October 2015

anyone who knows me knows that i take my job very seriously. i don’t think i will ever be comfortable with the term “coach” – there is too much baggage, weight i am not sure i am competent to shoulder. i am a trainer. i help people train behavior. i am a manipulator. a sounding board. a watchful eye. an adviser. a bridge. above all i am a communicator. my job is to understand – to assess the individual, their relationship to their goals and to the work. to push and pull, to bribe, bully, cajole, and coddle. to get it done. by any means necessary.

too often people look at the term “by any means necessary” as an excuse to use the big sticks in the arsenal. to yell at clients, “tough love”, threats and admonitions. trainers think that they are being edgy and raw – being “real”. we often say that if the only tool you have is a hammer than every problem starts to look like a nail – well if you keep swing that hammer long enough and loudly enough than the only problems that will seek you out will be nails – and then what? will you declare that you found the secret? i mean, how could you be wrong? it has worked every time…

training. proper, meaningful training requires knowledge and compassion. it requires trust and timing. some people need a shove, others need a helping hand. most people need both at very specific times and if you shove someone when they need a hand than you have lost – more than that you have failed as a trainer. you misread the signs, or worse yet – never bothered to look for them in the first place. the largest piece of advice i give to people beginning down the path as trainers is to never believe your own bullshit. in entering into this relationship your client is handing you the keys to their psyche, trusting you to root around in there, lie and manipulate, orchestrate events to a specific end – they are making themselves extremely vulnerable and that is not something i am going to be caviler about, and it is something that really, really upsets me when i see it.

your measure as a trainer is the effectiveness you have on your clients. if you seek out clients to fit your brand – then you are a talent scout, and there is nothing wrong with that – just be honest about it. we all have our strengths, other trainers in my gym, guys who i once taught have gotten more out of some of my former clients than i ever could. they saw things i didn’t, touched people in ways i could not. or maybe the clients in question simply needed a new guide for the next part of their journey – maybe by getting them from a to b i blocked myself from being useful from b to c. the point is that this is a process, and to be effective we as instructors must know our place.

too many fuckups in this world can be traced back to peoples failure to recognize conditions they are placing on their solutions. the self styled coaches who put their own ego in front of their clients success. the student who asks questions because they crave the attention of their teacher, not because they actually want the information. the fighter who is more interested in being seen as dominant than actually being victorious. we all want to win, but for some people (and at some times) it is just as important to be seen winning.

an important thing to note if you are choosing to train others is that you will be heaping all your bullshit onto someone elses life. your biases, your hangups, your random errant thoughts. you will talk and they will listen, you might even help people change for the better. the thing to remember is to never believe your own bullshit. in this era of broadcast media you can scream your advice into the void – swing your hammer with abandon and think you are actually changing the world for the better – you may have even gotten a thank you e-mail, and how can you argue with that? our successes reach out to us but what about the ones we push when they need to be reeled-in? it is so easy to forget that through these screens we are speaking to individuals – people who span the full gradient of position and temperament. it is easy to ignore someones situation, to forget that we probably have no clue about where they are coming from or even what they are working towards. what their specific issues may be. advice like “go harder” might make you feel good to yell but is it really what that person needs to hear? and if you can not honestly answer that question then why are you speaking in the first place? do you want to help – or do you want to be seen as helpful? silence is better than bullshit – and self-serving maneuvers, conscious or not are the surest way to break trust. never forget that the client is the important one. that was the deal. “i will help you until we achieve your goals or you find someone better” – and for some clients i have actively tried to find “someone better” – the point is that it all starts with getting to know someone. with openness and honesty and a healthy dose of humility. everyone will tell you what they need, but first you have to shut the fuck up and listen.

understand your contributions. understand your cost. grind and dream – but understand how they change over time. mind your drag, and realize that value is a situational judgement. realize that a tiny amount of mass, a spark of inspiration, a small amount of energy, immense focus, impeccable timing, and perfect accuracy give you one chance and permanent change.
i am in it for the poetry… mostly.

the more i do this the more it seems that communication is a greater issue than knowledge. the mechanics of change are relatively simple: expose. adapt. refine. making a body change is just a matter of pressure and time – the problem starts with identifying which changes you want to make, are compounded by deciphering which exposures will cause the desired adaption, and then on top of it all we have to convince the individual (our self or others) to apply the correct pressure for the correct amount of time… its easy to see how the whole system can break down.

i have said it before – ultimately i believe training is about control. it is about facing the facts about where we are today and making the decision to become something different. it is an exercise in problem solving. in directed growth. the mental parallels are hard to avoid – so much so that i generally think of our process as a mental one with physical side effects. workouts are prescriptions of sorts – meant to add certain elements to an individuals stress profile – their bodies “to do” list – and coupled with appropriate recovery we begin to shape the athlete. to become sculptors of sorts, adding and subtracting as we see fit – working raw material into something closer to the agent we wish to be.

