S03E130: Dissecting CrossFit Coaching: Evaluations, Connections, Enthusiasm and Technique
What does it take to be a top-tier CrossFit coach? Join coaches David Syvertsen @davesy85 and Sam Rhee @bergencosmetic as they dissect this question. They explore the importance of feedback in sharpening a coach's skills, sharing anecdotes about their own experiences and the value of constructive criticism. They also discuss the value of written evaluations and alternative methods to foster communication and growth.
The conversation then takes a deep dive into the softer side of coaching. Traits like personality, connection capabilities, and a servant attitude take the spotlight, showcasing the significance of building strong relationships with athletes at all levels. The hosts also discuss the importance of coaches remembering their own journeys as athletes and being able to relate and support newcomers. They further shed light on the crucial aspect of maintaining enthusiasm and an active lifestyle, reinforcing the importance of living the CrossFit values.
In the final part of the discourse, the focus shifts to practical coaching techniques, especially for managing large classes. The duo highlights the importance of attention to detail, from time management to movement correction cues, in order to provide a seamless coaching experience. Wrapping up the discussion, the hosts emphasize the value of continuous feedback from both coaches and members as a powerful tool for collective growth and improvement.
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0:05 The Importance of Coach Evaluations
12:53 Personality and Connection in Coaching
19:52 The Importance of Enthusiasm in Coaching
25:59 Coaching Techniques and Evaluations
34:57 Coaching Tips and Attention to Detail
43:53 Evaluating and Improving Coaching Skills
52:40 The Value of Evaluation and Feedback
S03E130: Dissecting CrossFit Coaching: Evaluations, Connections, Enthusiasm and Technique
Speakers
David Syvertsen
Host
00:05
Hey everybody, welcome to the Herdfit Podcast with Dr Sam Rhee and myself, coach David Silverson. His podcast is aimed at helping anyone and everyone looking to enhance their healthy lifestyle through fitness, nutrition and, most importantly, mindset. Alright, welcome back to the Herdfit Podcast. I am Coach David Silverson. I'm here with my co-host, dr and Coach Sam Rhee. There's two guys here chatting, just calling it a podcast. It's called Pretty RC for the holiday party, so we're going to dive right into the topic today and we're getting two episodes recorded for the next two weeks, and then we have a few of us are headed off to Legends next Tuesday, wednesday, thursday, so we might not be back for a week after that. We'll try to get in, but today we're going to kind of cram two in, and the first one is actually something that I am taking on right now for the first time.
01:00
Probably a little too late on this. I probably should have done this in official fashion a few years ago, but this is the first time I'm writing actual coach evaluations for every coach. At CrossFit Bison there are 12 of us. Really there's about eight or nine of us that are on the every week schedule throughout the year and I kind of want to dive into without talking about them specifically. This is all like private confidential information. I would never throw them out under the bus or even praise them individually. I'll add respect for them. If there are any examples of good and bad, I'll just make sure it's one of us and so you guys can get a clear picture of what we're saying. But I want to talk about why I'm doing this for the first time and why I believe I should have done it a few years ago.
01:48
Sam, I know you're probably super nervous about your coaching review that you're going to get, but I will say this about Sam Sam has always asked for criticism. He doesn't really want to know what he did. Well, I'm sure he doesn't mind hearing it, but he always wants to know what he could do to get better at coaching, whether it's clock management, class management, parings, all this stuff. There's so much that goes into it, and Sam is a very well respected successful surgeon. He's been around a lot longer than me. He's much more educated than I am. So what is your response to someone like me, sam, giving you a sheet of paper and being like hey, sam, this is what you're good and bad at at your part-time job that you, if you wanted to, could leave tomorrow, and right off into the sunset. What's your initial thought on me giving you a review based on your performance as a coach?
Sam Rhee
Host
02:40
Why didn't you do this years ago? I think if you listened to any of the coaching or CrossFit, like Best Hour of their Day, those two would have been like dude, why haven't you? This is a given and I would say I am so used to being getting constructive criticism, let's put it that way and sometimes it was just absolutely brutal in the day when I was in training. Literally it would come with expletives and shaming and you name it. So I'm used to negative. I mean sorry, feedback and you think it helped. Big picture, I mean it doesn't have to come with all the expletives. I don't have any expletives, I don't have any expletives, all the name calling, but absolutely there's no way to get better.
