The world of strength and conditioning is like trying to find your way along the shores in waste deep water while heavy waves crash into you.  You may find some sturdy ground for your current values, then the sand washes away under your feet while you get crushed by a giant wave, and you are back trying to stabilize.  The industry turns into white wash with the world of “fitness” colliding with “sport performance”, I see it all the time in the private sector.  Good coaches ask good questions, and good coaches should have adaptive and changing values; for this I believe this wave crashing process to be a positive cycle.  New theories, methods, questions, and collaborations build a path to strong values and growth for the coach.  There may be times of self doubt, but if the right questions are answered back, and open mind to change is present you will come out with stronger opinions of your value.

What are your values as a coach?  If someone asked me this question a couple months ago, I could have given a long explanation that probably rambled back and forth sharing everything about my philosophy of coaching.  Through the HPCTL program at UBC we were asked to come up with a short presentation of our philosophy on coaching.  This turned out to be more difficult than I originally thought but proved to be more beneficial than I every imagined.  Spending some time to actually sit down and narrow down what my actual values are, then further turning those into a coaching philosophy allowed me see what I really valued in myself and the athletes I coach.  It helped guide my programming, and most importantly the program and culture I want to see in my training facility.

We are currently in the process of building a new 14,000sq ft training facility integrated with a sports injury rehabilitation clinic along with re-branding from our previous franchise.  The re-branding allows me to get away from previous corporate values and create our own.  I am lucky to have a great team of quality coaches who have all stuck with us during the move as they see the importance in the common values we all share; this is rare for a training center.  Although our core values are not fully set yet, it is an exciting time to put our own value into something new on a large scale.  I can guarantee each one of our coaches is on stable ground with their own values at the moment.

In the field of strength and conditioning, it can be very challenging to find your value and be confident with that value.  There is an endless supply of contradicting methodologies, ideologies, and variations, especially when working in a high performance sport environment; whether that be from sport coaches, physiotherapists, higher management, or other S&C colleagues.  There are a lot of S&C coaches out there that have big egos and think that there way is the best and only way, which is a problem with the industry itself and could probably use it’s own blog post – so I’ll save that rant.  Taking value for yourself and your work as an S&C coach requires integrity, an open mind, and a focus on what the specific goal(s) for your athlete(s) is.

I have recently just finished our off season hockey training camps that consisted of a large volume of individual athletes looking to improve their performance, which always tests my values as an S&C coach.  From recruiting, organization and management, programming, monitoring progress and coaching, I get a lot of outside input, complaints, success, and pressure; this often has me questioning the value of the product I am providing.  In order to provide value for myself and for my athletes I have taken an approach of open mindedness – taking input from other coaches with programming, reviewing previous experiences by doing a gap analysis, and having continual open communication with the athletes to ensure they are valuing what we do and also themselves.  With having a more open mind to accepting more feedback and input, I feel that this was by far our most successful camp.

In previous camps I had decided not to add cleans into my programming, despite coaches and athletes asking to have it put in.  I had decided that due to the technical difficulty of the exercise  and having such a short period of time to teach and produce enough positive gains from, I had left them out and chosen alternate exercises with the same product.  This year I found a way that I was happy to add in the lift, although not for every athlete (mainly older athletes), and was happy with the outcome.  I feel this built some morale with coaches and the athletes got more value out of our camp this year.  In turn I find myself with more value and a greater feeling of accomplishment.

Recently I have been working with a russian/Japanese pro hockey player trying to get a new contract in north america.  He came to me with a very different background and experience with training and we found it difficult at times to get on the same page with the vision of his development.  Being open to his wants but keeping my integrity on what I know will get him to achieve his goals, we have been able to make massive improvement in his performance both on and off the ice and I now have his full bought in attention to the program.  Coming over with no contract nor any direction, he now has been offered big contracts in Europe and will be attending a training camp in North America.  Taking the athletes values, while sticking to yours can be a fine line, but if common ground is achieved, you will have the greatest results produced.

Now that this summer has come to completion I am looking forward to doing a more in depth gap analysis on this years camp as further my knowledge with this through the HPCTL program.