Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:03]
A
You're listening to Mondays with Matt. I'm Matt Reynolds, the founder and CEO of Barbell Logic and Turnkey Coach. Each week I share lessons from decades of lifting, coaching, and business to help you get stronger, coach better, and take action. Let's dive in. Hey, good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to Mondays with Matt. Happy Monday to you all. Hope you've had a great Monday. I've had a great Monday. Got a lot accomplished today. Felt like it was one of those days where I just was able to knock a ton of stuff off the list. And today we're going to dive right in and talk about waiting for permission to coach, or do you need permission to be a coach or to coach? And the simple answer is, you don't. We talked a little bit about this last week. There are so many people in the fitness industry that have no clue what they're doing. And you do, right? Even if the fact that you're even asking the question, should I have permission to coach? Means you probably do have permission to coach. You're better than the rest because you care enough to actually think about that sort of thing. You care about other people. You want to hone your craft and refine that skill. That alone is a great trait of the personality of someone that. That wants to be a great coach. And so simple backstory here is that when I look at my life, especially over the past 20 years of business, ownership and coaching, I guess I've coached for, actually almost 30 now. So, I don't know, 26, 27 years. 27 years I've coached. The times that my life made it the most progress were the times that I took the leap and did the thing without the permission. And I never felt I was ready. I didn't feel like I was ready to start a gym. I didn't feel like I was ready to coach. You know, I didn't feel like I was ready to have a kid. When my wife and I got pregnant with our. With our first daughter, I feel like I was ready to get married. I didn't feel like I was ready to start barbellogic. I mean, there are all these things. I didn't feel like we were ready to go after military contracts or what. Any of those times that we've swung for the fences, those are the times that have the greatest payoffs. Right? If you don't swing for the fences, you can't hit the home run. And, yeah, sometimes you're going to strike out. That's okay. That's life. There's lessons to be learned in that process. The simple answer is that you don't need anybody's permission. I'm not going to give you permission today. I'm not going to say you have permission from me because you don't need permission from me. You don't need permission from anyone. The way I look at it is this. If you want to be a coach, if you've done just a few things, one, if you've trained consistently for the past several years, if you're passionate about helping people, you want to change their lives, you feel like your life has been dramatically changed by strength or fitness, health, those sort of things, then you can coach. You should coach, right? And there are certainly we've talked a lot in the previous weeks about the knowledge base that you should have and that you want to have. But there's a point where you're like, man, I just, you know, that CSCS certification, I don't quite have that yet, or I haven't earned my PBC yet. I was like, you can still coach. Like, as a matter of fact, it's sort of a prerequisite to the pbc, to our pbc, is that you have to be coaching. You're not going to actually earn it having never coached on the platform. And so that experience is the next piece of this. So especially for those of you who have already signed up for the academy, you've been an academy student, you've pursued the knowledge you gained, the education, the last thing, the last step is just to do the thing right. You don't need anybody's permission. The reality is that taking that leap, a lot of times people are waiting for someone to tell them they can. So maybe I'm doing that without saying that you personally had permission. But often we just have to be honest with ourselves that we're just terrified that we're going to screw it up. We're terrified that we're going to fail. It's like this anxiety inducing thing that occurs and man, the payoff is wonderful though when it works out and when it doesn't work out perfectly, there are lessons learned. So if you take the attitude of going into it, say there are going to be tremendous lessons learned regardless here. I don't know that I've ever had a, I mean I've coached probably tens of thousands of sessions and that's not even counting what I've done online. I mean, Lord knows I don't know if I've ever had a session that I would say was perfect. There are always lessons to be learned there, right? There's lessons about how I could communicate more effectively, things I could have said differently, ways I could have encouraged my clients better. But there's no way to know that without getting in and doing the thing right. Dan, one of my close friends, the guy that's producing this Mondays with Matt. I remember Dan. Hopefully it's okay. I tell this story. I remember when he came and did a PBC certification seminar at a time he was an excellent coach, had an excellent eye. He had taken all the courses, taken all the academy, all the stuff, and had. I mean, he was an excellent coach. The one thing, because he hadn't done it on the platform, he had a young lady who was terrified and he was struggling to, like, get her to relax and calm down. He was trying to get her to move correctly and do the right thing. And there's nothing