03:36
And there is a surgeon, atul Gawande, who's from Harvard and he's written quite a bit and one of the biggest things that he talks about and he talks about surgery being just like being an airline pilot or many other professions, and one of the things is feedback and review. And you know me, I know when you start a job, like especially me, like I didn't know anything about coaching, I didn't know anything about teaching people how to move through space with barbells and gymnastics and cart All of these things. So my knowledge was hugely deficient and my application of teaching this was also really deficient. So I really needed as much feedback as possible to try to get better, and I know that's the only way to get better.
David Syvertsen
Host
04:27
Yeah. So you're at a certain point where you'll plateau in whatever profession, whatever performance you're undergoing, if you never get feedback. You can get better on your own, you can self-teach and self-critique, but if you never have an outside voice, you're simply just never probably going to get to your peak. Now, who is that voice matters, right. What is their agenda? If you will? That those are important factors to consider when someone is constructively criticizing, slash, evaluating your performance. So reason why I haven't done this in the past is a few things. No excuses here, just reasons, so you guys can understand where I'm coming from. One I have given feedback to every single coach you have over the years. It just hasn't been in written form, right, and it's just been like hey, I think you guys need to get better at this. Hey, dave, what can I do to speed this up? And I've also developed most of our coaches from interning right.
05:31
Every single one of our coaches Minus Mike and Chris and Ash, and Ash, I would even say, did intern for a while. Were interns here. Yeah, they were interns before they started. We set them out free and part of that intern process was we have a process for it. I don't want to dive into it. But there was a lot of critiquing there. One thing we never did that Hoboken did for us is we had to meet on weekends and teach each other how to do movements and we would critique each other. We didn't do that kind of stuff, but I did critique how Sam taught a beginner a sumo dead of hypo, or how they managed the class of 24 at 6 am prior to actually coaching the class themselves. So to me that was an evaluation and then, building from there, I did give certain critiques when something really stood out.
06:23
The problem with that is I would only offer advice or critique after something wrong happened, and I think part of evaluating a coach is that. But part of evaluating a coach and developing them is to prevent problems from occurring, and I think that's where there's an issue with the way I handled it. The other side of it is honestly I swept it under the rug a few times where I'm so busy here, I do so many jobs and wear so many hats, and then there's a life outside of here as well that I always just said, hey, I'll do it eventually, and it's one of those things. It's like how I am with my laundry. Oh, I'll put it away. Tonight, four days later, it's still there, and that's on me. I should have been better in that kind of leadership role where if I feel like something needs to be done to make the gym and coach better, you've got to find a way to get it on. It's got to be a priority and I did not make it a priority.
Sam Rhee
Host
07:18
And, to be fair, like I said, you did give a lot of verbal feedback and coaching and I would ask you what do you think about this or that? The other thing is, is that not to say that our coaches are so effing awesome or anything but compared to other boxes? But if you're not getting a ton of negative feedback from the athletes, from everyone else, then it's more like easy to let it go because you're not putting out fires. You already have like 500 fires that you've got to put out. So it's like, yes, should you be elevating your coaching level, like their competency and how they are? Absolutely. But if they're meeting a sort of a minimum required to keep classes going, that everyone is relatively happy and everything's going well and the gym is growing, it wasn't like you're like, oh my God, I have to do this or everything will fall apart, and so it does sometimes get pushed to the back a little bit.
David Syvertsen
Host
08:14
Yeah, it's more about being less proactive and more reactionary. So the reactions were never there because we haven't had a lot of complaints and, honestly, we have had a few over the years and they have been addressed. As recent as a, honestly, last week where something happened with a coach athlete, where human beings were not perfect and something did not get done the way it should have got done, and you go right away to that coach and say, hey, this is what you got. You always had the coaches back Like you're never I'm never going to throw a coach under the bus, to another, to a member especially, right, but that coach does get talked to. If something comes up and you deem it as okay, that's a problem.
08:52
My last reason again not excuse something that I've struggled with in leadership position here is I'm friends with our coaches and some better than others. I will say that but I do consider all of them are friends. I could give any one of them a call and ask for advice. I could expect a call from any one of them and be asked for advice, and those situations have come up over the years and one of the most difficult things in my position is trying to separate business, slash boss and the fact that we have a friendship, our wives are friends with each other's wives, all that stuff and we have a very tight knit group here and you don't want to fracture that. It can be really tough at times to play both sides. I don't think I've ever told any one of our coaches I'm your boss. I don't think that's ever come out of my mouth.
