So, you’ve made it through the honeymoon phase of your internship and you’ve become settled into your day to day routine. The novelty has been replaced with the reality of long hours and tedious workloads, and the wonder of why more coffee doesn’t do the trick for revival the way it once did. Perhaps you have the weight of weekly intern education assignments and a looming big project on your back, among all of your daily tasks, that may not even account for academic obligations. Welcome to the thick of the internship.
Internships are difficult (hopefully not made worse by coaches who believe you need to “pay your dues” to an exorbitant level); it’s typically the first experience of full-time work for aspiring coaches, but without the pay, perks, and responsibilities. As we have discussed previously, viewing yourself as an unpaid coach is a critical lens through which to approach your internship. However, that lens gets tinted with reality when you are handling session set-ups and breakdowns, engaging in tedious cleaning tasks, and being utilized during sessions in a multitude of ways, such as being an athlete’s partner for drills or moving equipment around.
The thick of the internship can be where complacency and apathy set in. Taking the once border collie-like enthusiasm towards learning and the tasks expected of you and shelving it in favor of minimalist efforts. As humans, we are biologically hardwired towards efficiency, favoring the lowest cost of achieving the desired outcome over fervency. Longevity in coaching is, at a very high level, about learning how to pace yourself. The demands you are put through in your internship are a great trial ground for beginning to learn how to do just this. This lesson will probably be learned the hard way in the first few weeks, and the middling segment of the internship being a great opportunity to begin to refine this pacing.
Veteran coaches understand that young coaches will generally learn this pacing lesson the hard way, as it is a very common mistake of aspiring coaches who want to impress full-time coaches. This is not problematic; where it becomes problematic is if you don’t learn from it and adjust the course appropriately, taking an illustrious start to your internship into a nosedive through the cessation of your time with the staff. With the desire to maximize your growth as a coach and make favorable impressions upon the coaches you work with, let’s discuss some considerations for the way you approach the thick of your internship.
It Starts With You
Reality
Before going further, here is a prospect that you could find yourself wrestling with- maybe strength & conditioning isn’t for you. Perhaps the in-depth peek you’ve gotten behind the curtains of the profession has opened your eyes and served as a bit of career addition by subtraction. While you know you want to work in some domain of performance, it isn’t strength & conditioning. This is okay- as long as you handle it correctly. Have a conversation with your supervising coach to express where you are at and see if maybe you are missing something in your considerations. Ultimately, If your heart isn’t in it and you feel this need of “I have to go to my internship” rather than “I get to go to my internship”, that mindset is going to reflect in your work. If you’ve arrived at the point of realizing that your heart isn’t in the experience anymore, then it is beneficial to everyone involved that you bow out respectfully.
While you may not be needing the connections/experience of strength & conditioning anymore, the fact remains that the sport performance realm is small and S&C and private sector coaches are much more connected than you might think, if staying within sports performance is still what you want to do. Even if you are making a career 180 away from sports performance, it is still a good professional habit to leave by informing your supervisor and the head strength coach of your decision in-person (not over text or email), thanking them for the opportunity while shaking their hand and looking them in the eye. How they respond is of their choosing and out of your control, but you can leave knowing you did so in a high integrity way and with the intent to benefit all involved.
Lifestyle
Your ability to thrive throughout the entirety of your internship starts with how you care for yourself. It is the most mind-boggling dichotomy to hear strength coaches preach to their athletes about the value of recovery, sleep, nutrition and stress management, yet turn a blind eye to their own habits. It’s as if they are some superior breed of human immune to the effects of a lack of sleep, spending too much time “on”, pounding energy drinks while not eating well-balanced, consistent meals, and not having a life away from the gym. It is not the intent of this section to inform you on lifestyle habits, so much as it is the intent to remind you that you need to go to sleep, you need to allow yourself time to rest and relax, and you need to eat and hydrate well. If these things get out of whack, your ability to perform at work WILL suffer. Don’t listen to the hardo strength coaches; they are suffering inside and the victims of their fragile egos that won’t allow them to admit their exercise in self-flagellation is killing them; metaphorically and literally.
