better reference) athletes are going to spend most of their time and improve their abilities. Also consider that the most worthy candidate for pitching incoming athletes on the atmosphere of the program, the level to which it is progressing, and the potential for an extended career would be the coach that sees them most often and whose job it is to evaluate character and work ethic as well as athletic ability.

I want to quickly bring us back to the question of interest from the previous post, “How should a strength and conditioning coach be valued?” To be honest, if there is an exact answer, I don’t know it yet. I provided some reasons as to why they should be highly valued, but how exactly? I have no idea. Should the median salary be higher? Should they be given larger budgets and staffing power? Should they be assured better job security? I believe the solutions to these questions are in the works and I will discuss them in my next post. However, for the time being, I would personally be happy if they would just let us have a spot in all of the team pictures. I mean at some levels we serve as a coach for more than one sport...

References:

1. Kraus, K., Schutz, E., Taylor, W. R., & Doyscher, R. (2014). Efficacy of the functional movement screen: a review. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, (12), 3571.
2. Myer, G., Ford, K., Brent, J., & Hewett, T. (2012). An Integrated Approach to Change the Outcome Part Ii: Targeted Neuromuscular Training Techniques to Reduce Identified Acl Injury Risk Factors. JOURNAL OF STRENGTH AND CONDITIONING RESEARCH, 26(8), 2272–2292.
3. Serpell, B. G., Scarvell, J. M., Ball, N. B., & Smith, P. N. (2012). Mechanisms and risk factors for noncontact ACL injury in age mature athletes who engage in field or court sports: a summary of the literature since 1980. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, (11), 3160.