Sam Rhee
Host
09:48
Has it? I don't know. I will say this I think the number one thing for you and I think for most owners, is they have to trust their coaches Right Like trust over everything. It doesn't matter how and I've heard others high level CrossFit people say this if you can mold people into being good coaches for the most part, not everyone but if you can't trust them, then it doesn't matter how much knowledge they have, how much skill they have. At the end of the day and I've seen you work with and select coaches and it was really hugely on trust and who do you trust? Your friends? You really really have to trust these people and if you trust them, they're going to be your friends. So I think that it's hard, like you said, being a boss trusting people who are your friends and then sitting there and saying you suck at coaching, like coaching snatches or whatever it is.
David Syvertsen
Host
10:43
You need to be better at this Right.
Sam Rhee
Host
10:45
And I think also, that's also why it's incumbent on every box, every athlete, to go to your coaches, go to the owner and say listen, I wanna give feedback, because that's the only way, in a huge way, that we're gonna get better. And I've said this time and time again, I've posted it in our Facebook group Listen, you have to hold this accountable. Dave doesn't have eyes on everybody, 24, seven, right? You might think he does, yeah, but he doesn't, and so right. So if you're in a class and you're like you know what, I think this would be better if X, then that's where that goes to Dave. Dave is allowed to give feedback and then that's how we're gonna get better.
David Syvertsen
Host
11:26
Yeah, absolutely. And again, that's where I said at the holiday party which always get uncomfortable talking in front of crowds like that but we do. We're trying to make the place better. There's things that we're doing to this building to make the gym better in the next year. There are things that we're doing to our staff again to make the gym better, and this is gonna be part of what we do to make the gym better, and we told the coaches about it. They're all gonna get one before the new year, and to give them also a written document helps to look back on because we forget what things say. You know, sometimes things get lost in tone. You know where we can. Hey, I'm gonna look back on these reports in six months and be like hey, sam, did you fix X, y and Z or is this still a problem? Now you can be like all right, what's up, what's going on.
12:11
So I wrote down. I have six things. I didn't write down every single element to the coaching eval template that I'm using, but here are the five or six biggest ones that I think we all have a right to members as well to evaluate a coach, because I know members evaluate coaches all the time we get oh this is my favorite coach. Oh, I hate this coach's class. Even that to me it's not good. That's not an evaluation of a coach, because we don't really tailor the gym to any individual person. If we did, we'd be driving ourselves nuts. But I do think, especially a seasoned veteran and cross it, their words they do matter when it comes to evaluating a coach. But I wanna make sure you know what to evaluate.
12:53
First thing is by far the most important. It's the personality component, their level of care for others, their selflessness, their servant attitude and the connecting with a variety of people. So these are pretty basic elements that are not easy to find in people. But to me it's you have it or you don't. It's hard to fake it for a long time. It's hard to fake it in an environment like this.
13:17
The one I really wanna touch on is the servant attitude To me. I think a lot of people wanna become a coach because they wanna be in charge, they wanna do things their way, they do wanna help, they wanna be a dictator. I think the best coaches out there, they do know when to be the dictator, when to be loud and mis-set rules, all that blah, blah, blah stuff right. I think the best coaches are servant attitude. They're servant-based. You're there to serve people. Especially in a business like this where people are paying money to come here and work out. You're now kinda like their waiter at a restaurant. You're there to serve them, you're not there to only control them. Yes, you're trying to change their movement on a snatch or help them progress to a bar muscle for their first pull-up absolutely, but you're there to serve and I think that can be easily seen in a person. Do you view yourself as a when you're coaching Sam? Do you view yourself as serving? Thursday 5, 6 am.
Sam Rhee
Host
14:12
Yes, my goal is to provide the best experience for them that they can have, or help them get that, if I can, to help them get better, avoid injury, cause Thursdays by Thursday they're pretty many times and then right and to have a good time and feel good by the time they've gone and that's all my goals are. I mean, you control a lot of that you do as a coach, absolutely. You set the tone, how you connect with people. This is what CrossFit calls relationship building, and if you're not good at connecting about help, like knowing how to, like you said, serve people in that relationship building business, then you're not a good coach. And I've seen this in other boxes. I don't know if I've really seen it here in terms of issues, but I will say this that's why I don't love things that tend to put coaches above athletes.
