Four Reasons You Do Not Need a Coach
I have been coaching or doing personal training for nearly 15 years with over 15 years of experience in strength sports, primarily strongman. As a coach, I often emphasize the importance of athletes hiring a professional in regards to coaching. But I hate to be hypocritical and make it seem that you need a coach. At the best, I will only make the argument that you likely want a coach. But for those of you who can not afford a coach or would rather not be coached, this is the article for you. In this article, I will give my top four reasons why you do not necessarily need a coach. I will outline how you can educate yourself, gain first hand experience, analyze the metrics, and outsource what is left for a fraction of the cost of coaching.
You can Educate Yourself
We live in the day and age of vast levels of content, most of which is free or of little cost. From my personal experience, I have not found there to be a large difference in education I sought out on my own and that of a more structured university setting. The only obvious difference for the latter is it will cost more money and have fluff of studies that are not going to assist you in coaching strength and conditioning, in my opinion.
If you are interested in self coaching, I highly recommend you diversify the content that you consume. Short reels or videos on social media might whet the appetite but we should seek out more informative sources. These sources should include peer reviewed research and textbooks, as well as online articles, information over entertainment based podcasts, and even longer, in-depth youtube videos by creditable coaches.
To be able to gain adequate understanding, the minimum investment is probably going to be 1-2 hours a day of consumption until you have a solid baseline knowledge where most content you can find and consume is just repeating the same principles in another voice.
You can Gain First Hand Experience
The barriers of entry to strength sports are relatively low. Most competitions can be entered with little to no previous experience of qualifying numbers. So it is highly encouraged to enter contests and gain first hand experience to be able to take back to how to coach and program for yourself.
Additionally, after some experience competing and coaching yourself you can coach others. The barrier of entry to coaching others is only slightly higher. You just need to market yourself and have people willing to pay for your services. Once you have achieved this, you now have more total people to test methods and learn from which should lead to exponential growth in your understanding of how to coach yourself. A big upside is, if you decide to coach and work with relatively novice individuals you have very little chance of “messing up”. Novice athletes respond well to almost any novel and consistent stimulus thus showing progress and you are protected by the fact that resistance training ranks much lower than team sports in incidences of injury. And even if a novice athlete gets hurt periodically, since they are new, they have no metric to compare to how often injury should occur so you are likely not to be blamed.
If you are looking to use first hand experience to help your own coaching pursuits I would recommend a minimum of 10 total competitions with 20-30 more preferred. In the sport of strongman, you will need at least double digits over the course of several years to be able to touch most events as they rotate in and out over consecutive years. If coaching others is to be used, any number of athletes will help with most noticeable gains in understanding happening after working with dozens or more athletes of various ages, skill levels and both sexes. To put a rough estimate, 20-50 total athletes and you may have enough of a sample size to find applicable knowledge for your own coaching.
You can Analyze the Metrics
One task of the coach is using objective metrics to gauge progress and set up systems of programming. Luckily, much like education and experience, there are no limitations to you doing this for yourself. With the use of calculators, spreadsheets, and ever more popular tendo units you can analyze the data of your training to catch trends and develop systems.
To be able to use any metric effectively, you will need previous knowledge and a large enough sample size of data. Much of this can be found online such as uses of rate of perceived excretion to percentage tables, Prinlepin’s table, and velocity based training relative to 1RM. If you have the previous two sections of education and experience covered, this part of the learning process will be fairly easy if you can take out the emotional irrationality that you might have from subjective feelings of your own program.
To be able to do this effectively, you will have to be able to log enough training sessions over a long enough period of time to have data to make generalizations. While previous studies found in your self education will help, your desire to coach yourself will require some trial and error to be applicable to you. This can be somewhat avoided, however, if you are able to coach enough athletes similar to yourself and use their data.
It would be recommended to have 1-2 years of extensive workout logs and contest related performances to start to make trends. While spreadsheets and online calculators are free, any velocity based or tendo unit devices will require investments of $300-3000+ as well as additional education time to be able to use properly.
You can Outsource As Needed
Even if you are looking to coach yourself it is not an all or nothing proposition. You can still seek out levels of education or coaching to fill in your gaps in understanding or gain professional curated knowledge on an area you are interested in.
For many, this will include the use of seminars with possible certifications (though not necessary), one-on-one coaching sessions, or consultation calls to experts in fields of interest. The cost of these services will vary greatly depending on the level of expertise and service but usually will be a fraction of the cost of long-term monthly coaching. This way of education or coaching also maintains full autonomy for yourself in your self coaching journey.
While there is no level of outsourcing that is generally demanded, one might expect to rely on this form of education several times a year with an investment between $100-1000 depending on the service.
Conclusion
As I have outlined, self coaching is possible. If you are diligent to self educate, gain experience, track and understand metrics, and outsource to experts when needed you can definitely make progress as an athlete without having an official coach. That said, the idea of self coaching being a viable option financially is very case dependent.
If we look at the recommended investment of self coaching over a year it might stack up as a minimum of: 500-600+ hours of structured education and 10+ competitive experiences.
At a conservative hourly opportunity cost of $15 an hour and contest entry/expenses at a generous $200 this would equate to an initial yearly cost of ~$10,000, or ~$835 a month. At $835 a month, this puts it about 2-3 times that of the highest tier of most coaching services ($250-400/month). This might be viable depending on the ability for the person to pivot self coaching into a coaching service. It may also be a good investment for someone looking to be self coached for 10+ years as the minimum requirements will be met in the first few years with very minimal opportunity cost needed later in their coaching journey (likely mainly from outsourcing to experts and professionals during plateaus or injuries).
At the end of the day, we can see how self coaching is feasible given the proper investment of time and effort (and possibly resources). As a coach myself, I can not make the recommendation for a person to be coached or not, however, for many, the opportunity cost to be a sufficient coach is not a good investment. Combined with the often inability for the person to limit emotional or subjective interference in making training decisions, I would say that many would benefit from coaching, even if for a select period of time, and should be viewed as education as outlined in both the second and fourth sections above.
