No matter what the stage of your Strength & Conditioning career, from the lowliest intern to the Performance Director operating at the highest level of sport you can always improve your education.
Once you think you know it all you have lost. Continual progression is KEY at ANY level of coach:
Every coach needs a coach. Even those coaches at the highest level of strength and conditioning need a mentor to take their skill to the next level. What got you here will NOT get you there.
At Strength Coach Network we firmly believe that the best coaches are ones who have experience doing the thing. All of our presenters inside of this course earned their living working with athletes. They have combined to work in sport for over 100 years across professional sport to NCAA Division 1.
Yet so much of coach education is gym focussed. How much success can you drive if you get lost in the weeds of the 10% and the 90% is just a secondary thought? Other courses have it backwards and begins with discussion of one exercise over another, programming details, coaching cues because it feels immediately productive.
But until you add a 30,000ft view, a global perspective and the ability to zoom in and out of these modes you won’t realize your full coaching potential to influence athletes where it is felt: on the field or court, not the gym.
Sport is inherently unpredictable. By its very nature you’re going to encounter problems every day that you’ve never dealt with before, especially as you progress through your career and deal with new or different forms of problems.
Specific tools, methods or ways of doing things may work, but they work because the underlying principles are sound and the integrated systems they operate within allow for it. Until you take the time to understand the integrated nature of sport, and the principles that govern effective sports performance and development of athletic talent, you’re simply a coach with a hammer looking for nails. As soon as the circumstances or environment changes the methods based coach is destined to fail. Other Strength & Conditioning courses provides you with the hammer.
The principles minded coach can simply adapt their approach to solve the problem with different tools. This is the difference between being given fish and learning how to fish. It’s the difference between instructing others in exercise and being a coach. One is a lot more costly and time intensive than the other, but if you want to be truly successful and exert the maximum influence on your athletes careers, you need to take the road less travelled.
Strength and conditioning coaches cannot work in isolation. We need to understand that we are part of a high-performance team and department that is focused on athlete well being. Since we do not work in isolation - we cannot look at athlete's bodies in isolation and reductionistic lens:
"If you lift them heavy, they'll get big and strong"
"If they test poorly for conditioning, add a bunch of MAS intervals"
"If you have a raft of hamstring injuries, add Nordics to the programming"
The above thinking does not work. Each individual is an interconnected complex network of biological systems where all variables affect one another in unpredictable ways.
The silo approach is damaging because it doesn’t account for the singular nature of the stress response, and the fact that the actions of other athlete stakeholders also eat into this limited capacity.
We feel the purpose of education is to solve real world problems.
We decided to work backwards from the coaches at the very top of the field.
We surveyed 60 coaches from the NFL, NBA, EPL, power 5 colleges, professional rugby and more and asked them what knowledge, skills and qualities they most value in their careers.
We asked what they have to spend the most amount of time on each year to bring their staff up to standard.
And we asked what the biggest gaps are in the applied knowledge in strength & conditioning education.
Then we got to work on filling those gaps. The end result is Strength Coach Network Fundamentals.
In building the Strength Coach Network fundamentals course we asked ourselves "If we could lock our younger selves in a room for an intense weekend of learning, what would we want that coach to leave with that would jump them to the front of the job line, and drastically accelerate their professional development for the rest of their career?"
The result is 20 hours of taught materials, with an additional 20 hours of self directed study and demonstrated learning, with a curriculum spans the gamut from the theoretical to the applied, from broad concepts to specific methods, from you as the individual to the organization you serve.
Much like the Bible states about teaching a man to fish versus fishing for him. We're interested in teaching you just as much about how to think as what to do, and to provide you with the tools to thrive in whatever stage of your career that you're in.
If you want a simple, "do this list" of things to copy, this is not for you. We want to turn you into a classically trained Chef- hard to teach, hard to replicate, high standards. But the food tastes better and people will ultimately pay a lot more for it.
Sign up for Strength Coach Network Fundamentals and you'll get access to modules on key career development topics including:
We've put together a holistic 360 degree curriculum of coach development. All modules are mixed media in nature- primarily video with supporting text and graphics. We provide an extensive supporting reading list of books and freely available papers to provide you with necessary background and context, and flesh out the concepts being discussed.
You'll also get the opportunity to demonstrate your learning at the end of the course by taking a quiz. Be warned: this is not spoon feeding. You will not pass these quizzes by just skimming and guessing. This is the exactly the kind of stuff we are trying to combat. We purposefully made it so that you have to consume the full module to answer the questions! No thinking = no value!
We've also included the ability to comment on each module in case you want to provide feedback, ask small questions or provide input about modules or materials that you want see from us in the future.
Lastly, you will receive a certificate of completion good for 2.0 CEUs to the NSCA under category C. This is 33% of your CEUs for a 3 year reporting period!
