The Changing Role of a "Strength & Conditioning Coach"

The job of a sports trainer can go by many names. Some like to be called trainers (although an athletic trainer is technically a separate profession), colleges call them strength and conditioning coaches, or even at our facility we go by performance specialists. To make things even more confusing, methods in this field are constantly changing and seem to be extremely anecdotal. Meaning - you could go to 5 different “strength and conditioning coaches” and train 5 different ways. The vast majority, though, will give you a rah-rah speech about getting “bigger, faster, and stronger!” While weight gain and strength are certainly extremely important tools for enhancing athletic performance, the landscape of our profession is changing and the days of being just lifting coaches in this industry are over. 

First, don’t misread what I am saying. Strength is vital, and something every single one of my athletes works to enhance. As important as it may be though, it is not complicated anymore. With the knowledge available on the internet, there are an abundance of very good resources out there. Programs such as Starting Strength, Jim Wendler’s 5/3/1, XL Athlete, or even many professional teams programs are just a Google search away (granted not all of them are good). Now yes, just doing the program and performing the program CORRECTLY are two very different things. However, let’s say a new athlete walks through your doors and goes through several 1-on-1 onboarding sessions. Once you teach them how to squat, lunge, and deadlift, do you really need to stand over them for an hour to watch during their 15th training session with you? Hopefully, the athlete has learned to this point and the answer is no. To make things worse, with so many instructional videos on YouTube, anyone can become an “expert” on lifting nowadays. Not to say all the videos are correct, but anyone who is willing to do their research can find great resources online. Strength is important, yes, but it isn’t a mystery anymore. Not to mention, we only have a finite amount of time with these kids each week.  Why spend our time with them doing something they could be doing on their own? My point being that with so much free information available to the kids who really want it, the days of being able to charge $75/hour to teach an athlete how to lift are behind us. 

We’ve established that I’m not a fan of just watching athletes lift for an hour, it’s boring and bad for business. So then what should we do? When we started addressing this question a few years ago, we had to go back to the drawing board and think, “What makes an athlete great?” Let’s be honest, we have all seen just as many, if not more athletes that run a 4.7-40yd or a 6.9-60yd that don’t squat 400lbs. We see more skilled shortstops, wide receivers, and point guards that can dominate on the field but can’t do more than 3 pull-ups. So as important as strength is (especially for health), it wasn’t the end all be all. The answer we came up with was motor control. Movement quality and motor control will win every time.  Now that is a great fancy term to throw around when selling your services, but what is motor control exactly? We go by Mike Boyle’s definition of, “Using the right muscle, to move the right joint, at the right time.” This is where the true art of coaching comes into play. There is an absolute necessity to not only know the mechanics of movement, but know them well enough to be able to communicate them to someone who has no idea what flexion or extension is.  The best athletes are also the best at compensating for poor movement.   For example, let's say an athlete lacks thoracic (upper back) rotation.  As soon as we tell them to go through a baseball their body realizes the most efficient pathway to perform that function is inhibited.  The body, however, will still find a way to execute that movement to the best of its abilities.  Meaning that the additional rotational torque needed will come from the shoulder and the elbow rather than the thoracic.  The same concept can be taken to simply learning movement patterns without having physical limitations.   One example we commonly see is an athlete that is an arm driver in rotation.  Think about an athlete trying to perform a rotational medicine ball throw.  Ideally we would like to see a combination of hip, knee, and dorsiflexion to put us in a position to use ground forces well.  Then the hip begins to drive the movement, we see femoral internal rotation, the core transfers power and the arms finish off and deliver the movement.  What we see in "arm drivers" is a lack of reflexive core strength and control over their hips.  This causes them to tighten up their arms first, then their core becomes extremely rigid and all of  a sudden they are trying to create energy from the waist up.  Both of these 2 examples can be fixed with the same solution, teach kinesthetic awareness and control over specific parts of the body.  This same concept can be applied to sprinting, changing direction, any field sport movement.   The greater motor control the athlete has; the more efficient the movement.  The more efficient the movement; the greater the expression of speed and power on the field.  This concept of teaching is something that I think gets lost in our field all too often,  and it is where we try and separate ourselves from other programs. It is where programs like Cressey Sports Performance, ALTIS, and many others excel. Athletes come in, not only to learn the “how” of lifting, but they learn the “why,” and how it applies to sport, and how to do it well.  At the end of the day, all movement is not created equal, and athletes will not increase performance and decrease injury risk until they find the correct muscle sequence. 

In short, the great performance coaches in today’s day and age train the mind just as much as they train the body. The art of programming and knowledge of lifts are still a must-have in this profession, but now it is only a minimum requirement. To truly separate yourself and create a training process that has longevity, we need to be addressing movement patterns and motor control. Teaching athletes how to move correctly at high velocities and creating intelligent, autonomous clients are the new standards in sports performance and the true role of a performance coach in our minds.