At some point in your fitness quest, you likely find yourself wondering if you should hire a trainer or a coach. Maybe you are completely new to your endeavor and want someone to guide you. Maybe you’ve been messing around with weights on your own and want to learn more. Maybe you consider yourself experienced but you’ve plateaued and aren’t reaching your goals. There are infinite options on the market for personal trainers and coaches. Personal trainers are everywhere at every gym, and the staff cannot wait to sell you a package of training sessions. There are endless ads online for boutique fitness studios in your area, who promise you results in weeks if you will just come to class three days a week and follow along with their leader. The Internet and apps make thousands of self-proclaimed coaches available virtually. You may also get recommendations and referrals from your friends. How do you know which to choose? What is the difference?

It is critical to recognize the difference between an excellent coach and a personal trainer. If you are going to pay someone to work with you and you are going to spend your time doing the workouts, you want the most from your investment. An excellent coach and a shitty trainer cost about the same, in my experience and estimation. An excellent coach is going to give you time, attention, and expertise. Their expertise must be based on first principles and experience with tried and true methods. An okay-coach will take your money. A personal trainer is not worth anything, in my experience. Just because you may go to a barbell club doesn’t mean the owners or staff know what they are doing, or that they can give you the time of day.

I generally try to keep a positive attitude when it comes to training, to set a good example for others. I have never said anything negative about someone else’s workouts, their coach, or their methods unless they asked me for my critical opinion. However I am now going to share with you my observations on “coaches” and “trainers” to show you how you can be swindled, get no results, and even get hurt when you hire unqualified people to guide you in the gym. I do this to show the stark contrast between the options on the market in the training industry, with the hope that you will choose to work with a Starting Strength Coach. The following is all true. These are real people that I know and have observed working as “trainers” and “coaches.” All names have been changed so that no one gets their panties in a bunch, but no other details have been embellished.

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The Well-Intentioned

Chase, Personal Training Director at a Globo Gym. Chase means well, and he wants to do the right thing for his clients, but he has little technical expertise when it comes to training. The majority of his clients are just exercising as he stands there and gives them feedback such as “Make sure you lead with your elbows” on a dumbbell lateral raise. His employer takes a healthy cut of what the clients pay for his time.

Chase’s goal is to make everyone happy so that they will keep buying more training packages, so he can pay the mortgage and buy his daughter a computer for school. Training packages start at $45 for a 30-minute training session and half of that money goes to the gym. Please tell me what can be accomplished in a 30-minute training session. Chase will never push a client to do something hard – what it takes to get results – because that client may not come back again. He is essentially entertaining them in the gym. Chase even has a regular client that wants no training. This client only asks Chase to be by his side as he goes around the gym doing whatever he wants, such as 10 sets on the leg extension machine. This client pays Chase for his companionship. Chase is pretty much a gym escort. If you want technical instruction on how to squat, Chase may get it half-right. If you want programming, Chase will just make something up. Whatever you want, he will give it to you, as long as you keep paying. Results not included.

Matt, Barbell Club Owner. Matt is a great lifter in his own right, but this gym and coaching are a hobby for him. He has a day job, but he loves the iron game. Matt cares about his gym members and is well-intentioned, but he doesn’t have the time and expertise needed to coach effectively. He gives his time and advice for free to his gym members, and calls it “coaching.” My friend Bea “trained” under Matt as a novice. He was generally right next to her on every working set, using the basic elements of the Starting Strength Novice Linear Progression as Bea progressed. But Matt is not a Starting Strength Coach, and he never helped Bea get her form just right.  

Once Bea’s progress started to stall out on a few lifts, Matt could not or would not suggest any programming adjustments to keep her progress going. He just didn’t know enough and he didn’t seem to have the time to customize her program. I told Bea how she could make some very simple adjustments to her NLP to keep making progress, such as moving to 5 sets of 3 on bench and press, but it fell on deaf ears. She wanted to believe in her coach because they had become buddies.

Unfortunately when the going got tough, her coach told her to stop the NLP altogether and start using the JuggernautAI Training App. That was a terrible idea. Bea was still a novice lifter, and Matt abandoned her to a smart phone app. Bea is no longer lifting. In the gym, you get what you pay for. Free “coaching” isn’t valuable; that's why it's free.

The Know-Nothings

Omar, Rank & File Personal Trainer at a Globo Gym. Omar has no idea how to do anything in the gym, yet here he is escorting people around the gym and pretending to train them. Omar is there to hang out with you and give you a good time while he suggests physical activities that you could do. One day Omar was escorting a client in the power rack next to me. I was squatting a fine 3x5 at 275 that day and his client was doing something that both of them thought looked like a squat.

