Good article, but maybe not the most ringing endorsement for your gym when your head coach in charge has roughly an 800lb powerlifting total.
TMPHBITEU
Member
Good article, but maybe not the most ringing endorsement for your gym when your head coach in charge has roughly an 800lb powerlifting total.
Member
It's closer to 1,000. Which still isn't exactly elite, but Hayden was a skinny, gainzless scientist - a real scientist, not an ex-phizz guy - before becoming a coach. He may not be the strongest lifter or the best crossfitter, but his ability to understand and apply the principles that make people better at those things is much better than most out there being paid to do the same.Originally Posted by kidcolin
We note on here often that the best lifters very rarely make great coaches. What you usually see, and what a large % of the SSC pool is made up of, are pretty good lifters, people who have excellent numbers compared to regular folks but mediocre numbers compared to the best. Like me, for example. We're good enough to have some success with it and so stay with it for a while; but we're not so good that just anything we do works and makes our numbers go up. We need to observe carefully and try different things to get better, and we do this long enough to become competent coaches ourselves, whereas many people who have less success don't stay with it long enough, and many who have more success never had to try as many different things or have as much focus on technique as we did.
Of course there are exceptions to this on both ends, and Hayden is an exception to the less success side. He's naturally very tall and lanky, and the truth is that while his interest in just getting stronger has grown tremendously in the past year, he still has crossfit goals too. That's OK - HE'S THE HEAD COACH AT A CROSSFIT GYM. So he doesn't spend all his time working on strength.
Regardless, how well you are able to do X is not an indicator of how well you are able to coach X. You need to have experience with the thing, to have done it and struggled with it yourself, and put yourself through the process of getting better at it. But you don't need to be great at it. And I'll tell you from my own personal experience that having the head coach of your crossfit gym be a big fan and advocate of Starting Strength is a tremendous boon to both the ability to properly run a program like this and the culture of the gym overall.
Member
I don't think the head coach for CROSSFIT Solace (notice the italicized word) gives a shit about his powerlifting total. The article was very clear that it was not a powerlifting program, but a general strength program so you can get better at whatever your sport is, presumably crossfit, considering the demographic. (It's on a crossfit site). And the head strength coach, presumably the one you would be booking sessions with if you wanted to raise your powerlifting total, is a beast powerlifter. Great essay wolf. Enjoyed the read.
vxmorpheusxv
This was a wonderful read. Thank you for writing and sharing it, Wolf.
Member
This was all you had to say after reading that well written, carefully thought out article?
✓ Member
Nice job with the article.
Member
Nice job Wolf, very well written.
The videos did a great job of exemplifying the strangeness of equipped powerlifting as well.
Starting Strength Coach
Very well done article, Wolf. Thanks for posting this.
Member
This is true in many teaching fields. My best college professors, at least in the sciences, were not the guys who were bringing in big grants and publishing 6+ papers a year but the ones who taught the intro courses and could relate to people with an "average" understanding of the subject and explain it in language they could understand.
I remember one of the most "respected" professors I had couldn't teach at all. We had a perfect bimodal distribution of test results - people either didn't "get it" and got around a 50 or people intuitively understood the subject and got a 90. The guys in the "don't get it" category didn't improve. After the second exam he had a bit of a heart-to-heart talk with the class and I remember him repeating over and over "I don't understand what you don't understand."
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