wrong with trying to get him to move correctly and do the right thing. Ultimately, that's what you want to do. But the experience of actually coaching people helps you understand how you connect with them, not just on a movement basis, but on how to get them to take a deep breath and relax. Right. You don't even know to say that if you haven't done it on the platform. And now I've watched what Dan's become as this incredible coach for us over the last several years, and that was not just, I think, a good learning experience for Dan. It was a great learning experience for me to understand, like, man, there's more than just the X's and O's of this thing and the moment arms and exactly where you put the barbell on your back and where you hold it in your hands, things like that. And so you cannot gain those things without the experience. You just can't know how to feel out all the nuances of a human that's on a platform. And everybody's different. So the way. The way you handle the way you're going to coach your spouse, your wife, your kids, versus the way you're going to coach your buddy from college is going to be different versus the way you're going to coach a total stranger versus somebody who's, like, very fit. And you can tell they have some confidence in their ability and their aesthetics and the way they look versus somebody who's brand new and maybe overweight or certainly not confident about the way they look. How you handle those things on the platform that really can't be learned in a textbook. You can hear those things even as I say them now and go, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. But until you've done it. You just don't know. You just got to dive in and do the thing. Let me tell you that this week I've been talking a little bit starting last week about the deal that we have going on for the Barbell Academy coaching 101 fantastic intro course. For those of you who have, who have taken the academy, your next step is absolutely to get on the platform and coach. But if you haven't done this yet, you haven't done the academy. This is. It's not going to get better than this. Right. So coaching 101, you get $100 off coaching 101 plus a free month of coaching where you can learn from one of our incredible coaches at Barbell Logic. Those sorts of things. Exactly. Not just the X's and the O's and exactly how you communicate online or in person, but how to navigate human relationship and how to do that well and professionally and responsibly. Right. So we want to make connections but want to keep it professional. Like I'm the coach, they're the client. That doesn't mean we can't be friends and doesn't mean we can't have a great relationship, but we want to make sure we understand, like where those boundaries are. And so that's a great offer that you can take us up on. And that's barbellogic.com mat101 is how you get there. Barbarlode.com mat101 it's $100 off plus a free month of coaching. That's a sweet deal. It's 300 plus dollars worth of coaching for free. And today, I believe today's the last day. So, man, if you haven't done that, you should sign up for coaching 101, get the free month of coaching and go. If you have signed up for the academy, you have the knowledge that you need get on the platform. And one of the first things we'll talk about in 101, CJ will start to talk about you don't need permission to coach. You have it right. You can start coaching right now. So that's a great deal to take advantage of right now. I'll probably talk about it a little bit at the end again, but that's a great thing to take advantage of. Okay, so you don't need permission. We must be people of action. Scott and I used to say this all the time on the podcast. It's super fun to talk about a thing that we want to do, but until you actually make the leap and do the thing you haven't really done anything. You've read all the books and you have all the knowledge, but you haven't actually done the thing like, why. Why do doctors and surgeons, why do they have such a long residency program? Because they actually have to perform surgery, and not just on cadavers and pigs. And they've got to actually perform real surgery on real people. They've got to actually treat them, because there's no way to learn that in a textbook. And it's the same when it comes to coaching. So you can do that today? Yes. Start with friends, family, co workers, people that you're close to, people that you know will still love you and care even if you screw it up, it's okay. And then as time goes on, you can start to bring in more people that are maybe more like acquaintances and not friends and even total strangers and start to charge them money in the beginning. Just get the experience under your belt. It's a great place to start. Know that when you do that, you'll feel an incredible sense of accomplishment. Not because maybe you crushed it on the platform, but something I've preached for years is that there is value in the work itself and the process of learning these skills. I love it. I love the process. Even coaching now, after coaching for almost 30 years, I still love to learn things on a daily basis from my clients, see what they're doing, figure out new ways to bring better programming to them, to tweak their movement pattern, to encourage them in ways that gets them excited about their training and gives them motivation. And not just hardcore discipline all the time. These are super fun things to learn, even 30 years in. And so right now, in your first several years, you were just a sponge. Every session is just one wildly valuable where you can absorb