Coaching, for those who care and take pride in their work, is a serious profession, and even an art form. To be a great coach requires thousands of hours of dedicated and reflective practice, a deep understanding of the fundamental principles at play, and constant reevaluation and improvement of your own performance and knowledge base. While I would not be so haughty as to call myself a great coach, I am, I think, a pretty good one and I aspire to greatness one day. A big part of the pursuit of coaching mastery is upholding standards. Doing things the right way, even when it’s hard. Getting people to lift the way you want them to, the way you know is best, even when doing so may be difficult and frustrating.

The main obstacle here is that we are all human, and entropy is an ever-present force bearing down on us all. Through tiredness, complacency, and laziness we can all begin to cut corners and let standards slip. This is a slippery slope that can very rapidly lead to lazy coaching from people who should know better, and as a result mediocre results for clients. This is obviously undesirable and is something we should all – coaches and lifters alike – be on the lookout for. To my mind there are some clear red flags, the most common corners that get cut when coaches start to get complacent.

Box Squats

Box squats are all too often used as a crutch to cover for half-assed squat coaching. Most often, I see box squats thrown out as a solution to depth issues. The problem here is that the box squat is almost never a good solution to depth problems. The struggling lifter does not learn the proper feel of depth because they come to rely on the box and very often relax, sitting down entirely at the bottom.  

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What’s worse is that very often they’re squatting to a box that’s above depth anyway. What happens then when the box is removed (if indeed the coach ever attempts to remove it) is that the lifter feels weak, awkward, and off-balance, and still has a hard time hitting the right spot. So more often than not, the box is reintroduced and that lifter performs high box squats for the duration of their training lifetime with that coach – never having learned to squat to proper depth.

The use of the box squat in this instance fails to address the root cause of the problem and actually introduces further issues into the mix. It is, however, much easier to just have someone squat to a box than it is to take the time to sort out the problems.

Strict Press

This is another red flag. Getting the basic positions of the strict press right is easy. It takes no time at all to teach the correct bottom position, the correct top position and how to push from one to the other. Using the hips correctly, can be another story. Some people find the movement initiation and pick up the feel and timing of it right away. Others struggle, sometimes a lot. They mess up the timing, they go soft in the knees, they let their elbows drop, they lean back instead of pushing the hips forward and sometimes they do all these things at once.

It can feel like playing whack-a-mole as a coach sometimes. Why not just cut out all that stress and let them off the hook for the hips? Just let them strict press and don’t bother with the hip throw. Don’t even tell them about it in the first place, that way they don’t know what they’re missing out on, right?

Wrong. Just because someone has a hard time learning something doesn’t mean it won’t be beneficial or important for them to learn it. What’s more, it’ll be beneficial for you as a coach to help to get them there – that is supposed to be your job, after all.

Non-Standard Pulls

While taking someone through the five-step deadlift set up is relatively easy, getting some people to set their back properly can be a real headache. Some people simply lack the necessary awareness to set their back in hard extension and maintain that position as they drive through the floor. Lazy coaches won’t take the time to work through this issue, they’ll just skirt around it by selecting a different pull where the lifter can find extension more easily. Block pulls, trap-bar deadlifts, and RDLs all spring to mind here. Once again this is an avoidance of work on the part of the coach, not a decision made in the lifter’s best interests.

Skipping Cleans

Along a similar line to the press, we come to the red-headed stepchild of the Starting Strength lineup. Of all the lifts in the repertoire, the power clean is the most sadly neglected and overlooked. The power clean is perceived as being much more complicated and therefore much more difficult to coach than any of the other lifts. While I do not necessarily agree that it’s much more complicated than a press or a squat, I would say that it is more difficult for most coaches.

This is down to two factors. First the power clean is very fast and it’s easy to miss things when your coaching eye is not used to catching them at speed. Second, and far more importantly, most people have far less experience with the lift. They’ve trained it less, they’ve coached it less, and they’re overall less confident and experienced with it. So, they gloss over it in favor of a more simple and familiar lift like the barbell row. This is of course a self-fulfilling prophecy. You’re not good at coaching cleans, so you don’t coach cleans, so you stay not good at coaching them, and neither you nor your clients ever improve and reap the benefits of this tremendous lift.

I want to offer a caveat here before I continue: box squats, strict presses, pulling variations and even omitting the power clean all have their place. I’m not saying there’s never a time for box squats, or that everyone should always clean. These things exist for a reason and are necessary in some cases. What I’m trying to do here is call out coaches who take the path of least resistance. It’s one thing to program box squats to work around a knee injury, it’s quite another to program them because it just makes the lifter easier for you to deal with as a coach.

Template Programming

Programming is, or should be, a progressive evolution based on what has come before. Programming in this way requires experience, knowledge, and meticulous record keeping. Far easier to just use programs as copy-and-paste templates. A lifter has finished their NLP? Hit ‘em with Texas Method! Someone you know has made good progress using 5/3/1? Program it for all your clients! Minimal input and individualization required, and a massive time saver. The only problem with this is that you never learn how to program well, and your clients won’t be progressing like they should if they were following a tailored approach.

Not Taking Immediate Action

This is perhaps the most pernicious problem. the one that leads to all the others. When you see something go wrong you need to address it there and then, before the problem has a chance to take root and become a bad habit. The issue is that this takes constant vigilance and effort on the part of the coach, and it’s all too easy to just let things slide in the moment, especially after a long day of standing on the platform. It’s easy to think “I’ll catch that one next time,” but you won’t. You’ll forget about it when you go home, and an opportunity you had to make a difference and to teach someone something has been lost forever. Similar self-justifications occur with the previously mentioned exercise substitutions. You don’t set out to have someone strict press forever – you just say to yourself “I’ll teach them the hips next time,” and then you never do.

Some of you might be a little pissed off reading this, you might even feel a little attacked, but I want you to know that this comes from a place of love. I love lifting, I love coaching, and I want as many people as possible to be great at both. I am able to identify these issues because I am guilty of each and every one of them. These are all corners I have cut in the past, either out of laziness or a lack of knowledge and understanding. It was only when I decided to embark upon the long and difficult road of necessary self-improvement to become an SSC that I started to up my game. It was only when these shortcomings were called out by other coaches and mentors for what they were – laziness and complacency – that I took steps to right my wrongs and be a better coach, for myself and for my clients.

So let this be that wake up call for you. If you are a lifter or a coach guilty of cutting some of these corners, stand up and be counted. Take the constructive criticism and begin to redress the balance. You and your athletes will be much better for it.  

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