In the coaching trenches: ordinary folks obtaining extraordinary gains

Real Coaches Coach

Real coaches coach: getting real results for regular people on a routine basis.

Not your cheerleader: Ivan Abadjiev, shown in the featured image, watches Naim Süleymanoğlu backstage at the world championships.

I am a strength coach. I build and strengthen the human body through coaching. If you want to increase your current quotient of muscle, power, and applicable athletic strength, I can show you how. I am both a strength theoretician and a strength coach. There is a difference. Strength theoreticians divorced from coaching are both common and flawed. I theorize, then take my newly hatched mental strategies to the gym to test-drive them on myself and others.

Regular People Making Extraordinary Gains

I coach a squad of “regular guy” athletes every week. We are all voluntary lab rats in a decades-long double-blind study on acquiring human strength: we go where results lead. I used to coach elite athletes to near exclusion; now I mostly coach regular people, neighborhood guys, motivated men, short on time — but all in serious pursuit of muscle and power. Our current group ranges in age from 14 to 65. Again, regular folks making extraordinary gains.

Because they live in the neighborhood where we train, they just so happened to fall into our orbit. The point being: our system works for a broad range of motivated trainees when properly coached, intelligently scaled and consistently applied. Properly enacted, ultra-minimalistic strength training, the kind we preach, can grow muscle, strengthen the body, and improve performance in motivated individuals who use it as directed.

Coaxing Gains Instead of Beating Them Out

One common misapprehension about hardcore strength training is that we beat gains out of trainees. Factually, we coax gains. Coaxing results on a consistent and ongoing basis for regular folks is far more of a coaching challenge than obtaining results for seasoned athletes already at 99% of their awesome genetic potential. I still consult with elite athletes, and they are always dropping by to train with us. Hall of Fame powerlifter Kirk Karwoski coaches the same athletes as I do because he trains with us every Sunday.

The Sunday Core Four Format

The Sunday format is always the same: show up at 9 am and over the next two hours work through the Core Four lifts, the fundamental compound multi-joint progressive resistance exercises: overhead barbell press, squat, bench press, deadlift. The elite and the beginner use the same training template. They adopt the same signature techniques and use similar periodized strategies. What differs between the beginner and the advanced trainee is the poundage, the payloads used, the coaching attention required, and the amount of technical polishing needed. Everyone uses the same techniques and tactics, scaled to the lifter.

A decade ago, when we began these sessions, held in an unheated country barn, I talked a lot. I had to explain, to teach the why’s and wherefores of the training tactics and exacting techniques passed along to me by my world champion mentors. Today, I teach the locals the same exact strategies and techniques I used decades ago to guide a young Kirk Karwoski to six straight IPF world championships, seven national titles, and a dozen world records. Kirk is widely considered one of the greatest squatters in the history of powerlifting. He trains with us today in the same identical way he did as a young lifter. His payloads are lighter — yet his techniques have never been crisper.

As many as twenty weightlifters will populate three different training stations. All will work their way through the overhead press, squat, bench press, and deadlift, always in that order. Each station is populated with men of similar strength levels. After working through the Core Four, they might do some arm training, perhaps some power cleans. Or not. It is the four lifts that matter. They are the meat and potatoes, everything else is dessert.

Periodized Goals and the Rising Tide

Each week each participant seeks to attain his preplanned periodized workout goals: in each of the four lifts, poundage / rep targets are identified ahead of time. Small sequential successful jumps in reps or poundage compound and amplify into big gains when set into a three-month, 12-week periodized timeframe. The goal is to attain weekly goals. Attain the weekly goals and the overarching goal takes care of itself.

Our Sunday sessions are a beehive of activity; the boys are quite vocal in supporting one another on their “top set” efforts. My own role is that of senior coach. A decade ago, when I began working with “the locals,” I talked quite a lot and was, by necessity, extremely vocal. Back then the crew needed serious coaching. Not so much a decade down the road.

Nowadays I take great pleasure in saying very little: there is less need. If the techniques I observe are proper, if the poundage is handled adroitly for the predetermined number of reps, what is there to say? Other than, “Good job.” Or, my favorite, “Nice!” A good coach is not a cheerleader. A good coach shuts up if the athletes are doing what they should be doing as they should. Now, when a rookie lifter passes the audition and starts training with us, I pass him off to one of our senior guys. Our lifters teach each other because now they understand the system and the techniques.

When a Coach Should Shut Up

A good coach sees no need to needlessly insert himself into the proceedings if everything is humming along. As I mentioned, we routinely push through 15 to 20 lifters in a two-hour timeframe. This past Sunday not a single lifter missed a single rep. This is a rather miraculous occurrence, no one missing a single repetition during a two-hour training session.

