Rewards of being a trainer...

Ask any trainer/strength coach about why they got into the industry and I guarantee not one of them will say "the money." And as Mike Boyle often says, not many of us gave up brain surgery to start training athletes.

So why do we do it?

I've always known what my motivation was, but the other day it was reaffirmed by one of my young "athletes".

I recently wrote about the value of praising effort over performance, an idea I took from the book Nurture Shock. I gave a story of a young (9 year old) athlete who was struggling, and getting frustrated when he couldn't perform certain coordination drills or games. And I think I pointed out how much more effort he put in when I made it clear that effort was all I expected, and how he continued to get himself up time after time after falling down (literally a couple dozen times in a single "workout").

Well a couple of days ago, with the same class and young athlete, we did a similar workout to the one from a few weeks ago (including a lot of ladder drills, and some linear acceleration games/ball drops, etc.). The same drills that led to Ryan falling down so many times before, were almost perfected by him on Monday. And let me tell you, his eyes lit up like the 4th. His footwork was almost flawless and his feet were much quicker-and I don't think he fell once.

This isn't the first time I've seen this, but it never gets old. This is why we need to stay patient with our kids. Statistics say that Ryan will probably never be an "elite" athlete, and many parents and coaches see this as enough reason to not pay for training like we give. And many of Ryan's friends, maybe even parents, won't notice much of a difference right away, making it difficult to put a value on the training he's been given.

But I bet if they do notice anything, it's that he's willing to try anything now because he knows a concentrated effort will be rewarded in the end. It's not magic, voo-doo, or slight of hands tricks. It's simply allowing each kid to try to reach their own potential. We'll never know what the ceiling is for most of these kids, but the least we can do is get them to try to find it for themselves.