By Matt Mohan
Here is what one of our students, Matt Mohan, learned from taking the Certified Functional Strength Coach course:
This past January, I completed the Level 1 CFSC program as my first coaching certification. As soon as I started the program, I realized that this isn’t just a certification to get you in a big box gym coaching 30-minute workouts. It isn’t putting a client on a chest press machine and having them press until their chest and shoulders are crushed, or they’re passed out after a run on a treadmill on their first day in the gym. Though that would be an oversimplification of what CFSC isn’t. What CFSC is though, is a program designed to improve performance by training functional movement patters to specific each person’s level of fitness, in a rigid, well-coached program. CFSC changed the way I view coaching and programming, so here are my biggest takeaways from it.
Why do we exercise? Why do we train clients? Why do we program certain exercises and not others? Why did I choose this career? One of the books often brought up by Mike Boyle and CFSC is ‘Start With Why’ by Simon Sinek. If you have a strong why, your how and your what will come easily. Many training certifications don’t require practical exams and don’t do enough to make sure that “coaches” know how to coach, cue or demonstrate exercises. The ‘why’ is to change the standard of strength coaching. The ‘how’ is requiring coaches to learn the exercises, coach them, and cue them in a practical exam; they can raise the bar of what a newly certified coach can do for clients. And that leads to the rest of this article the ‘what’s that I took away from the certification process.
But to add a little bit more to our ‘why’ as coaches, Mike Boyle and CFSC gave us three primary goals. The first goal is to prevent injuries while training. This is our most important goal, because if we fail to keep our clients safe in the gym, then they can’t perform in their sport, occupation, or daily activities. If you get your clients injured while training, you will quickly lose people’s trust and therefore lose clients. Because of this, we want to train clients using exercise that they can perform safely, and have a favorable risk-to-reward ratio.
Our second goal is to prevent injuries on the field of play. This also extends to preventing injuries on the job or in daily activities. A quote that is common in sports is “the best ability is availability.” I’m sure most of us can think of a talented athlete that would have had a great career… but they didn’t because they couldn’t stay healthy. Our job as strength coaches is to build their strength functional movement patterns that carry over to the activity that they are performing so that they have more resilience at game-speed or on the job.
Our third goal is to enhance performance. This is our third goal and it is to be achieved after the first two. If we fail at our first two goals, this goal is obsolete. Enhancing performance is why most athletes come to strength coaches, they want to be better athletes; run faster, jump higher, hit harder, throw faster, etc. A well-planned strength and conditioning program is designed to help with these goals, but the athlete has to progress to this level of training so they do not get injured training at this level of specificity.
How many times have you been in a gym and seen somebody walk in and greet their personal trainer, and head directly to the leg press machine to start their workout with a few sets of leg press? Or perhaps you’ve done this yourself – I’m honest, I have. Tissue quality, tissue length, tissue readiness, tissue temperature, tissue excitability, tissue strength, and endurance; foam rolling, stretching/mobility, motor control, warm-up, power, and strength training, and conditioning. These are all of the components of a good strength and conditioning program. Rather than doing one or two of these things in a workout, we should be doing all of them preferably in that order.
What about arm day? Chest and back day? Leg day? Shoulder day? We do full body day. Core, hip dominant, knee dominant, upper body push and pull, lower body push and pull, and carry are the foundational movement patterns and should be done each session. These patterns should be trained both bilaterally and unilaterally.
When it comes to structuring the strength training portion to our program, the most effective and efficient way to balance exercises without wasting time or inducing unnecessary fatigue is by using tri-sets. When we do tri-sets, we are not hammering the same muscle group three exercises in a row, we are balancing the work done across different muscle groups. An example could look like this: our first exercise is a set of kettlebell deadlifts, then our second exercise is TRX rows, and our third exercise is a farmer’s carry, and then rest. By doing this, we are hitting our lower body pull, upper body pull, and carry in rapid succession; and we will repeat the tri-set two or three times before moving on to another group of exercises.
Now we know how to structure the program. Today we’re all doing kettlebell deadlifts! The problem is, Tony doesn’t even know how to hip hinge, and Todd is deadlifting the heaviest kettlebell in the gym for twenty reps! So we should write Todd and Tony completely different exercise programs right? That’s inefficient and ineffective. The best way to address clients of different abilities is exercise progressions and regressions. Tony should regress to learning the bodyweight hip hinge pattern and perhaps we can set Todd up on the trap bar.
We can keep our programs rigid and flexible at the same time as long as we stick to the foundational movement patterns. For each movement, we have a baseline that we can expect 80% of clients to do on their first day in. Then we can regress and progress clients based on how they perform the baseline exercise. CFSC has a manual of progressions and regressions for each movement pattern.
Perhaps the biggest way that CFSC challenged my knowledge pertains to the way that Mike Boyle views conditioning. Across my education I have learned different ways to program conditioning, aerobic and anaerobic exercise. Sure, a periodized program with 5 days of training in intervals, long distance, HIIT, etc. are good ways to train somebody whose sport is running, cycling, or swimming. But as strength and conditioning coaches, these are often a small percentage of our clients, these clients are better suited to take their sport specific training to the coach of their sport.
On our part, our objective is to incorporate conditioning. But we want to incorporate conditioning in a way that promotes recovery and reduces the number of impacts that our clients or athletes take. Mike’s approach to conditioning relies on heart rate recovery. Suppose we have our athletes do 40-meter sprints, for 6 or 8 reps. What we want to focus on here is getting our athletes into an aerobic heart rate zone based on their heart rate max percentages. Our goal for each sprint is to be intense enough where they enter this zone but not so intense that they are beating up their joints and connective tissue, and gassing themselves. Once an athlete finishes a sprint, we are waiting for their heart rate to come down out of that aerobic zone before they do another sprint. The work that is being done here is heart rate recovery, which plays a large role in cardiovascular adaptations to aerobic exercise. We want our athletes to be able to recover 30bpm in 1 minute and 50bpm in 2 minutes. This method of conditioning spares the athletes from fatigue and joint-wear while enhancing their aerobic conditioning.
So I understand how to do the exercises, how to cue them, how to fit them into a program and progress/regress them; I’m ready to coach, right? That’s part of it. You can be just an exercise expert, or you can be a coach. To be an effective coach, social skills and culture are everything in taking in and keeping clients. As a coach you have to be sociable; you have to be active on the gym floor; and demand good leadership, programing, practicality, and execution. Understand behavior and how to program behaviors to achieve your goals or your athletes’ goals. Ask for help when needed, I don’t know everything and neither do you. Be competitive and safe, teach and make teachers. Importantly, find out what kind of coach you are. These are the ideas and sayings that came from a video called “Transformational Group Coaching” from Kevin Carr. This video in the CFSC certification program was perhaps the most impactful for me and it helps me to continue to find myself as a developing coach.
I found the CFSC program to be a foundational piece of my development as a coach, both in understanding exercise programming and the skills that it takes to be an effective coach. This program has given me many tools that I need to prescribe exercise effectively and be a better coach.
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