so much information. You can take that knowledge that you've learned, you can turn it into experience, and then the cycle continues where that experience turns into more knowledge. It's super important to you that you can then take to the next session and then the next session and then the next session. And so by the time you've done 5,000 sessions, you're probably a really good coach. So I have some questions here about me. When I first started coaching. Let me say before I answer the questions, I wasn't a good coach when I started. Nobody's a good coach when they start. And I think that's part of it. If you really care about this and you've done barbell logic, or you've read all the books and you've taken the academy and you've gained the knowledge, you care and you take it serious. And so you don't. I think there's a respect piece where people don't want to sort of disrespect the platform or disrespect the profession. And yet the reality is that you're not going to be good the first day. That's okay. Just get out of it with a win. Give the client, whoever that is, even if it's your spouse, give them something that they can take with them to the next session that they can remember that's clear, that's memorable, that's a cue, that's a word, that's, oh, I remember, I need to do this, that's a win. And then you'll take that learning that you did on the platform, not just for them, but for you, into the next session. So much to do, so much fun. I think those first couple years of coaching are some of the best. And for those of you who already have a regular job, you're working as an accountant or as a plumber or whatever. You don't have to have the pressure of, I've got to go out and make money, I can't let somebody cancel or, you know, I can't pay my, can't pay my mortgage right now. Like that kind of pressure on coaching. I would not have that. I would just make coaching fun. Because you're listening to this and because you take the academy you build, been a student, because you've done barbell logic, it's serious to you. And so you're going to take it serious and you're going to learn, make it fun. You're not going to slack off, pursue it with everything you can and dig in and coach this week. Put somebody on the schedule this week. Go ahead and lock in that friend or family member right now. Commit to that thing. It's Monday. You've got four more days after today, and that's if you don't do anything tonight. So four days starting tomorrow and not counting the weekend to be able to get a session in, go ahead and schedule a session, even if it's one that you're going to train at that you're going to train, say, hey, want to come be my workout partner for a workout and then use that as an opportunity to coach. That's a great first step. Okay, let's dive into the questions. Let me scroll up here. See, I had some come in this week on Social, so I will dig in first there and keep going. Here we go. If you have questions, please feel free to type them in the comments, and I will do my best to get to all of them. When you first started coaching, what did your first few sessions actually look like? I haven't read through all these, so it's going to be interesting to see what I say off the cuff. Honestly, I don't remember that much. It was 30 years ago. It probably didn't look great. I mean, at the time, it probably looked like, you know, coaches that I knew at the time, Louis Simmons and Dave Tate and Glen Penlay and people like that, they were a little more gruff and a little hardcore and more into powerlifting at the time. And so it looked a lot like that. I started teaching the platform for starting strength. Those sessions looked a lot like that teaching progression there. And as we've moved on with barbell logic and we've made little tweaks to those things, that intro session, it often looks like somebody comes in, I calm their nerves, I tell them everything's going to be just fine. I'm able to say in a very honest way, I've done this a million times. There's nothing that you're going to do that I haven't seen. You can say something like, hey, I'm super excited to do this. You're going to do great. We're going to learn together, and let's just have fun doing the thing and calm their nerves. And then I start walking them through the squat, and I teach them how to do the squat without a bar, just in their body weight, make sure they can get down to parallel, stay on midfoot, have the right angles, all that sort of stuff. And then I take them to the barbell and adjust their grip. One of the things you want to do when you coach is you don't want to major in the minors, right? The minutia don't matter that much. So if people really have a hard time taking a close grip on the squat, they got to go a little wider because their shoulders are tight or they constantly wrap their thumbs. