The Challenges of the Strength and Conditioning Profession

Strength coaching as well as personal training in the United States are relatively young professions. If we can use Boyd Epley as the first example of what it looks like to have a codified program at the University of Nebraska in 1969 we start to understand that the profession as a whole is still relatively young. This is why it is not abnormal to run into a lot of training programs that very much have a wild west style. What happens on Monday has nothing to do with what happens on Tuesday or Thursday or any other day for that matter. The difficulty continues to be standardization of the profession while simultaneously giving coaches the flexibility to create and adjust programming to fit the needs of individuals. While this gets sorted out good coaches are going to continue to create programs that are tailored to the individual regardless of the lack of standardization in practice.

Since there are no true authoritative practices what coaches lean on is anecdote, studies that have a legitimate impact and real world experience. Scholastic education while useful on a certain level is really only beneficial when combined with practical experience. Often when individuals graduate from a bachelors, masters or even a doctoral level physiology/kinesiology program what they have acquired is a lot of knowledge that they have never applied. This is akin to spending years studying books and listening to lectures given about the internal combustion engine but never having turned a single wrench on a broken down automobile or never even working on a car of any kind. You know exactly how to work on a brand new fresh from the factory vehicle in theory.......but brand new vehicles usually don't need a lot of corrective work to begin with.

This is exactly what happens in a lot of cases. Young people get out of university with some level of knowledge but little in the way of experience. Usually what they were exposed to in athletics is the foundation of their practical knowledge and then they immediately turn those practical experiences into the "programming" for their clients or student athletes. This is highly problematic in the real world of training real people because this kind of athleticism has to be built from the ground up. If the indiviual they are training doesn't have full flexion overhead then they need to assist them in achieving it. If the individual doesn't have a relatively good amount of dorsiflexion then the coach/trainer has to help them improve it. This is not standardized learning at the college or university level and the reality of this process is that it leaves young coaches ill equipped to assist people in improving their performance and preventing injury simultaneously. Which is critically important to the long term development of anyone in the gym.

The challenges of the profession don't stop there. Since there are no standardized methods then everyone and anyone can market their "method" or "brand" of strength and conditioning practice as a holistic approach. Which is definitely not the case nor is it the practical reality that many people will even aspire to. The problem here being that in many cases this environment that has limited structure can attract individuals with little in the way of ethics that are more concerned with just making profits rather than improving the people around them. This taints the market with a pretty horrific stain and only continues to complicate the process as becoming recognized as a more of a reliably therapeutic endeavor.

To say the least the profession is challenging but incredibly and sometimes overwhelmingly rewarding. Teaching people how to function better, move better and feel better when they train is one of the most amazing processes to be a part of. As a coach/trainer you get to be a big part of the improvement of the quality of life of the individuals around you in your community and this is something to be incredibly honored by and grateful for.