At a recent conference, I was asked about the biggest change in strength coaching and this is my answer...
I'd say there is more "horizontal education" and not enough "vertical education". By that, I mean that decades ago, coaches had their "specialties". You would find the "speed guy" who knew everything about speed but if you asked him about strength, he didn't know shit about it. But at least he would come out and say "look, that's not my thing." Same with absolute strength and every other aspect of strength coaching.
Now we have a lot of people who know a little bit about many aspects of strength and conditioning. They are masters of none. I think this is because if you start to go deep into one category or specialty, you have to fucking learn it. You have to seriously take the time and that goes beyond the e-book or article that you were reading.
To get mastery in that one area, you're going to have to seek out people who are best in that area. You're going to have to read textbooks (which do still exist), and dig deep into older books like Super Training. When you start trying to learn it at deeper levels, you're challenging yourself and your ability to learn and bring in new information you may or may not agree with. And you have to integrate all of that into your current strength training paradigm.
The good part of that is when you find those people that are deep in one category, they know it inside and out. I would say my specialty is absolute strength. You could give me any topic on it and I could give you a lecture as to why it's the greatest thing in the world. And then give another lecture on why it sucks.
When it comes to any discipline, the real answer that everybody doesn't want to hear is, "it depends". When you know a lot about a topic, you know that "it depends". You don't have to pretend that there is an absolute and you can give answers on both sides.
Remember, "Just the tip" was never meant to be the end goal but a way to get in deeper.
Today all they seem to want is to "dip the tip" and move to the next one.
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