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Not right now, right? So just get the big stuff, like get the bar generally in the right spot. Make them stay on their midfoot, not be squatting on their toes, make them get to parallel, right? Those sort of things. That's what I'm looking for in that first session because I want to give them the wins. You can't give them nine things to think about. So kind of watch them squat. If they squatted before, I often will say, go ahead and do a set of five with the empty bar. I'm not going to judge too much. I'm just going to watch. I'm not going to coach on this. On this set, I just want to see what it looks like, what your normal squat looks like. If they've never squatted, you're going to walk them through exactly what it should look like and then tell them at the end the things they did right, not the things they did wrong. Right? The things they did right first. Now, next time, what I want you to do. So after you. Hey, did a great job of like, you sat back really well. You were leaning over. Things look great. Like, the one thing I want you to do is I want you to make sure you feel your heels through the entire rep. So you're going to think about this time. I want to feel the weight on my heels, right? And it's. I want them on midfoot, but I want them a newbie. I want them to feel the heels, right? So things like that, I'm going to focus on the big stuff that press. Close grip, elbows forward, wrist straight. Close grip, elbows forward, wrist straight. Right now, just barely miss your nose on the way up. Barely miss your nose on the way down. Go real slow. Go slower than you think you need to go. It's that. That's it, right? And then celebrate what they did. Well, don't tell them what they did poorly because you don't want them thinking like the negative cycle of, okay, don't do that thing that I did. You want to say, like, oh, do the thing that I did correctly. That's the way we're going to attack it. So I would love to. I would love to have video of the first few sessions. This is why you should video yourself in those first few sessions, because I would love to go back and probably see how hideously bad I was as a coach. But again, over time, you just, you gain a lot of experience and the more you do this. When I was a kid, I just thought of this story. My brother and I went and stayed with my aunt and uncle in Chicago at the time. They lived in Houston for years now, but they had a ping pong table and never played ping pong. I was probably 10. Brother was like 8. And a lot of you know him from being on the podcast. And we started playing ping pong that week. We were there for spring break or summer or something, and we played like eight hours of ping pong a day. And we were terrible at ping pong. But you know what? By day Four. We were pretty good and enough that we could play my uncle and my dad. They were both very good and they could beat us handily, but we could hold our own. After four days of eight hours a day at ping pong, you get pretty good. You. After four days of eight hours of coaching, you'll be surprised at how much experience you'll gain in that time and how much you'll refine your skills in that amount of time. And that's a bunch of hours. So that's a great way to think about it. Okay, question two. I feel like I still have a ton to learn about programming. Should I wait until I feel more confident there before coaching someone? No, because here's the deal. Almost everybody that you coach is going to start linear progression, right? And whether you do that in like the old starting strength model or our model, or Renaissance periodizations model or whatever, it's all linear. Everybody coaches linear that knows what they're doing. It's just going to add a. Typically, you're going to add a little weight every time. Maybe with somebody like Renaissance, maybe they'd add volume, which I wouldn't do. I would add weight. But it's the same lifts, right? We don't do the power clean. Others do. I'm going to teach them to squat press, bench press, deadlift, that's it. And they're going to come in two, three times a week and they're going to add a little weight to the bar every time. And in that time period, you can learn a ton. Listen, this is another great question for AI okay, this is what my client's doing. As they start to struggle to hit their reps or go up in weight five pounds or two and a half pounds on their, on whatever exercise they're on, what are the changes I should make according to barbelogic starting strength, Renaissance periodization, barbell medicine, whoever, whoever you want to use combination of all of those and let AI tell you and you will start to go, okay, now tell me why. Why would they make those changes? Why would these two disagree about it? Right? And that's how you learn about programming. But no, absolutely not programming. Scott and I had a podcast episode years ago called Programming is Secondary Consistency Technique. Those are the two things that matter. I just had this conversation with a client over text just a little bit barbelogic client just a couple hours ago and he's lost a bunch of weight. He's lost about nine pounds of muscle over the last few months as well. And I said, hey, the problem is Consistency and technique. Because he said, do I need to keep squatting heavier? I'm choking. I said, no, you don't need to keep squatting heavier. You squat more. Correct. You need to make sure that everything's lined up. So excuse me. Consistency and technique are everything. How do you know when you're ready to change to charge somebody for coaching? How do I set this up? Okay, when you have probably six months under your belt, maybe a little less, you're probably ready to charge. The best way to do that. This is going to be very self gratifying. Turnkey Coach does all that for you. So Turnkey Coach is. It's cheap, it's. It's the best software on the planet. We do payment processing, we give you the link, you set your prices. Our customer service team works with you on that. I would tell you this, set your prices very competitively. Not too cheap, but not too expensive. When you're new and only have one or two options, not more than that. You don't want somebody to have decision fatigue when it's time to charge. Right. And then set them up and say when they sign up, do just written into, it's not really a