15:11
Like we've always talked about, how do you get people to come in on time? Oh, 10 burpees every minute. You're late. Like I understand why people wanna do that as a coach, but I also understand listen, that means I'm a dictator and I'm like you get punished and I never liked that. You're my bitch. Go do 10 burpees, Right. So most of what I try to do as a coach is to make people feel comfortable and good, and if you wanna call that being a servant, that's fine. It's like I said. Like you said, as long as I'm not thinking about me, I'm thinking about how is my class doing, what is it gonna be like?
David Syvertsen
Host
15:50
That's important Connecting with a variety of people. This is something I look for. Everyone always says are you always looking for the next coach or looking for a coach, right? One thing I do observe is if someone I am looking at as a potential coach, how do they connect with not just their friends, but everyone in that gym? I always tell our coaches do not be the person that's coming here and you're always clinging to the same person every time.
16:16
It's a bad look and it sets a bad tone for everybody else. Right? Can you show up to a Saturday partner workout and literally be cool if, no matter who the coach is put with you? Like I text you at Mike Del Tor all the time on Friday nights. My bro, put me with whoever you want tomorrow, put me with someone new. I want that because I want the coach and I think I wanna evaluate this with coaches. Right?
16:40
How well do you connect with every single kind of person at that gym? Because, as from the outside perspective, you might look at this like white suburbia, like everyone's just the same person in Bergen County and Midland Park, ridgewood, glen Rock, white Cove. I think it's a very wide variety of walks of life in this gym in my opinion. Yeah, all right, a coach should be able to connect, find a way to connect, and that is a skill Not everyone has it. Yeah, that they can have a conversation with anyone in that gym and at some point find some common ground, be able to relate to them, ask the right questions, know where to push, where not to push, and that, to me, is an important personality trait to a coach.
Sam Rhee
Host
17:22
Yeah, it's interesting because you have a skill. I know you love really good athletes, you love people who perform really well, but you also have a good way of connecting with the newbies, the ones who are kind of scared to come into the gym, who are worried about can I even do a movement or even the scaled version of the movement. Am I gonna like? You actually like, and that's a skill that I think a great coach in terms of relationship building can do. It's not about wow, can you really connect to the dude who's snatching 225 and doing 50 bar muscle-ups unbroken it's? Can you work with the athlete who has, like, can't even go upside down for a scaled wall walk Right, you know who is afraid of a barbell Like that, especially since we have a lot of pretty new athletes. Like being an athlete who, like a coach who cares and understands those athletes. That's probably as important, if not more important, than connecting to your elite athletes in some ways.
David Syvertsen
Host
18:27
Coaches remember where you came from. Right, you know, like remember who and what you were when you came here as an athlete, because none of us came in doing muscle-ups and snatching and moving well right, none of us didn't know what to do. Like we have videos of all of us when we first started it. They were train wrecks and I think some coaches will lose track of that, you know, because they've been doing it eight years and, like this person can't even do a strict press. Like this person can't even hold a front rack. Like what do I do? You know you have to be able to rewind back to your early days of CrossFit and be able to like all right, I need to remember what I was like when I started and relate to this person Is that will mean the world to that person If you can really help them at the start. It's what we always say. It's hard to start at an established gym. It really is. Next part this is a big one for me. This has grown on me over the past year or two.
19:20
Do you love CrossFit coaches, and I'm saying the workouts? Do you research some of this stuff on your own? How much knowledge of CrossFit do you have? Do you know the landscape of CrossFit Like? Do you know who the CEO is? Do you know who they're hiring? Kayla Ha ha, ha ha ha.
19:41
Oh, but do you know? You know the open is starting February 29th or on February 26th. Are you gonna be like, oh, the open's coming up? You know I don't wanna put too much pressure on a coach on how many times do you work out per week, because there's a lot of reasons behind that. But I will say this a CrossFit coach should be working out with CrossFit classes if they're healthy period. That shouldn't be debatable.
20:10
What can be debated is how often and should you be doing stuff on your own? Can you be doing stuff on your own because of X, y and C? Right, we all have reasons. I do it sometimes as well, but I could say, since we began CrossFit Bison 2014, I would say 80% of my workouts have been with classes. Even when I had hired my own coach for $330 a month to be on my own program for competition reasons, I was still in classes three to four days per week and I want to set that example. Be that example that if you coach at Bison or coach at a gym that I'm with, that should be part of your weekly routine. If you're healthy, do you love CrossFit.
Sam Rhee
Host
20:52
You know. What's funny is I pulled a CrossFit journal article from an L4 and they list all the things that a great coach has, and love for CrossFit or enthusiasm was not in there, but it's probably one of the most important things that a coach needs and I would actually probably write CrossFit and say, hey, listen, when you write your next one, like you better include this, because you can have all the knowledge in the world. You can know how to apply it. You can know how to build relationships. You can know, you know how to manage. You know all the stuff that we're gonna be talking about.
