Written By: Kevin Cann
The NFL Hall of Famers write letters to their younger selves once they get inducted into the Hall of Fame. I really like this idea. I have been coaching a long time, but I have been in powerlifting now for 5 years.
This is not a lot of time, but I think it is a milestone in this sport. I feel the majority of the people in this sport have been in it for less time than that. I still have a lot to learn. In fact, learning never stops.
I wouldn’t be where I am today without making all of the mistakes that I made. I will make many more mistakes that will lead me to get even better than I am now. With PPS, we will always try new things in the pursuit of strength. Sometimes we miss, but sometimes we hit big.
Dear younger Kevin,
I know you have been out of coaching for about 9 months. You took a job teaching at a school because the daily grind of being a strength coach got to you. You enjoyed coaching the high school athletes and the adult classes that you had, but the money was poor and there was definitely something missing. You weren’t challenged.
After this break, you are about to enter a completely different world within the fitness community. The world of competitive strength. You are about to find out that you don’t know shit about getting people strong.
It is time to dump your FMS screens and “perfect movement” narratives. You won’t do this right away; it will take time. However, those things make coaching easy. Anyone can coach someone to get a better score on an FMS screen, or to achieve more optimal movement. Worrying about these things will only hinder their strength.
You will learn that those things don’t matter. This will shatter the foundation of everything you believed you built your coaching philosophy off of. This will be really tough to swallow, but it is necessary for you to grow into a better coach of competitive strength athletes.
This is a lesson you will learn the hard way. You will hire Sheiko as a coach because you really like what he says about technique. This will be the biggest and most important time period of your coaching career. You know you are lucky to have him as a coach, but his importance was understated at the time.
You loved that under Sheiko, technique was the most important aspect of training because it fit your old narrative of optimal movement. Eventually you will see lifters struggle to get better with this narrative. It will not be because technique does not matter, but because you don’t really know it is not as easy as “better movement equals better results.” This will force you to seek out your own answers to so many questions.
This will be tough to do, because so many of these answers will contradict your beliefs and what you believe to be true. You will latch on to popular beliefs within the community in which you are lifting. This wasn’t the facility in which you were working in, but a community filled with a lack of experience within the sport itself.
A community filled with regurgitations of other people’s words (that you will add to) with little knowledge on what it actually takes to produce long-term strength. In doing this you will miss the message of some coaches that have been coaching longer than you have been alive.
You will discard what they say in the name of science. Cherry-picking articles and poking holes in those coach’s narratives. You will be completely unaware of the blind spots within the research. Not sure you would have even cared, as you only cared about proving what you know. And of course you know better than those that have been getting people to top levels of strength for decades.
You will be one of the crowd shouting that “Westside sucks” and equipped lifting is cheating and a completely different sport. It is different, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore aspects of it. At the end of the day it is still about getting stronger.
You will make a smart move and surround yourself with more experienced coaches. You will realize that a couple of them love quite a few aspects of Westside’s training methods, and even the one that isn’t a huge fan of them, doesn’t disregard everything that Westside does.
You will reluctantly be convinced to start a podcast. This podcast will have a few world level lifters, other coaches, and researchers as guests. You will get to have very lengthy conversations with all of these people. This will be huge for your learning.
You will discuss many theoretical concepts on the podcast and in your blog. You will have trolls because of this. Remember that they don’t know what training with PPS really looks like. At the end of the day it is not that different from what everyone else is doing. They just think you are nuts.
The more you talk to other coaches, lifters, and researchers, the more open minded you will become. You will see many parallels between the pain science world and performance. You will have a smart group of physical therapists that will help you make sense of that world and make it easier to connect those dots.
You will be able to put innovation on top of the foundation of general principles that Sheiko taught you for 3 years. Eventually, you will come back around full circle and realize that those coaches that you discarded in the beginning were actually onto something.
You will begin to see your own methods put onto paper. These methods will be a combination of the things you learned with Sheiko, and what you have learned works for the culture of PPS. You will see Sheiko’s influence in the program, you will see the influence from the researchers you have spoken with, and you will even see the influence of Westside in your program.
Continue to keep an open mind as you coach. Continue to learn as much as you can. Continue to use science to guide the process but understand that science has blind spots that can be filled in by continuing to talk to those that have been successful in this sport for long periods of time.
Continue to try out new things. Never stop experimenting. The goal of the team is to continue to grow and learn in the name of strength. This is a big reason why lifters in PPS see results. We have this desire to try whatever we can to get stronger than everyone else. That attitude goes a long way.
And no matter what just keep outworking every other coach by reading, learning, talking to others, experimenting in the gym, and coaching your ass off.
Precision Powerlifting Systems 