contract but an agreement. Say like, hey, your grandfather in on this price for six months. That way after six months, if you've gained a lot more experience and you're able to charge significantly more, you can slowly raise their rates if you need to. Especially if you, you know, come out of the gate, charge them 99 bucks a month or something, which is way too cheap. But a lot of you will end up doing that. So that is how you set it up. Honestly, it's the easiest way to do it. Trying to set up your own stripe account, things like that. You set up your own stripe account through Turnkey Coach, but you're able to do that on the back of our stripe account. It's all yours. We never see the money gets charged and automatically deposits into your account. But because we vouch for you, then you're able to set up that price point and that stripe account and actually set up point of sale processing in a way that's super clean. I mean, it literally takes probably two minutes to set up. And if you don't have that, you've got to prove all this background information about your business history and stuff. And so it's a lot more difficult. Okay, what is one habit that separates good coaches from average ones early on? That's a great question. I think it's the ability, it's understanding what is the same for everyone, which is the basic movement patterns, what movements we do, you know, what are the big things we're looking for and what is different for everyone. And it comes back to those nuances. I was talking about how I speak to different demographics, how I speak to people that I have different relationships with. A very close personal family relationship versus a stranger, you know, someone who is a good old boy from the country I'm in, southwest Missouri, versus a businessman who owns his own company. The way you speak to them is little is different for sure. So understanding how to connect with everybody is a big piece of this. So when I started Barbelogic, I went out and hired all the best coaches that I knew. I can remember. I can still see their faces. I will not name their names. Three to five coaches that I thought were like, probably top 20 technique coaches in the world that I did not hire at Barbalogic because I didn't think they had the personality, the likability to do this. It's interesting when you don't have all the experience of an incredible coach, but you do have the ability to treat someone incredibly well, with respect and connect. That buys a lot of goodwill when you don't have all the experience, education, et cetera, that you need to have. As you're learning in those early years, what you can do is you can outwork everyone. You can be kinder than anyone. You can be more respectful than anyone. You can build that trust. That's a huge piece of Andrew Jackson's trust equation. That benevolence. Be like, do you care? Does the client see that you actually care? That doesn't require any experience to care. Right. And so do you have integrity? That doesn't require experience. The only part that requires experience is the ability part. Are you able to do the thing? The answer is, I don't know. In the beginning, you might not be able to. But even if you're struggling a little bit on the ability, if you're high integrity and high care, high benevolence, individual, you'll still continue to build trust with your clients, and they will forgive that little bit. Lack of ability, often because you're charging a cheaper price, they'll stick with you and watch you learn and grow over time, which is what you want. And that's how you end up with lifelong clients. Okay, if someone wants to start coaching this week, what preparation actually matters? I think ultimately just a good handle on the lifts, Just understanding what the lifts should look like and the script for teaching them. We talked about this in previous weeks. And by the way, that's always available on the Academy. So if you join the Academy, you get the scripts like here's word for word what you say, but you can also just go to the short versions. Well, you can go to the versions on YouTube at BarboLogic, how to squat, how to deadlift, how to bench press, how to press. And watch me or Nicky Sims or Andrew Jackson I think is a model in a lot of them. How we teach those. That is the script and you just write that down on a three by five note card, bullet points. Because you don't want to be reading it like it's a transcript. You just want to be able to understand the major steps in the teaching progressions of each lift. That's all you need. If you've done this on your own and you've thought about the form on your own lifts and you understand generally what you need to do on the big four lifts especially, and you can communicate that to somebody else, you're ready. If you're nervous you're going to forget major steps like remembering to tell them to sit back and bend over on the squat or to stay on their midfoot. Those are the bullet points that you put on the three by five note card. So two more here and then I'll go to the comment section. Are there any certifications that are worth getting or important? If so, for whom and why? It's a great question. Simple answer is. The easiest answer is there's no certifications that you have to have to be a great coach, period. And I've had all of them. However, certainly I think the professional barbell coaching certification is. I think it's the best and it's the hardest to get, but it's also got the greatest payoff. I think it's the biggest reward. I think it's something that you can be most proud of. Certainly the starting strength