If you enjoy the social scene a good bit, the reality is that enjoyment of running the streets may have to slow down a bit so you don’t burn the candle at both ends. Weekends end up being a time to catch up on sleep, rest and relax, and take care of yourself. If you spend both days recovering from any sort of hangover and presumably not sleeping or eating well, you should expect a steady decline in your performance at your internship. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t enjoy yourself, but that you should consider enjoyment in the grey area between nothing and fully blacked-out known as moderation.
Workload Management
Depending on your situation, you probably have a myriad of responsibilities to keep tabs on. Daily, weekly, and monthly tasks of your internship, weekly intern education assignments, bigger intern projects or presentations, and if you are a student, potentially assignments to detail the ongoings of your experience and other projects. As mentioned earlier, your internship is a great trial ground for learning how you work best, and something you will want to spend time figuring out is how you keep track of your workload. Ensuring things are done when they are supposed to be done, how they are supposed to be done, and that they are done the correct way every time. Perhaps you work well with a notebook or planner, as the act of writing down your tasks helps not only reinforce the task cognitively but documents it and so you can look at your day/week/month ahead and know what’s going on. Maybe you consolidate all of your due dates, events, and tasks to your phone, taking advantage of the vast amounts of apps and functionality phones can be equipped with to ensure you never miss a task or event.
Whatever your preference, this is your opportunity to really hone and systemize how you manage your workload. You may have to try a few different methods until you arrive at one that works for you, but again, that’s what this stage of your career is for. Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande is a great text to check out that speaks to the value of checklists in a variety of domains and how it ensures that complex responsibilities get completed correctly every time they are executed. It would be a good question for the coaches supervising you as to how they’ve arrived at managing their schedules and ensuring tasks are completed on time and in the manner expected.
Just a friendly reminder that internships are generally not easy, everyone that has done an internship has probably at least thought about quitting. Add in assignments for courses you might still be enrolled in and the work is certainly no joke. It is entirely realistic that nights once spent video gaming or socializing are now relegated to catching up on schoolwork, internship education assignments and learning. Guess what? This is normal for this step of your career. Remove your feelings of self-pity, realize there are dozens, if not hundreds of interns like you going through the same struggles and embrace it. If the work is genuinely piled up and you find yourself running out of hours, you’ll need to do some introspecting to figure out if the falling short is occurring because of inefficiencies in your execution or because there is simply far too much work and not enough time. Odds are, it falls into the former category, but on the small odds the bottleneck falls into the latter, then it may be worth considering a conversation with your supervisor to talk about how you’re struggling and get their insights as to how to solve the dilemma.
Remember, coaches have typically run many cycles of internships prior to your arrival and will have a pretty solid lens as to the demands of the internship and how they are perceived by interns (unless you work for an overzealous prick who just sees interns as cleaners and session set-up personnel). So don’t go into such a conversation under the pretence of trying to get your workload reduced, but just expressing that you are struggling and trying to figure out if you are missing something that would allow you more time in your day.
Conclusion
The thick of your internship can be a breeding ground for complacency and even apathy if you don’t manage your experience correctly. Just as it is impossible for athletes to train hard every single day without burning out, we as coaches are not exempt. If you are going to succeed, you have to be honest with yourself and how valuable you are finding the internship, how you manage and maintain a solid lifestyle, and how you handle the various workloads you may have on your plate. It’s okay to struggle; you are supposed to, when it becomes not okay is when you aren’t actively working to find ways to get out of that struggle and you end up becoming a zombie of what you once were when everything was new, fun, and fresh. Don’t let yourself fall victim to this trap and affect any positive initial impression you may have built up with the organization. Do right by yourself first, and this will ultimately trickle down to your athletes, supervisors, colleagues, and the organization you work for. If you find yourself struggling, and aren’t comfortable approaching your supervisors about it, there are hundreds of coaches and interns on the Strength Coach Network forums that you can connect with and see what insights they can offer.