21:24
But if you don't truly love what you're doing and thuzed about it, then all of that is a complete waste. And I have seen this professionally on the other side as surgeons. Like, if you don't love doing or any job, honestly, you've probably known people at your own job where People are really good at it, they're burnt out. They just don't really find enthusiasm in it anymore. And when you get to that point you're not. You know, as a surgeon You're really dangerous and as a coach, you need to step back and be like why is it that? I don't find that and it's it's not like it's an on and off switch. That's the problem. Like some people, you know, can find little things here and there, that kind of get them boosted up. Maybe it's their group or this or that or you know. But like, if that flame is flickering for you, it's a bad sign. It is, and I see that time and time again and I'm like, dude, I don't know what it is in your life or in anyone else's life where you don't have that enthusiasm, but you have to find it.
22:29
I've seen it in athletes. You see, in athletes we see, oh geez, they get burnt out. Yeah, we talk about burnout a lot all the time and and we see it in coaches and I'm like I listen, maybe it's because, like I've done CrossFit for a while but I'm a relatively new coach when it comes to stuff like that Mm-hmm, that is still like if I ever lose that like Anticipation for coaching or that like I really want to do a good class or or any of that, then I know like this isn't for me at right you know, like we have a coaches chat sometimes and we and someone will throw a cue out there that we saw and like it'll turn into a 20-minute conversation about pulling yourself underneath the barbell using the PVC on the J hooks right, and you know no, I'm not taking notes on who responds who doesn't again, because we should be on our phones last period and we talked about that often as well.
David Syvertsen
Host
23:21
But I do find it interesting that either in a chat like that or if I'm at a, at a competition and I'm around a bunch of people that coach, you know someone's like who's Hiller? Like? Well, I don't want to pump Hiller up right now because I don't always love what the content he content that he puts out there, but if you're into CrossFit you should know who Andrew Hiller is and you know you're welcome for that shout out If you, if you ever hear that you should know who Savanna's. You should know that Dave Castro has been Director of the games CEO fired. Now he's back. You know running the games again. You know Rx plus version of this. He gives the weekly updates every a 15 minute video on his YouTube channel and he really dives into a lot of detailed oriented stuff with CrossFit and I'm not gonna Tally who watches them, right, I don't think I've ever watched as a coach if they watch them.
24:12
But if you come to the gym and be like, hey, did you hear about x, y and z? Did you hear that Brooke Wells left proven and now he's with hard works pays off, that to me is like all right, you're in this stuff and like all right, dave, I don't like the sport, I don't want to pay attention to Andrew Hiller and Brooke Wells. All right, then come in and tell me, like you know hey, dave, there's an L1 in Waldwick in a couple weeks. Did you know that? Like, I was surfing and I was following these Instagram accounts? Or hey, I found this new queue for the for the deadlift. We should try to implement this next time. That, to me, says You're not only here for the couple hours that you're required to be. You're actually in a CrossFit lifestyle, and a part of the reason why I've hired every person on our staff was they were in it at that time.
25:00
The fire can go up and down based on your life situations, but, like Sam said, you should have the emotional intelligence to be able to tell that your light is flickering and it's on you To do one of two things Find it, light it back up. Find a way or be honest and upfront that the fire is not there anymore, because a lot of people are going to feed off your love for CrossFit or not every class. Yep, now we've just been talking about for about 15 minutes on this stuff, 10 minutes on it. We haven't even talked about coaching. You know, a coach needs to be eviled on how well they coach. I don't think it's the most important component.
25:39
We have some really good coaches on our staff right now that I think for the first year and myself included my first year I was awful at coaching classes. I was never on time, I had terrible warm-ups, I was not good at seeing problems with movement, right. That doesn't make you a good coach. Eventually you had to get there, but that doesn't make you a good coach, especially early on. But let's talk about some of these things.
26:00
All right, I could have done an entire podcast on just this, but I didn't want to make this the focus. This is just part of it. Here a couple things I want you to focus on with coaching. Again, members, you can kind of take notes on this as well. If you want to eval coach timeliness, that's sorry. Timeliness, starting and ending on time. Organization All right, just in terms of the format of the class, the equipment that's being used.
