There has been a recent thread on the Science of Sport Discourse forum around the quality of provision from fitness professionals, based on the US experience. This touched on something that has always struck me, whenever I do any fitness based training qualifications. I cannot underestimate how much I have gained from 10 years in full time teaching, prior to shifting into coaching. When I thought about this and wrote out a reply, the basic maths works out pretty much to qualify as a professional coach you have around 5% (and that’s generous) contact hours of a fully qualified teacher. And that’s without then considering the ongoing contact for a full time teacher vs a coach.
Imagine a club running coach / football coach. They may have 15 to 20 individuals. Maybe they see them 3 times a week, for an hour. Let’s say 90 mins for one of the sessions. 3.5 hours for 15 individuals, or 52.5 contact hours / individual a week.
Teacher – 30 children in a class, 5.5 hours a day = 165 hours a day or 3 times what the coach has access to in a week.
This purely contact time with the individual and not to mention the metrics / expectations / assessments / external assessments to measure progress against.
The wider point here isn’t how much more onerous / better / challenging one is over the other, more the level of knowledge teaching offers in supporting coaching. When I look at this it makes me realise just how lucky I have been to spend 10 years teaching before going into coaching. To gain a similar level of experience in coaching IN TERMS OF HOW TO TEACH I’d be looking at minimum 15 to 20x as much in coaching and qualifying up to 30x the level of detail. One of the things that has been invaluable is this knowledge of how to teach – and in the time of AI this doubly important. Finding sessions to run / long term structure of a plan is all over the internet. Understanding an individual to create the best environment, for them to produce the best version of themselves isn’t. And that for me is what separates an average coach from a good tor great coach. How can you look at what someone wants & help them reach their goal, not how you can take someone and force them into a system that you have designed, is inflexible and is not for bending. Whilst there are times for directed action, working like this exclusively to the detriment of the athletes voice is not helpful
The post I made on SoS
Whilst I have no experience of the American system, I do have quite solid experience of the UK system in terms of qualifying to coach within sports both before and after I qualified as a teacher.
What I have experience is the huge difference in expectation / time / contact hours / stringency between qualifying as both – where this becomes relevant is coaching is effectively teaching.
In terms of recognised fitness/coaching qualifications I’ve qualified as a Lvl 2 FA coach (some time ago now and something I don’t use), Lvl 3 Personal Trainer (2020-21) and a UK athletics coach with a focus on endurance (2020). So all well established, recognised qualifications that license / insure me to deliver content & qualify me as a professional who can then charge to deliver these services if I wish.
I qualified as a primary school teacher in 2010
To qualify as either LVL 2 football coach / Coach in running fitness a major part of whether you pass / fail is you are assessed based on delivering 1 session (maybe for an hour) coaching your fellow course members. Not athletes you would coach, not people you don’t know.
You also have to have 10-12 coached sessions signed off by a qualified coach at a club – however this then becomes a matter of trust as to whether these sessions have been delivered or not. Accepting that they are You also spend a couple of weekends learning and have the assessment. The process takes around 14-16 weeks & is around 30 hours total time.
PT – a lot of this moved online around COVID, there are a variety of courses to do, some in person and 2 in person assessments with someone you can choose to work with to illustrate how you train them and written long term plans that you would use. My memory is a little vague but it felt around 45-50 hours total work.
Having done these courses you then are qualified, this feels great and off coaches / trainers go to work. Some push to learn more, some don’t, however the vast majority are poorly prepared to teach.
To qualify as a teacher it takes 2 years (if you take the PGCE route). A year of study / teaching practice to become an ECT (early Career teacher) then a further year of paid teaching which you are regularly observed / assessed. The challenge for this second year is that you have to pass a standard. If you fail to hit this standard you can never teach and have to leave the profession.
In terms of contact hours in the first year I had 3 placements, where I would be in a school for maybe 4-6 weeks & deliver content to 30 children (supervised / observed) 5 days a week for 1-2 hours a day. I’d have to pass each term or not be allowed to continue.
Then in your first year as an ECT you have 5 days a week, 5.5 hours a day teaching, planning, delivering, being observed, etc then all the other work outside of actual delivery. 39 weeks of the year for this year is over 1000 contact hours of delivering content – with constant feedback / observation. If you’re lucky you have an excellent mentor to help steer you, develop you.
So on the one hand you have fitness professionals qualifying off 3 months (1 day a week for an hour) 30 hours total with courses, who work with a a small group and are assessed on how they deliver content to other members of the course. More often than not are passed as the desire to fail someone makes this pretty uncomfortable for a lot of assessors (I have had more than one UKA coach pass comment on how they heard the assessor say you can’t really fail the course, which totally undermines the qualification)
Versus teachers who spend over 2 years & 1 year of 5 days a week for 39 weeks, over 1000 hours delivering content (this after spending a year getting to the point where they are allowed to step into a classroom to do this) & being observed doing so, given constant feedback, learning what works and what doesn’t – often having the children they teach taking national standardised exams.
I clearly remember from when I did my UKA Coach in Running Fitness qualification how much I benefited from having taught for 10 years by then and just how much was missing that
A. Couldn’t be covered in that short time frame
B. People just didn’t have an awareness was missing as you don’t know what you don’t know.
What you then have is public faith in a qualified individual (where the fitness individual has had a very, very limited grounding) who also may have more confidence in their qualification than their knowledge belies. I’ve seen some excellent coaches (watching others teach / coach is the best way to learn I’ve found) but this pales in comparison to the amount of average / poor coaching I’ve heard about or seen first hand – mainly that comes from a lack of feedback / mentorship / experience or a direct result of the training given.
