This is not going to be an article that is trashing the quality in coaching. The majority do lack formal education, which is necessary to understand the concepts that they speak about and the science they attempt to interpret. The majority also lack the necessary experience to truly guide those that they are charging hundreds of dollars per month to.
The bigger problem doesn’t lie in their lack of skills, it lies in worrying about that stuff to begin with. Less than 5% of the people that participate in this port make it to 5 years or longer. I played soccer as a kid starting at 5 years old. There were no goalies, smaller balls, and less kids on the field to allow for more shots to be taken and the initial development of specific skills. If a bigger ball was used it would change the mechanics, the child would have to use to kick, and goalies would dissuade kids from shooting.
The main goal at this time was encouragement and fun, while teaching some of the basic rules with boundaries and not using your hands. It isn’t until players are around 8-10 years old that there are referees and goalies. However, the goal is a bit larger, and there are a few more players allowed onto the field. It is until the teenage years that the game is played 11 v 11and within similar dimensions as the top levels.
The same is seen in baseball. Kids go from tee ball to coach pitch, to the kids pitching on a smaller diamond, and finally to the larger diamond in the teenage years. If we look at powerlifting in terms of skill development, only 5% makes it past the smaller sided games in soccer or the smaller diamond in baseball. This is still the developmental stages of skill. However, coaches act like these beginners are national level lifters in a state sponsored Olympic program.
This is where I suppose that education for the coaches would be helpful, as the programs they are dishing out with high volumes and high specificity were not actually given to the Russian athletes until they were in their teenage years. Often after 10 or more years of long-term athletic development that started with gymnastics like movements from 6 to 8 years old, high levels of GPP, and only light technique work with the lifts that were practiced at low frequencies.
Performance is not a goal in real sports until around high school. Performance is built from a foundation of fun and the development of fundamentals stacked on top of each other for 10 or more years. To reiterate a fact, less than 5% of powerlifters last 5 years in the sport. Even the ones that are competitive out of the gate many times are not emotionally ready to be competitive in the sport. This isn’t about total, but about maturity. This is a major reason why they come and go so quickly too.
It seems most coaches are targeting beginners on the internet through social media. This makes sense since 26.5% of users on Instagram are 18-24. Tik Tok trends much younger with a higher percentage of that age group. The problem is that the message is targeted for a much more experienced lifter, and not beginners. Those lifters tend to be older than this demographic and not getting their information from social media. If you ask the majority of them how they got started with lifting it often follows the trends of long-term athletic development laid out by the Russians. They did a lot of GPP type movements and got into more specific powerlifting training years later. Even Louie talked about his GPP as a kid being carrying buckets of concrete up flights of stairs for work at 9 years old.
These people competed when they were emotionally ready to compete, not because some internet coach said they should do it because “There is never a perfect time to do it.” There is a perfect time to do it, and it is when they are emotionally prepared to do it. They also don’t need to compete to get the benefits of the hard work and commitment required to get stronger over the long run.
The lack of education and experience in these online coaches is not a major problem to me. Them not identifying that they are the tee-ball coaches to these lifters is. The goal should be for the lifter to learn some adequate technique, have fun, and build a base for future specific training.
There is no place for high frequency training, and no place for high specificity training in these beginner lifters unless they have a strong background in the gym doing GPP work. I don’t think this needs to be 10 years, but a 2-3 year period of bodybuilding mixed with a history of playing multiple sports throughout their developmental years is fine.
The lifters that get hurt after a few years and need to quit altogether should be able to sue their coaches for negligence. Everyone wants to make fun of the Navy Seal that hospitalized the TUFTS University lacrosse kids with rhabdo, but they are doing the exact same thing over the long run. They are prescribing inappropriate training to a group of people in the exact same way. The lacrosse kids are not Navy Seals and the beginner powerlifters are not Russian national level lifters, and even then the Russians prescribed high frequencies at much lower average intensities than you see these beginners getting.
The program again needs to be fun, have a high focus of GPP work, and more variability in the movements being performed to allow for the best skill development over the long term. A high bar vs low bar squat is not enough variety between movements. Use different barbells and alter the velocity of the movement with bands and chains. There is my conjugate plug because it matches my bias, but it allows for the lifter to train the sport, but also build the more important areas. As you get older the volume needs to be more on GPP anyways for recovery reasons. Learn the nuances of the system so if you are one of the 5% that lasts you develop the appropriate training skill to still get better. There are a lot of lifters with long-term success on conjugate. Louie hit his biggest squat at 55 years old, Dave Hoff is still at the top of the sport after over 20 years, and many others. The same can’t be said of higher frequency training.