26:23
Logistics that's a huge thing. When you coach big classes, your cues right for for movement correction, warm-up how are you prepping people to get ready for a workout? And then intra-wad action All right, I want to touch on a few of these. All right to me. Timeliness, organization, logistics those all kind of tie together. Same. You coach big classes so I think you've actually developed Faster because you had to. You're being thrown into the fire. Yeah, I'll say this Because I coach all classes now morning, midday, night, morning to the hardest, the 5, 6 am, it's the hardest. Two classes of the day to coach Saturdays can be thrown into that mix as well. What was that like for you to go from Coaching at night right, that's when you started off. Very small classes mid days and then nights to coaching yeah, that probably the most intense two-hour period in our gym Group from this, from this from group management perspective.
Sam Rhee
Host
27:21
Right, group management skills are critical when you're when you have large classes. If you have like six or five, it it's it's exact. I mean, I have some margin to play with right and I love that, but me too I do. Yeah, but when you do 25 or 30 some days, like it's not so much about the knowledge application scene correcting, it's about can I provide a reasonable experience for 30 people and get them out on time? And it is. And I've gotten burnt.
27:47
Where I wasn't very good about time management, I you know, and regardless of how good I coached the workout or how I was correcting people Listen, if you don't get them out on time, they are pissed. The piss like in the next class is, and the next class is pissed because the parking situation is a nightmare coming in and out. So I have sat there several times and apologized to my classes like I'm really sorry it was not supposed to run this late, and then I cursed day for programming 25 minute work or 30 minute work out, 25 minute running workouts. People are still outside right with like five different equipment things and everyone's like with their toys. I'm like. So hey, I gave you a lie up this way, by the way, I love it.
28:24
Actually it's a good one and I wasn't gonna work out today, but I was like to silver call me. I was like, alright, I'm gonna do this one because it was a tempting one. I like it. But I will say this you do learn trial by fire is one of the best ways of learning, and when you have to figure out how to get 30 people moving, how do you get really efficient? You're like, okay, I'm not gonna use this PVC pipe if I can sub something else in, exactly. Or if I am gonna use the PVC pipe, I'm gonna use it for everything. I'm gonna use it for the warm-up, the demo, the stretching, everything. Like, like you start figuring out how to get. Like, I'm not gonna make them get all the toys first, because that's gonna be too long. Let's do this part, then they'll pull that stuff out.
David Syvertsen
Host
29:08
If you could save two minutes here, one minute there, it makes all the difference.
Sam Rhee
Host
29:12
So honestly, that comes down to experience. So the more you coach those classes, the better off you're gonna be. Yep.
David Syvertsen
Host
29:18
And I think the biggest red flag from an eval perspective, right, because that's what we're talking about how to eval a coach if you see them making the same mistakes, like week after week, month after month, year after year, even in some cases, despite the fact that they know they made that mistake, and now they're getting an eval from the head coach owner, whatever you wanna call them. That's the red flag, because you can't always but kinda get tried hard like good job, like if your 5A in class is constantly ending the one at 5.57, and we're telling you to try to be done by 5.50, 5.52 latest, right, and a year later it's 5.55. More often than not you need to make a change and if not, maybe you can't coach those classes. Right, because that's a really important element to the coaching the. What we have, a coach that does really well here. She'll coach a busy 4.15 sometimes like same thing, 25, 27 people. Right, she will get that person's zone prepped completely before the WAD starts like walk around the throw, abandon every zone, throw a PVC in every zone, because that shaves off five minutes. It's amazing. You tell a class to get a red band and PVC. It will take five minutes. It will Because they chat and you want that, but you take that out. So that's what being organized and forecasting. And that coach I know has been burned before where like train wreck schedule, really late, and she knew that that would take off a few minutes. So that's what you wanna see.
30:52
When you eval a coach, give a critique and now what do you do to fix the problem? Okay, in terms of actually coaching, like the warm up and like we have a podcast coming up with a guest about warming up I don't wanna get too deep into that, but here's two things. One thing, the intro, wad action. What do I even mean by that? Okay, if I gave myself an eval, this would be my biggest red flag that I need to fix is you have your phone out too much during a class.
31:23
I am not good at setting up my playlist prior to the class. I just kind of pick one and then, if I get to a song I don't like, I pull my phone out. I find a song, do that. Or you get to the end of the playlist. Now there's no music and people are freaking out like put that music on. So I'm like scrolling through something else is slow sometimes, so like freezes right.