An 18-year- old boy quarter squatted a shaky 135 for 8. Then Omar and the boy shot the shit for a few minutes as the kid started loading up 185. Typically I keep to myself at the gym. I only give advice if asked. But on this day, I had to say something. I walked by and said, “He’s not ready to go to 185. He isn’t even squatting 135 to depth. You need to start with an empty bar and get it right first.” To which Omar immediately replied, “Yeah! You didn’t get to depth! You should try 135 again.” The boy was so confused. “What do you mean depth? I did all the reps.” I went back to my workset with my headphones in, knowing that Omar does not know (1) what proper depth is, (2) why his client didn’t get to depth, and (3) what he could do to get to depth in the future. Please explain to me what the purpose of this “personal training” is for the ungodly sums the gym charges. I wonder where that kid is now and how much Omar took him for.  

James, Bilingual Personal Trainer at Globo Gym. James and I were close friends when he started his first personal training job. James comes from Brazil and has an undergraduate degree in physical education. Although personal training was not James’s dream job, he needed a job if he was going to chase his American dream. He is fluent in Portuguese and English, and the general manager at the gym he belonged to noticed this. The GM recruited James to the personal training staff not because he would be a good trainer – he had never worked in a gym, had never trained anyone at all, and had no credentials other than his PE degree he had earned 10 years earlier.

For the GM, personal training was all about sales, not results. There was a significant Brazilian clientele at this gym and some of them spoke little to no English. A training staff that only spoke English could not sell personal training packages to people who only spoke Portuguese. James eagerly took the job with the delusion that he would make lots of money working this untapped market. The on-boarding for the personal trainer job consisted of how to give a tour of the gym, how to talk to clients about the value of personal training, memorizing the pricing options, a book on kettlebell training, and an online video about sexual harassment prevention.

James thought he was ready to train everyone in their preferred language. The globo gym took in all the money from the personal training packages James sold, then paid him a piddly hourly rate for all the 30-minute sessions as he worked them. Most of James’s day was sitting at the front desk until his clients came in (many of them canceled at the last minute) for their treadmill-TRX-dumbbell-Bosu-ball workouts that the GM suggested.

James quit after one month because he felt like a shill for the GM, because people paid way too much, and because he earned way too little. I encourage you to be very skeptical about the qualifications of any personal trainer at any gym. Take nothing at face value. Personal training is always about dollars and never about what the client gets out of it.

The Too-Good-for-Yous

Travis, Gifted Athlete-Turned-Coach. Travis has an ego bigger than his client portfolio. For what it’s worth, Travis is 25 years old and has a master’s degree in exercise and sports science, and is a pretty competitive lifter. This man is a perfect example of a naturally gifted athlete who is a terrible coach. If you did not already know, being an accomplished athlete and being a good coach are not one-and-the-same. In fact, I believe they have no relationship at all.

Travis coached an acquaintance of mine a few years back and it was a total disaster. Let’s call her Jenny. Jenny was 40 and a total novice to lifting, but she was no slouch either. Jenny came into an open house at the club one day, tried out the bench press, and was very surprised to find how strong she was on a “test of 1RM.” (FYI: testing your 1RM at a gym open house is a sales gimmick). Travis said, “Wow, that’s an impressive bench press! I sincerely want you to train with me and compete in our next meet.” Jenny was flattered, excited, and signed up for a 12-month gym membership and an online coaching contract that day.

Travis drove her into the ground in training for 6 months, as though she, too, were a 25-year-old gifted male athlete. Travis wasted no time ramping up Jenny’s maxes at the expense of her joints, just sending her spreadsheets with RPE-based training once a month. If Jenny was in the gym, Travis ignored her, because she was an online client and had not paid the premium price to be his in-person client. Which means Travis did not see or did not care that Jenny was benching with bad form and compromising her shoulders.

In some circles, how much you lift is more important than how you lift, which makes for very short lifting careers. Jenny suffered her way through the meet and then immediately quit lifting because of intolerable shoulder pain. Turns out Jenny had shoulder impingement from benching and required surgery. We never saw Jenny in the rack again. Beware of inexperienced athletes-turned-coaches who cannot relate to average people. Be wary of a coach who has no feedback on your form and ramps up intensity at any cost. Watch out for anyone overly concerned with winning competitions or having status.

Sean, Coach from An Elite Gym. Sean appears to get money for nothing, and his chicks are free. He probably has more than 100 online coaching clients plus all of the people he trains in person. A good friend of mine trained online under Sean for years. Let’s call her Amber. Amber signed up for Sean’s coaching for a very high monthly fee after getting a recommendation from another friend. After all, her friend was very strong, so why wouldn’t Sean deliver the same results for Amber?

I was highly suspicious about Sean after watching Amber train for a few months. I was certain that Amber was wasting her money and time on this coach because she had some obvious problems with her technique on the big lifts. Surely Amber’s coach noticed this in her training videos that she sent to him, right? Well, I don’t think Sean ever watched any of her training videos. If he did, he was not giving her form checks because she made the same basic mistakes for years. He also gave her lots of inane accessory work as a novice, which I could not understand.

Amber made strength gains with Sean for a while thanks to the novice effect. After a while, those gains slowed and the programming did not adjust appropriately. One day Amber told me, “I want to train with your coach. I see you making PRs and I haven’t had any all year.” No PRs for a year for an intermediate lifter is a huge red flag.

