There are massive differences.
“In the training business you have Facilitating & you have Coaching.
Facilitators prescribe sets & reps and give cliche cues.
Coaching is a different animal. You’re pouring into athletes from start to finish.
This is why Coaching is an infinitely more valuable service.”
-Ray Zingler on Twitter
I’ll just be honest with you.
Most people in this space, whether it be the high school weight room, the globo gym, the boutique (45-minute burn) gym, and even the performance training gym, aren’t coaching. They are facilitating.
They are existing for a period of time, telling people what to do and how long to do it for, while they sit on the clock waiting for their time to be up so that they can collect their check.
After doing this for an extended period of time, the hours seem to pile up, they don’t have any purpose within their work and then they get burned out and leave the industry.
This isn’t the exception to the rule.
This is the industry wide NORM.
This is why personal training, fitness coaching, whatever you want to call it has MASSIVE turnover rates in every setting from public to private.
It’s easy to point out the money side of things, and I will wholeheartedly admit that in the public (school/university) setting, many administrations do not value the S&C Coaches and many are underpaid.
My argument on the other side of that equation is, the folks in that sector know what they are getting into before they agree to terms. (That’s why I’m not there.)
But back to the facilitating vs. coaching.
Facilitating is easy. It’s scripted work. Cliché engagement, cliché conversation, cliché exercise recommendations, and cliché technical cues.
Coaching? Coaching is an entirely different animal. Coaching is exhausting. Like roll you up on the couch spent to the bone, exhausting, if you do it right.
It’s not just standing around.
The level of mental and physical engagement from, setting the tone of the room, bringing energy to the environment, tactfully coaching well thought out programs, auto-regulating on the fly, making adjustments in a pinch, managing emotional beings across the spectrum, & dialing tone and tactics to reach nuanced individuals in the way that best reaches them is astronomically high.
1-Hour of Coaching is equivalent to 5 hours behind a desk (if you’re actually working and not playing on your phone.)
This is why real COACHING is an infinitely more valuable than facilitating.
Great Coaches are paid in direct correlation with the value they add to the marketplace.
You don’t get points for standing there.