31:43
That perception could be bad If someone's gonna look at me wanting a deadlift cue and I'm on my phone scrolling. You don't know what I'm doing. I might be looking at scores from last night's games, so, but that look is bad. And I can fix that by setting up the music prior too. I could cue 15 songs or get a playlist. That's hey, every song on here is good, like we're good to go. Don't even have to look at it once.
32:06
And then what happens when you have your phone out? Someone texts you. Hey, dave, I'm running late for the 6 am, so I start texting someone back. Or Ash will text me about Brock. Now I'm texting during a class.
32:17
Again, the perception is bad. I might be able to justify it, but I think the more you keep your phone in your pocket or even away from you while the WOD is going on I'm not gonna tell a coach especially with coaches that have families that you can't have your phone on you. But maybe the second the WOD starts, it's on the box and you're walking around the gym, and that's an example of an intra-WOD action. Another one would be are you sitting on a box chilling while they're suffering through an 18 minute workout. I've had athletes tell me that before that. Hey, my coach sat on the box all the time. Hey, maybe that coach just hurt, or maybe that coach is lazy, it's not feeling it today. That's an intra-WOD action. I think a coach should make a lap, should just be making laps the entire workout to make sure that they show the people hey, I'm looking at you, I'm paying attention to you, because that is what a lot of people want.
Sam Rhee
Host
33:11
Absolutely. I notice when a coach is coming up around me. I'm like, oh wait, am I?
David Syvertsen
Host
33:15
doing. Okay. No, the funniest thing I ever do. It's like clockwork, like if you walk around and you walk behind someone that's rowing and you know that they're noticing that you're walking, their pace goes from like 1,000 to 1,400.
Sam Rhee
Host
33:29
I'm like, oh, I was gonna take a little more rest before I pick out the barbell. I guess I'm gonna have to go a little faster. But yeah, I think what you do in the WOD is very important as a coach and I try to move around as much as I can. I try to see how everyone is moving. I think my biggest efficiency for sure and this is something that I wanna coach some smaller classes too, because the whole knowledge, application, teaching, seeing, correcting this is what CrossFit L1 and L2, is they hammer so hard like they don't care about so much of the other stuff, but it's like can you see faults? Can you correct them? And I have always had an issue with that and I'm still having issues and I need and listen. I don't. I understand. I'm giving myself a little grace because when you have 30 people, you're not gonna sit there and teach, see, correct all these people.
David Syvertsen
Host
34:26
And I'll take some of the responsibility too. Sam, if you had someone giving you evals more often, I think you'd be better right now as well, so I could take that as part of my responsibility.
Sam Rhee
Host
34:35
Right. So I know that as a deficiency. That's what I have and I need to practice on maybe smaller groups so that I can apply it better to a bigger group, but in a middle of a wide, it's a challenge for me to say, all right, I see a fault here and this is what I would suggest how to correct it. I work on it, but it's something that every coach. You shouldn't be looking at your phone. You shouldn't be texting, you should be scrolling, you shouldn't just be sitting on a box like. You should be applying what you know as a coach to help your athletes.
David Syvertsen
Host
35:07
The only time I would say the phone is okay is if you're videotaping someone For critiquing. We've gone back and forth with the debate. Should a coach be filming a class and then putting it on Instagram like I do that? Liz has done that a lot in the past. I think every coach has done this right. Where you film something in class, you put it on Instagram and that's debatable. That could probably be a topic for another time because you are trying to market the gym and run a business at the same time, and I do think people love seeing themselves on Instagram. They do. They really post that stuff. That's free marketing there. But that's the only time I really would say it's okay if they're videoing someone. That would be the time I really think it's only the only reason I have your phone out.
35:49
I'm gonna skip over the next one because it kind of ties into the next bullet point the attention to detail. And here we go the spelling of names, your music variety, the avoiding predictability to a point right. This is a problem for coaches that have coached for a long time. They are set in their ways. They want to do what works and it works and it provides a good product, a good experience, right. But I think it's a bad look for a coach that if, every time you squat, you're doing the same squat warmup, even if it's a warmup that works, all right, because I'll tell you what it probably doesn't work for everyone, so you should be switching it up and again.
36:34
I think it shows members that you are trying to find different ways without being over the top. I hate the coaches that do warmups that are just like so over the top and it just takes way too much away from the actual class. So don't try too hard on trying to impress the class with a fancy warmup. But I have coaches that do this at a really high level. They will find different ways to warm the coach. That's something I do. I don't know if I do this at a high level. Maybe I need to be valid. Maybe members, I get invalid all the time actually. So, but you can tell me like, hey, I wish you did something a little different. But if you're deadlifting and you're doing the same stretch for the same three weeks in a row, what if there's people in that class that don't get a benefit from that stretch? And it's gonna give this image perception that you're just kinda checking boxes here rather than finding ways to make yourself better.