certification, still a very solid certification. And then if you plan on going into like university sector, public sector, Division 1 university or even professional coaching, something like the CSCS or the CSCCA, those ones that are widely recognized that require you to have a bachelor's degree in a science field can be important in the private sector. I don't think those are important at all. And I think things like IFSA or whatever are, they don't matter. So ultimately there are very few out there that I think actually teach you how to coach. Even the CSCs, when I took it, that's just a multiple choice test that you pay 450 bucks for and you never prove that you have to coach. So I think certifications are generally worthless for the big giant ones that are out there. There are certainly some, a few good ones that are a little more niche, and I think they're worth going after, but I don't think you have to have them to be a coach. So last one that I have here that came in over social media. When coaching people, you know, how do you maintain authority as the coach? I set it up from the. It's the first line. I say to my wife, to my kids, to my friends, I say, hey. And I still have to say it to my wife all the time. We've trained together for 20 years. I say, hey, in this room, I'm your coach. Just remember. And so I'm not your husband in here. I mean, I am, but when I'm correcting you, I'm not correcting you as your husband. I'm correcting you as your coach. And I say, I want the same thing out of you. She has a great coaching eye. If you see me like I did heavy box squats the other day, I set a five, and I was collapsing on the box a little bit. I wasn't falling on the box, but once I sat on the box, I was relaxing a little bit, and she caught it, and I was like, great. But it doesn't bother me because I want to be corrected. Not everybody wants to be corrected. So you have to remind them that it's just coach. You're coach. You're talking to your client. And it's one thing you have to be able to do in those situations is you've got to be able to compartmentalize. So do they. Some people do that better than others. I can. We can have a, you know, tough session in the gym and then go out and have a great dinner together. And we're. We're family. Right? It's not coach client relationship anymore. And so you just have to be able to separate those things. Okay, dive in. If you have your questions, please ask them. I'll see if anything is here in the comments. Question from Instagram. I only coach the big four lifts, yet every single client's session is different. You only learn that just by starting a coach. Yep, absolutely. So totally agree. And again, understanding, like those big four lifts, the. The major points of those big four lifts are the same for all. But how you communicate those, or even the tone of your voice or the look on your. On your face, your body language changes dramatically how you say a thing. If I'm Trying to get somebody to get on their midfoot or to sit back or use their hips. There have to be great coaches. Probably have 20 different ways to say that. Good coaches might have two or three and coaches that are brand new might only have one. And that's sometimes the place that you run into where you'll be like, ooh, I struggled in that session because you'll find a thing that you can even see what they did wrong. You tried to communicate it to them. They, it just wasn't making the light bulb go off and you didn't have additional tools. Right. So do you have the socket wrench and the crescent wrench and like whatever. All, all the different ways to like turn the screw, turn the, the bolt head. Do you have 5, 6, 7, 20 options for that or do you just have one? I love going into a session knowing that I have at least two for anything. So if the first one doesn't work, I can fall back on the second. And as time goes on, you'll start to understand this cue works for most. This q works for 70, 80%. And when it doesn't, here are the cues that I start to go down the line. Well, this one works for 15% or this one only works for 6%. You kind of go on down. I don't know the exact percentages obviously, but it's the, that's the, that's kind of the way you attack it. So. Okay, any other questions? We're almost out of time. Give you guys one more minute to get any questions in and then we'll wrap it up this week again. Please remember, take advantage of this coaching 101. Barbelogic.com mat101 $100 off coaching 101. It's cheap already and you get a free month of coaching. Take advantage of it. It ends today, I believe at midnight. So just do it right now. Just hop on over as we wrap this up. To Barbelogic.com go matt101 and sign up for coaching 101 and get your free month of coaching plus coaching 101. It's a great, great, great resource for you as a coach. Alright, that wraps it up. It's four o' clock on Monday. I hope you have a great rest of your Monday. Enjoy dinner with family tonight. Coaching. If you're going to coach in the evenings, I don't because I only coach in the mornings. But I hope you guys have a great week this week. And if you haven't coached before or you're not coaching currently get somebody on the calendar this week. You got four more days to make it happen. Get off of this call and immediately text five people and try to get somebody to in your garage gym. In your gym. Go meet him at a big box gym and get a session in this week. Be a person of action. You don't need permission to coach, so I'm not going to give it to you. You give it to you. Right. Have a great one. We'll see you next week on Mondays with Matt. Sam.