This deserves a bit of extrapolation: if 18 lifters perform five sets in each of the Core Four lifts, 20 cumulative sets per lifter, a good average, 360 sets were performed by the 18-man group as a whole. And not a single rep missed. This happens on a regularly recurring basis. When this occurs week after week, when few if any cumulative reps are missed by the group as a whole, everyone improves. A rising tide lifts all boats.

What Ivan Abadjiev Taught Me About Coaching

I remember seeing videos of the great Bulgarian Olympic weightlifting coach Ivan Abadjiev overseeing the Bulgarian national team, this back in the 1990s. I noted how little he said. Randy Strossen had flown over and spent a week filming the national team train prior to the world championships. The best Olympic weightlifters in the world trained on three lifts only: clean and jerk, snatch, and squat, this in an ill-heated, pathetic training hall, eight lifting platforms laid out, side by side, in the indoor gym of a deserted elementary school.

Abadjiev sat at a school desk just watching, watching, watching. He said very little. That struck me as odd. I understood it much later when I became a mature coach, after I too had worked with world champions and world record holders.

Teaching Athletes to Fish

We teach our athletes how to fish, instead of continually selling them fish. Because we are so demanding and precise in training, because our menu is so limited, adherents, over time, become self-sufficient. They are so drilled and instilled with our techniques and tactics that they no longer need me — though I am sure that they would miss my scathing criticisms and insightful witticisms. Probably not.

Strength Training Is Not Bodybuilding

Strength training is not bodybuilding. Bodybuilding is divorced from performance. Strength training’s purpose is to improve performance. A bodybuilder will train long and often, using a wide exercise menu. Effective strength training uses shorter sessions that are extremely intense and infrequent. You cannot get any less frequent than training once a week and only doing four exercises. This is the epitome of the phrase: fewer things done better, and less frequently. The key is, as always, results. Are there measurable increases and improvements in both performance and physique? Those that obtain the optimal results for the least time investment are the ultimate winners.

Equipment Notes for Core Four Coaching

The system is not built around exotic equipment. It is built around precise technique, progressive loading, clear coaching, honest effort, and enough recovery to come back stronger.

For Core Four barbell work, lifters and facilities can compare Olympic weightlifting bars, weight plates, weight benches, dumbbells, and power cages and platform racks.

A straightforward strength-room setup might include a bar such as the CAP Barbell 7-foot black oxide Olympic weight bar, loading such as Troy gray iron wide-flanged weight plates, dumbbells such as IRON COMPANY rubber hex dumbbell sets, and a bench such as the Legend Fitness 3103 three-way utility bench, when those tools match the lifter, room, supervision, loading, and intended use.

The equipment does not create the coaching. The coach, the lifter, the system, the technique, and the logbook create the coaching.

Safety Note for Heavy Barbell Coaching

This article preserves Marty Gallagher’s RAW coaching perspective and firsthand experience. It is not individualized medical, rehabilitation, youth-training, or programming advice.

Heavy overhead pressing, squatting, bench pressing, and deadlifting require appropriate warm-ups, technically sound instruction, safe loading, suitable racks, or spotters when needed, and a coach who values clean execution over ego. Beginners, teenagers, older lifters, injured lifters, and deconditioned trainees need the same principles scaled to their bodies and current ability.

Stop or scale back for sharp pain, dizziness, chest pain, unusual shortness of breath, numbness, repeated technical collapse, uncontrolled bar path, missed warm-ups, or any symptom that feels different from normal training effort.

A good coach coaxes progress. A good coach also knows when to stop the set.

RAW with Marty Gallagher, J.P. Brice, and Jim Steel Podcast.

About the Author: Marty Gallagher

As an athlete Marty Gallagher is a national and world champion in Olympic lifting and powerlifting. He was a world champion team coach in 1991 and coached Black's Gym to five national team titles. He's also coached some of the strongest men on the planet including Kirk Karwoski when he completed his world record 1,003 lb. squat. Today he teaches the US Secret Service and Tier 1 Spec Ops on how to maximize their strength in minimal time. As a writer since 1978 he’s written for Powerlifting USA, Milo, Flex Magazine, Muscle & Fitness, Prime Fitness, Washington Post, Dragon Door and now IRON COMPANY. He’s also the author of multiple books including Purposeful Primitive, Strong Medicine, Ed Coan’s book Coan, The Man, the Myth, the Method and numerous others. Read the Marty Gallagher biography here.