the key here is the idea of prescribed stress. this is where modern times has actually made the communication part more difficult – we are so used to broadcast media. the same information for everybody – and if we were all starting from the same place than maybe that would be useful, but most of us have history. we have injuries and imbalances and all sorts of emotional hangups about food and failure and countless other things. i heard a very intelligent coach claiming that goblet squats are useless – and for certain athletes i can see his point – but the problem is he wasn’t speaking to just certain athletes, or at least more than just those athletes were listening. the simplest rule – the prime directive: find the problem – fix the problem. the tool isn’t the important part, the weight isn’t even the important part – the signal is. the why. our goal is change. is movement. broadcast communication fails because we don’t know the listener – we cant see where they are or where they want to go. in the most basic of terms, without that knowledge we have no relevance.

there is so much going on, our bodies have so many avenues of adaption – muscular strength, technical form, CNS recruitment, general acceptance of risk… for most of us we are constantly adjusting multiple variables, clumsily nudging the dials hoping to accomplish a task – and it works. at first. when you are far enough from the goal movement in a generally better direction is perfectly acceptable, even necessary to understand the raw material with which you are working. the thing is that along the way we tend to only see what we know to look for – we pick up bad habits to go with our progress, we develop wrong thinking and because “it worked for us before” we give it almost magical significance, when perhaps the fact that it worked for us before means that it will offer diminishing returns now, or even worse – hamper further progress.

intelligent work is about first exposing weakness. asking questions. it is about understanding why we did not go further. what was the lynchpin? what broke first? was i not strong enough? mental or physically? not flexible enough? mental or physically? did my technique fail? why? fatigue? concentration? stabilization? it is why we focus so much on failure and on learning from it. our goal is often to isolate the worst moments – to hold that place – to make it clear on a cellular level what and where the weak link is, and to show our bodies how to deal with that fact. it is the same thing we as instructors try to offer to our students – to wade into that place with them – dark and uncomfortable and uncertain – to grab them by the hand, and to walk out together.

that part is where i see a lot of training advice fall down, because ultimately this is a social science – it is the art of manipulation. it is about sets and reps and stress and leverage, but it is also about trust and honesty, about friendship and leadership. about threats and promises and little white lies. it is about filters, and the responsibility that comes along with employing them. above all it is about not believing your own bullshit. the most difficult thing in the world is to convince someone of something that they have not experienced. my job as a trainer is to get to know a person, to understand what they have experienced, how they see the world – to extrapolate how that vision has shaped them, what mark it has left physically and psychologically, and to develop and execute a plan that will bring the client closer to their goal. to function this plan must move in stages, must start in some sort of familiar place – i have to adopt their language, reframe my plan as their own – convince them that they already agree with me. regardless of our age, we deal with new thing the way we always have – think of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. blind refusal, blind acceptance, challenge, and nuance. the thing is that social media filters and answer shopping allows individuals to exist as perpetual teenagers – after all, nuance is complicated, time consuming, and hard to sell. it is so much more desirable to accept pre-packaged solutions, and there is no shortage of those, and if one doesn’t work I’m sure there is another waiting on the shelves. the reason i am trying to explain this is to accelerate peoples growth – most of the stages of learning are unavoidable, but a good teacher can provide the tools to minimize the damage and time wasted by some of these lessons. there is also the undeniable fact that i am using those same manipulation tools – that in essence, i am selling a competing product. manipulation is what i do, i will never lie about that – my goal is just to give those tools the proper respect, and to earn the trust i am given by providing results.

results. individual results. goal oriented results. whatever that goal may be. because in the grand scheme of things, the gym doesn’t matter. it is just a game. a tool. we can afford to fail a thousand times for each success. it is a science experiment. the accumulation of data. refinement of a system. we control the variables, we set up the pins and knock them down. add and subtract things. fine tune. edit. our brains love linear progress so that is what we give it. we add in variation to maintain engagement. medicine is only useful if we take it – so we filter and dissect and give ourselves tasks and information in digestible chunks. the right amount, in the right place, at the right time. flavored accordingly to get a desired response. to make it useful. because above all that is the measure. usefulness. function. the ability to employ the new information. to better achieve a task. this game is a microcosm. it teaches us about how we work and how we think. we learn which levers to pull – how to manipulate ourselves towards the ends we chose. but more importantly – through it all, through the diligence and attention, through the dedication and appropriate acceptance of stress – we learn how (and why) to change.

associations. reminders. measurements. motivation.
cultivate your environment. choose what to reinforce, and what to cut loose – decide who and what you want to be, and above all: take action.

Archives for October 2015

self-help

communication