Coach's Prep - 101

Welcome to Coach’s Prep

Congratulations for nurturing your curiosity. In fact, it’s the exact attribute that will make or break your coaching career. The moment you stop exploring outside the confines of your current abilities you die as a quality coach.

Is this for me?

Maybe. This course is for coaches that want to be better at their craft. Prospective, novice coaches can use Coach’s Prep as a preparatory program to build basic coaching skills from the ground up. This course will also challenge intermediate and advanced professional coaches by filling in gaps, challenging current understanding, and eradicating the complacency of focusing on the needs of others and neglecting your own craft.

At DEUCE Gym Coach’s Prep is never over. Our entire staff participates along side student coaches indefinitely, for example.

History

Coach’s Prep has been a corner stone for DEUCE Gym since before the gym opened. In fact, we were very clear from the beginning that our ability to deliver the most viable training experience in the world and our ability to grow would be found (or lost) in our ability to develop remarkable people. Coach’s Prep began in the park in the spring of 2011. While we were incubating a fitness community, we put equal importance on the notion of incubating incredible coaches.

Years later, we’ve grown in more ways than we can imagine. That growth is thanks to Coach’s Prep. The fitness community noticed and soon aspiring coaches and experienced professionals alike would flock to Venice Beach to see what was happening. More and more emails and phone calls would come in, and finally at the first ever ‘Hold the Standard’ Summit in Spain, the levy broke. The world was demanding access to Coach’s Prep and now here we are.

What is it?

Each week you’ll be presented with a video lecture, which will build conceptually each week. This information comes with corresponding:

• Weekly assignments
• Weekly quizzes
• Weekly practical application exercises that will expand your capacity with relative challenges to your current ability

Also included is lifetime access to the Coach's Prep private Facebook Group.

This course is a comprehensive look at the craft of coaching. Sure, we’ll dive into the details of imparting knowledge on an group of athletes, but Coach’s Prep also recognizes a 10,000 foot view of coaching that can help shatter the confines of a follow-the-leader mentality that is pervasive in the fitness industry today.

While Coach’s Prep is rooted in coaching movement, its application is broad and its students can expect to gain insight into coaching individuals and groups in an array of disciplines and contexts. Whether you’re programming and instructing group general physical preparedness (GPP) classes or you own a weightlifting-only gym, you’ll be outfitted with the skills to impart simple, clear, compelling communication. You’ll be able to create valuable context. Most importantly, you’ll finish this program as a better leader.

“Give me some details.”

At DEUCE Gym, we’ve developed a model to answer the question, “What makes a great coach?” Coach’s Prep develops skills towards this definition.

Great coaching begins with some technical skills. In order, we call these skills your ability to set a standard, communicate the standard, and build the standard. It’s here we find the groundwork needed to choose and impart the right stimuli for the right people, skills to teach the information, and all the strategies for progressing, drilling, and cuing respectively.

While a good coach can manage these technical challenges, a better coach can hold these abilities and deliver them with context. Creating context is an intangible we place great value on and is the next layer of quality coaching. While a better coach excels at the technical elements of setting, communicating, and building a standard in the gym with context, the best coach is a leader. A leader goes beyond the technical aspects of coaching and even the ability to create contextual frame. A leader holds the standard.

In this course, we’ll back up your mental frame far enough to recognize that we’re drawing lines and making rules where there are no lines. We’re talking about movement and your ability to teach it will take technical skills. Do you know what to teach? Do you know how to teach it? When an athlete or many athletes deviate from the standard, do you have effective tools for bringing them closer to the standard? Is your communication simple, clear, and compelling? Sure, you can coach your athlete’s movement in this moment, but can you coach them beyond this rep and into their lives?

Lastly, can you transcend what written on the whiteboard and what happens in the gym and become a leader?