Almost everyone will have had a coach at some stage in their lives, whether for paddling or another sport in their off the water life. But every coach is different and as a result some are better or worse than each other.
Think about the best coach you have ever had, it might be the one that put you through sessions so hard you have nightmares or it might not be, chances are, the reason you picked them wasn't even about the training sessions they set. For me, having been coached for what seems like my whole life and over multiple sports, the best coaches are the ones that teach you things.
Maybe that sounds obvious, but there is a big difference between teaching an athlete something and telling an athlete something. Teaching requires an explanation, and an explanation requires knowledge that goes deeper than the surface level instruction of where to put your hands or how to move your hips.
Teaching also requires the coach to work out a way of making you understand what they are trying to tell you. Sometimes its spending a whole session framing a technique change in different ways until they find the one that sticks or imparting in you the "why this is important" so you have a reason to make the change and continue to work on it through the session(s) ahead.
The best coaches I've had, have always gone a step further and crossed the imaginary barrier between the sport and real life. They go past coaching just the athlete at training and add value, wisdom or support to things outside of training and in so doing make you want to turn up to training regardless of the type of day you've been having.
But this blog isn't meant to be just about what makes coaches great, it's meant to be about how some coaches aren't really coaches, or at least not like the ones described above. Some coaches are really just Trainers. A coach can be a trainer, but a trainer is not a coach. A trainer sets a session and calls go and stop. A trainer operates on the surface level of an athlete providing generic cues and shouts of encouragement.
"1 minute at 90%! Ready, Go", never taught any athlete anything. It might have been necessary to run the session but for me it's not coaching. "Keep you hands up" might be a great cue for a lot of paddlers but if none of my coaches had taken the time to explain to me why, I never would have thought it was important enough to warrant the sore shoulders or the focus it required when I started to fatigue at training.
Paddling is a hard sport to do well, and a very easy sport to do poorly. A good coach can spend decades explaining it to their athletes and never run out of words, while somehow the Trainers of the sport can run sessions for years without making it past calling out times and the buzzword, tagline comments of "hands up", "hit the catch" and "leg drive" on repeat.
So if you're not sure where your coach sits on the scale of trainer to coach my advice is to start asking them questions, and the best one to ask is "why?". If they don't know why they want you to do something, then they don't have much to teach you. If they take offense, in my experience that means they knew they didn't know why they were telling you something, before they even told you.
I don't want to make Trainers sound all bad though. There is definitely a place for them and not everyone is wanting to improve and learn all the time. A lot of the time people just want to turn up, do their exercise and get on with their day.
As long as you know that there is a difference between coach and trainer and, know whether you are wanting to get coached or trained.
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