In the next instalment, we will take a look at how you begin cultivating your training philosophy. While you will certainly not have this entirely figured out by the time you leave your internship (if you think you do, google the Dunning-Kruger Effect), you will want to begin giving thought to the principles you hold to be true and important in approaching the development of your athletes, and how you will articulate this to other coaches.
Internships are difficult (hopefully not made worse by coaches who believe you need to “pay your dues” to an exorbitant level); it’s typically the first experience of full-time work for aspiring coaches, but without the pay, perks, and responsibilities. As we have discussed previously, viewing yourself as an unpaid coach is a critical lens through which to approach your internship. However, that lens gets tinted with reality when you are handling session set-ups and breakdowns, engaging in tedious cleaning tasks, and being utilized during sessions in a multitude of ways, such as being an athlete’s partner for drills or moving equipment around.
The thick of the internship can be where complacency and apathy set in. Taking the once border collie-like enthusiasm towards learning and the tasks expected of you and shelving it in favor of minimalist efforts. As humans, we are biologically hardwired towards efficiency, favoring the lowest cost of achieving the desired outcome over fervency. Longevity in coaching is, at a very high level, about learning how to pace yourself. The demands you are put through in your internship are a great trial ground for beginning to learn how to do just this. This lesson will probably be learned the hard way in the first few weeks, and the middling segment of the internship being a great opportunity to begin to refine this pacing.
Veteran coaches understand that young coaches will generally learn this pacing lesson the hard way, as it is a very common mistake of aspiring coaches who want to impress full-time coaches. This is not problematic; where it becomes problematic is if you don’t learn from it and adjust the course appropriately, taking an illustrious start to your internship into a nosedive through the cessation of your time with the staff. With the desire to maximize your growth as a coach and make favorable impressions upon the coaches you work with, let’s discuss some considerations for the way you approach the thick of your internship.
It Starts With You
Reality
Before going further, here is a prospect that you could find yourself wrestling with- maybe strength & conditioning isn’t for you. Perhaps the in-depth peek you’ve gotten behind the curtains of the profession has opened your eyes and served as a bit of career addition by subtraction. While you know you want to work in some domain of performance, it isn’t strength & conditioning. This is okay- as long as you handle it correctly. Have a conversation with your supervising coach to express where you are at and see if maybe you are missing something in your considerations. Ultimately, If your heart isn’t in it and you feel this need of “I have to go to my internship” rather than “I get to go to my internship”, that mindset is going to reflect in your work. If you’ve arrived at the point of realizing that your heart isn’t in the experience anymore, then it is beneficial to everyone involved that you bow out respectfully.
While you may not be needing the connections/experience of strength & conditioning anymore, the fact remains that the sport performance realm is small and S&C and private sector coaches are much more connected than you might think, if staying within sports performance is still what you want to do. Even if you are making a career 180 away from sports performance, it is still a good professional habit to leave by informing your supervisor and the head strength coach of your decision in-person (not over text or email), thanking them for the opportunity while shaking their hand and looking them in the eye. How they respond is of their choosing and out of your control, but you can leave knowing you did so in a high integrity way and with the intent to benefit all involved.
Lifestyle
Your ability to thrive throughout the entirety of your internship starts with how you care for yourself. It is the most mind-boggling dichotomy to hear strength coaches preach to their athletes about the value of recovery, sleep, nutrition and stress management, yet turn a blind eye to their own habits. It’s as if they are some superior breed of human immune to the effects of a lack of sleep, spending too much time “on”, pounding energy drinks while not eating well-balanced, consistent meals, and not having a life away from the gym. It is not the intent of this section to inform you on lifestyle habits, so much as it is the intent to remind you that you need to go to sleep, you need to allow yourself time to rest and relax, and you need to eat and hydrate well. If these things get out of whack, your ability to perform at work WILL suffer. Don’t listen to the hardo strength coaches; they are suffering inside and the victims of their fragile egos that won’t allow them to admit their exercise in self-flagellation is killing them; metaphorically and literally.
