Responsible (Kettlebell Sport) Coaching

Outside of Eastern Europe, kettlebell sport is still in its infancy. This means that kettlebell sport athletes and coaches only have access to a small body of good, reliable, verified information on training methodologies, unlike the athletes and coaches of many other sports who have access to a large pool of information including research and experience that has been amassed over decades.

Of course this isn’t to say that kettlebell sport coaches in Eastern Europe are automatically infallible. ANY coach should be assessed thoroughly before an athlete accepts guidance from them (always take a good look at a coach’s track record: have their athletes been successful and generally free of injury directly related to kettlebell sport training?). The difference between Eastern Europe and the rest of us is the accessibility of good information and that is what we need to address.

The scarcity of good information on kettlebell sport training for those of us outside of Eastern Europe has resulted in what I perceive as two very major problems for the sport:

1) Many people who do a one or two day course in kettlebell lifting feel that they’re automatically qualified to call themselves a coach. Many of these people are well-intentioned and enthusiastic, unfortunately, though, enthusiasm combined with insufficient knowledge and experience is a recipe for disaster.

2 ) People don’t know how to spot a fraud/cowboy/someone who doesn’t really know what they’re talking about and so, unlike in other sports where there is enough knowledge and there are enough experienced practitioners to ensure that frauds and cowboys will be exposed by someone, it is difficult for those who are new to the sport to make informed decisions about coaches.

In a nutshell, the kettlebell sport community is not yet large enough or well-informed enough to self-regulate and weed out the hacks who claim to be coaches.

Coaching is a skill

Coaching is a skill in and of itself and like any other skill, requires practice in order to foster proficiency. Coaching requires:

• An in depth understanding of each the kettlebell sport lifts
• An understanding of safe, effective programming
• How to individualise training for a variety of different body types, athletic backgrounds, experience levels, personality types etc
• The ability to communicate information about technique and training methods clearly to a wide variety of people

In addition, kettlebell sport coaches outside of Eastern Europe will, without exception, be working with recreational athletes who have limited time to train, as well as limited time and resources available for recovery. This means that a good coach will understand the differences between a professional and recreational athlete and the differing needs of both. Further to this, Steven Khuong, renowned Ice Chamber coach, has said that a good coach has:

“[t]he ability to gauge information overload. Over-coaching can cause confusion and dismay for the client. A good coach does not need to take every little bit of nuance from every "perceived" high level lifter and apply those nuances to his/her client's program. A good coach knows the difference between the appropriate amount and too much information for the client during the initial developmental phase.”

It should be noted here that being a good kettlebell sport athlete does not necessarily make you a good coach. Having experience in training and competing for kettlebell sport can certainly improve coaching skills and give you insights, but it does not automatically give you the tools to train other people.

Many of the requirements of kettlebell sport coaching require experience and this is the crux of the issue with many coaches – without specific coaching experience, you are not in a position to coach safely and effectively, but how do you get the coaching experience to become a coach if you’re not experienced enough to be a coach?

Gaining coaching experience responsibly

There is really only one way to gain coaching experience responsibly: mentoring. You need to find an experienced coach/coaches to watch over you when you start coaching to ensure your “guinea pigs” aren’t harmed by your experiment. If you have a good coach yourself, that is usually a good place to seek guidance.

My advice is to work very closely with a mentor in the beginning, get them to check over pretty much everything you do so that nothing is left to chance.

Be completely honest with anyone you take on as an athlete, let them know that you are not an experienced coach but that you are working under the guidance of an experienced coach to ensure you are providing them with good information. If they are not comfortable with this, then they have the right to know and to seek another coach, but I have found that most people are fine so long as you’re upfront. And if an athlete asks you a question that you’re unsure of, tell them you don’t know but you will find out (don’t make something up for the sake of saving your pride).

A good coach will continue to seek new knowledge and advice from other good coaches for the rest of their coaching career, it is an ongoing process of which mentoring is just the beginning.

The growth of the sport

It is great to see people getting enthused about kettlebell sport and wanting to take part in growing the sport. One of the best ways to grow the sport is to coach others, foster their interest and pass on the passion for the sport that many of us have. We just need to remember that good coaching is vital for this process, sub-optimal coaching may actually put athletes off and be detrimental to the sport.