Additionally, Amber complained to me, “If I ask Sean a question, he never gets back to me.” Convincing my friend to fire this coach was like convincing a friend to leave a bad boyfriend. Some coaches are dishonest. Others are disinterested. If you are in compliance but aren’t making progress, quit your coach. Do not pay these people for sub-par coaching. Any coach who is hands off and unresponsive should be fired after the first month. I don’t care how big of a name the coach is or their gym is.

The Sport-Specific or Functional-Fitness Coach

Darya, BJJ & Fitness Gym Owner. Darya is a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu and a personal trainer, although she does not make public her credentials on personal training (highly suspicious). She owns a martial arts school with a strength and conditioning facility attached to it. A friend of mine, Elle, trains BJJ here and believes she is cross-training in the weight room to improve her jiu-jitsu. A practitioner myself, I do believe that strength training improves your abilities and through-put in BJJ immensely.

But Darya is not coaching strength training and conditioning in that weight room. The weight room has no barbells. It has things like a leg press, battle ropes, dumbbells, and a Smith machine for “training.” BJJ athletes go through group circuit training with Darya and call it strength and conditioning. One day I saw Elle standing on one leg, with a kettlebell hanging off her elevated leg from a resistance band, as Darya counted down from 20. What a show!

Elle won a gold medal in her brown belt debut at IBJJF Pans in spite of this training, not because of it. She is just good at jiu-jitsu because she trains hard on the mat. I’ve noticed that Darya has invested in gimmicks like an expensive body composition scanner for her gym rather than real training methods and equipment. If the group training looks more like a circus than training, beware. Ask lots of questions about any purported coach/trainer’s credentials, too.

Tom, Functional Fitness Trainer. Tom trains jiu-jitsu with a friend of mine named Emilio. Emilio is in his 50s and his stated goal is to get stronger for jiu-jitsu and resist injury. That is a fine goal and one that I applaud. Networking with others in your sport is very common, and Tom has convinced his teammate Emilio to be his client at his functional fitness gym. Emilio has told me all about his “training” and asked for my opinion. Tom has Emilio work out with him for 40 minutes, 2 days a week. They do a lot of jumping around that makes Emilio sweaty, tired, and sore. Jumping jacks, running through a ladder on the floor, doing “reps for time” with light weights. When I asked Emilio if he thought was getting stronger, he said, “I don’t know.” Well then, the results speak for themselves.

I described in detail why these workouts would never get Emilio to his goal. While it may be nice to give your business to your teammate, Emilio is wasting his valuable time and money on something that has no relation whatsoever to his goals. What Emilio needs to do is lift heavy and eat more food. Tom does not know anything about real strength training, but he has a hammer and everything he sees looks like a nail. I gave Emilio the name and contact info for a very good Starting Strength Coach in his city. Everytime I talk to Emilio, I ask him how training is going and if he has contacted the SSC yet. No; he just quit working out with Tom once he figured out it was a waste. Every day that Emilio does not contact that SSC is a waste in my opinion.

The Starting Strength Coach

Michael, Starting Strength Coach. Here I did not change the name. Michael Shammas is my SSC and he is the best coach I have ever had (I have worked with three different strength coaches over the years). I asked Michael to be my coach after I had known him for about two years. I was in search of solid technique coaching and great programming to get me to the next level, and I knew Michael would get me there. Before I asked him to coach me, Michael had given me some free and unsolicited advice on my overhead press technique and programming which helped me put quite a few pounds on my press. I was impressed.

What sets Michael apart from other coaches and trainers is his technical expertise, his sincere attention to his clients, and his ability to drive change. Michael does not bullshit anything and he does not improvise. He can tell you confidently why things work or don’t work, and everything passes the bullshit test. Even as an intermediate lifter, Michael put me on a short and intense linear progression when we started working together online. It was very challenging mentally and physically in the first few weeks of training because Michael was drilling me on technique while simultaneously keeping the intensity very high.

I was not used to this rigor of coaching, and I thought very seriously about quitting two weeks in. Then I remembered why I hired Michael and told myself to shut up and put up. Put up I did. My lifts looked better, felt better, and were bigger in a short period of time. I can count on one hand the number of reps I have missed in the past 14 months while training under Michael because the programming is right.

Michael is always honest. He gives me no free passes. He is always studying and developing himself. He only trains people in strength from barbell lifts so he is a master of his craft; not a jack of all trades. I have gained 15 pounds working with Michael and increased my total by more than 10%, with more to come.

How to Find an Excellent Coach

Starting Strength has already vetted the best coaches in the industry for us. They are available to you in Starting Strength Gyms and online through the Starting Strength Coaching Directory. There is no need to use your judgement to discern if the guy at your gym with a nametag and a clipboard is a good option for you (he is not). You do not need to be influenced by your friend to try their functional fitness workout (it isn’t good for anything). You do not have to be hard-sold by the guy who owns the barbell club in your area (strong as he may be, it doesn’t mean he is a good coach).

Starting Strength Coaches have worked very hard to achieve high standards for training and coaching, and they know what techniques and training methods will work for you.

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