If you enjoy the social scene a good bit, the reality is that enjoyment of running the streets may have to slow down a bit so you don’t burn the candle at both ends. Weekends end up being a time to catch up on sleep, rest and relax, and take care of yourself. If you spend both days recovering from any sort of hangover and presumably not sleeping or eating well, you should expect a steady decline in your performance at your internship. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t enjoy yourself, but that you should consider enjoyment in the grey area between nothing and fully blacked-out known as moderation.
Workload Management
Depending on your situation, you probably have a myriad of responsibilities to keep tabs on. Daily, weekly, and monthly tasks of your internship, weekly intern education assignments, bigger intern projects or presentations, and if you are a student, potentially assignments to detail the ongoings of your experience and other projects. As mentioned earlier, your internship is a great trial ground for learning how you work best, and something you will want to spend time figuring out is how you keep track of your workload. Ensuring things are done when they are supposed to be done, how they are supposed to be done, and that they are done the correct way every time. Perhaps you work well with a notebook or planner, as the act of writing down your tasks helps not only reinforce the task cognitively but documents it and so you can look at your day/week/month ahead and know what’s going on. Maybe you consolidate all of your due dates, events, and tasks to your phone, taking advantage of the vast amounts of apps and functionality phones can be equipped with to ensure you never miss a task or event.
Whatever your preference, this is your opportunity to really hone and systemize how you manage your workload. You may have to try a few different methods until you arrive at one that works for you, but again, that’s what this stage of your career is for. Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande is a great text to check out that speaks to the value of checklists in a variety of domains and how it ensures that complex responsibilities get completed correctly every time they are executed. It would be a good question for the coaches supervising you as to how they’ve arrived at managing their schedules and ensuring tasks are completed on time and in the manner expected.
Just a friendly reminder that internships are generally not easy, everyone that has done an internship has probably at least thought about quitting. Add in assignments for courses you might still be enrolled in and the work is certainly no joke. It is entirely realistic that nights once spent video gaming or socializing are now relegated to catching up on schoolwork, internship education assignments and learning. Guess what? This is normal for this step of your career. Remove your feelings of self-pity, realize there are dozens, if not hundreds of interns like you going through the same struggles and embrace it. If the work is genuinely piled up and you find yourself running out of hours, you’ll need to do some introspecting to figure out if the falling short is occurring because of inefficiencies in your execution or because there is simply far too much work and not enough time. Odds are, it falls into the former category, but on the small odds the bottleneck falls into the latter, then it may be worth considering a conversation with your supervisor to talk about how you’re struggling and get their insights as to how to solve the dilemma.
Remember, coaches have typically run many cycles of internships prior to your arrival and will have a pretty solid lens as to the demands of the internship and how they are perceived by interns (unless you work for an overzealous prick who just sees interns as cleaners and session set-up personnel). So don’t go into such a conversation under the pretence of trying to get your workload reduced, but just expressing that you are struggling and trying to figure out if you are missing something that would allow you more time in your day.
Conclusion
The thick of your internship can be a breeding ground for complacency and even apathy if you don’t manage your experience correctly. Just as it is impossible for athletes to train hard every single day without burning out, we as coaches are not exempt. If you are going to succeed, you have to be honest with yourself and how valuable you are finding the internship, how you manage and maintain a solid lifestyle, and how you handle the various workloads you may have on your plate. It’s okay to struggle; you are supposed to, when it becomes not okay is when you aren’t actively working to find ways to get out of that struggle and you end up becoming a zombie of what you once were when everything was new, fun, and fresh. Don’t let yourself fall victim to this trap and affect any positive initial impression you may have built up with the organization. Do right by yourself first, and this will ultimately trickle down to your athletes, supervisors, colleagues, and the organization you work for. If you find yourself struggling, and aren’t comfortable approaching your supervisors about it, there are hundreds of coaches and interns on the Strength Coach Network forums that you can connect with and see what insights they can offer.
In the next instalment, we will take a look at how you begin cultivating your training philosophy. While you will certainly not have this entirely figured out by the time you leave your internship (if you think you do, google the Dunning-Kruger Effect), you will want to begin giving thought to the principles you hold to be true and important in approaching the development of your athletes, and how you will articulate this to other coaches.
