Coaching = Progress

In my opinion every one needs a coach, even and perhaps most especially coaches. It is next to impossible to coach your self in my opinion. Dan John has a pretty good bit about it. Basically he says that each person has a finite amount of will power in the day and every decision you make eats into that will power eventually you are left with not enough to make yourself do the right things. However if you can turn that decision make process over to someone else then you are much more likely to succeed. If we no longer have to come up with the reason why we should do something but instead just decide to do with what coach says it takes far less of our will power and there fore we are more likely to stick with it. This is the main reason I hired someone else to write my weightlifting program. I wanted something specific to my goals and my life but I had been constantly talking my self out of what I had planned. This led to me changing direction all the time and getting absolutely no where. Now that I can do something just because "coach said so" i have made consistent progress on my goals. increasing my snatch and clean and jerk consistently over the last 10 months with the goal of snatching 300#, while decreasing my body weight on my way down a weight class and all the decisions were my coaches allowing me to pass responsibility and just decide to follow the plan and trust in it to get me where I want to go. This is the single best  piece of advice I have been able to give people who are not members of my gym ( I feel a little bad saying it to my own members as it is more than slightly self serving, even if it does work; and I have heard them members tell each other this anyways) is to "do whatever coach says". Seriously the consistency and peace of mind created by this approach works wonders. It also gives you someone to ask all your silly questions to. I try my best to be the type of athlete I would want. when i do not understand why I am doing something I ask, and then i accept that answer. Might I have done it a different way, sure but, I chose a coach who knows what he is doing and I choose to do what coach says. While I do not advocate blindly following any one, it does no good to ask a question and then argue about the answer you were given. When my coach says I am supposed to be sore and tired and hurting I say ok and do not worry about the mythical creature over training. When it seems like there is far to much work for the day I may ask about how long it should take me to finish or let him know I am not feeling up to the task but if he says go do it I will, because I do what coach says. I understand that my coach is the one with the plan, the one who is trying to make me better, he is the one with the big picture not me so if he says go then i go if he says stop then I stop. If I am feeling good and want to do extra I ask, sometimes he says no so I don;t do it sometimes he says go for it and provides some ideas. The point here is that when I turned over the responsibility for my program and reduced the responsibility to simply following the program I was presented with, my performance increased and progress has become a fairly consistent reality instead of a distant goal. If you really want progress then find a coach and have them write a personalized program when you have questions ask and be prepared for the answers you didn't want to hear, accept it and move on following the advice and direction they give you. The secret to being better is just doing what coach says, trust me, we coaches know what we are talking about.

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