The biggest benefit to a course like this is you're getting the answers to the exam. When dozens of elite level coaches are telling you "THIS is the stuff we want from our interns, GAs and assistants", we've done the hard work of researching and filtering for you.
Now it's just on you to put in the time and the work. When you have you'll be that much further ahead of your peers who are either still figuring it out, or just ploughing ahead without addressing gaps in their development.
The Strength Coach Network Fundamentals seeks to address the 4 Ps of career development:
Personal- to build more efficient processes into your work, free up more time to be a human being and spend time with your loved ones.
Pay- to equip yourself with the financial tools to earn your worth and be secure in your standard of living.
Progression- to develop the necessary professional skills and knowledge to achieve your ultimate career goal.
Purpose- to belong to something bigger than one's self and feel a sense of mission in your work (this one is on you, but if you've read this far, you probably have it)
We want to provide with the kind of information and mental tools to become a true high performance practitioner: to influence every aspect of your program by collaborating with other key athlete stakeholders from dietitians, to sport coaches to medical staff. In doing so you'll become the indispensable hub that all information and decision making passes through, a role that makes you easier to promote and pay well, and harder to fire.
We're delighted to bring together a distinguished list of presenters who are extremely high level performers in their respective modules. Our main criteria was skin in the game. If you do not make your living getting results in the real world, you cannot contribute to this course.
They bring DECADES of elite level of experience to the table, across a wide variety of sports, pairing the theoretical with the practical, and most importantly they get fired if they do shitty work or give shitty advice, which is the definition of skin in the game.
If you’re wanting cheap education. Good, cheap, or fast- you can only pick two. Strength Coach Network Fundamentals is not cheap, but you’ll learn a whole lot In a short space of time from some very accomplished coaches, and join an exclusive network of strength & conditioning professionals who want to change how things are done.
If you want to train regular people, not athletes. You can get a ton of value from business courses/resources, general training resources on strength, hypertrophy and power, and nutrition. Our course is for strength and conditioning coaches who want to work athletes possible, either in private sector, or the school/college/professional sector. If you work with team, field or court athletes, even better. We’re for you.
If you want a simple recipe or a to do list. This is going to be hard, but the juice is worth the squeeze. If it was easy, everyone else would be doing it. We estimate 2-3 hours per module to consume the materials, do the reading, take the quizzes and do any additional note taking. Assuming you do an hour of study per day (most don't), and take weekends off, this course is going to take anywhere from 6 to 10 weeks to complete. No mean feat.
This course is not intended to be like all the rest. Like most of the good things in life, in taking this course, you'll sacrifice the short term reward of convenience and ease for a bigger reward in the long term: drastically improved professional prospects. There's no plug and play program. There's no exercise list. There's no gimmick you can show off on the gram. What you are going to get is a framework and a way of thinking, that if you spend the time and do the work, will serve you for the rest of your career.
The same is true financially. Our course is right on par with the price per CEU you will obtain.
We're biased but even if our competitors were offering the same type of materials or information (they're not, we checked), we put our guys against their guys any day of the week. We've tried to recruit the smartest guys out there with a ton of skin in the game.
Even if you can find better out there (you can't), you're probably going to have to cherry pick from a variety of different sources at a much higher cost of time and money. With The Fundamentals, we've done the filtering for you. It's all here for you in an easy to consume format and a much lower price than you'd be able to organize by yourself.
We’ve set the price of entry to this course at $599.99.
This is premium education, so we've priced it accordingly. But as an investment that will return many times that to you over the course of your long career, it should be an easy decision to make. Additionally you can have your university, organization, or team purchase the course with continuing education budget since you get 2.0 CEUs at the end of the course.
For comparison:
If you compare Cal U Pennsylvania online 1 credit hour is between $322-$744. That is for ONE credit hour. One course is 3 credit hours. So that means one course for the semester will costs you $966-$2,322.
Or if you look at Concordia University Chicago 1 credit hour is between $534-$1,068. So one course being 3 credit hours is between $1,602-$3,204 for the semester.
That puts Fundamentals at 18-38% of the cost of ONE three credit course at an online university. You could buy Fundamentals 5 times before you have spend the same price as one 3 credit hour course at Concordia University Chicago.
Not only are these courses several times higher than Strength Coach Network Fundamentals, there is no guarantee that the content will be taught by top level pros who are telling you exactly what the high level organizations are crying out for. We offer more quality, more content, at a lower price than existing offerings in the marketplace.
Furthermore you'll get exclusive discounts to all Strength Coach Network memberships if you're not already a member, in addition to discounted pricing on the subsequent levels of this course series, and our future sport specific courses.
If you've made it this far you're probably tired: of the status quo of traditional strength & conditioning education, of doing what everyone else has done to get what everyone else has got. More importantly you probably want to do something about it. If you're ready to get started and you want to get your hands on our most in depth offering to date, and help us on our mission to change the face of strength and conditioning, click on the link below and we'll see you on the inside.