Sam Rhee
Host
37:24
This is really important and I have found I've gotten into ruts too, like I like three major stretches that I always try to do and I'm like, okay, I really have to change it up sometime. Sometimes I'll go back to different things, but yes, if you imagine if you were the athlete and you had to come in and it was always the same, it's really, it stinks, and I feel like it's as a coach, it's incumbent on you to spend some time and think about the athlete experience. I know, for example, there are certain coaches who, oh right, we're doing these three movements double unders, cleans and box jump overs and so they pull out their teaching points for all three and they're always the same. But you know what it's this? This workout is really a box jump over workout. The cleans and the double unders really don't almost play any role. So why are you teaching so much about the double unders? Like, really focus on yeah, it sounds like you're a robot Right, right. Focus on the box, like, look at the like, literally look at the wad and figure out what the stimulus is and coach to that. Don't just coach the three movements, coach to the stimulus, which is why I do the workout a lot because it really helps a lot for me to understand what the stimulus is for that workout. And I have, like we have coaches at our gym who don't have to do the wad to figure out what the stimulus is. They know this is the sticking point right here.
38:52
You gotta really focus on the heavy cleans because that's a big deal on this workout. I'm not there, which is why I still I use that as a crutch, but I know when I get better, like I should be able to look at workouts, mix up my and you don't even always have to mix up your warmups, you just it's mixed up by definition that the workout is different. Like you might have done a heavy power clean workout last week in this one, but it's totally different. That was an EMOM. This one is like a you know, 10 minute like speed workout, like that. Your warmup is gonna be really different for that, just by virtue of the way the workout is Absolutely so you need to look at the workout, you need to coach to the workout and you need to custom the experience to that workout and if you just focus on that, you're gonna provide a much, much better experience for your athlete.
David Syvertsen
Host
39:44
Yep no, those are great words and really sound advice. I don't even have anything to add to it really. How about some other little things beyond coaching, though? I have a critique on a coach's report right now. You're spelling names wrong on the whiteboard. A lot of them Like in a matter of four classes, like 15 names, are spelled wrong, and it I don't think it would make someone angry.
40:08
I mean, I have had some people like come over and like I used to write Michelle Frusciato's name back in the early days with two L's and she would come and like, oh, it's one L, dave, it's one L, next, dave, it's one L. And then one time she came over and erased one of the L's, I think. From that point on I've never spelled her name wrong and you can get some grace with this. Like Colin spelled with a one L instead of two, cory does not have an E before the Y. Like you can get it wrong. But I'll tell you what was Zen Planner? Now, you should never get that thing right Because it's literally written on there. But we're programmed. We do this a lot. We have it in our head that it's spelled a certain way.
40:49
Here's another one that I think part of the reason why we write names on the whiteboard is to connect coach and athlete. Like I am writing that Sam is here today, you know he might not know that. You know an athlete might be like she doesn't even know I'm here, I'm just sitting in the corner in zone 15. And he hasn't even said anything to me. I wrote your name on this and I wrote your name and your score on the board. Right, there's some thought that goes into that. That means a lot to me and that's why, like we've been offered, like, hey, let's get a keyboard and type them, it'll look cleaner on a TV screen, it probably would, and it'd be a lot easier to erase that damn whiteboard. Right, you could just blank it. Blanks, bleed it.
41:28
But I like writing. Even with my bad handwriting and some coaches have really bad handwriting too that means something when you write their name down. But if you're writing that name incorrectly over and over, even if the person's not sensitive, it does send a little bit of a message. Right, we have at some point I think we had like seven lores in the gym yes, l-a-u-r-a, you can't write that on the board. I'm sorry, you can't. You gotta write Laura C, laura L, laura M, you have to. Right now we have two Rob SHSCH, there's Rob Schick and Rob Sher.
42:08
Yes so their name is Rob, and then I'm like all right, just write Rob SC. No, I can't write SCSCH, can't write that either. So the other day I'm writing Rob SCHE and then I'm writing Rob SCHI. Okay, I said that this is a tension to detail. Yes, it's not gonna make or break your ability as a coach, but I'll say this I'm the one doing the evals. I will notice every single time you do that Attention to detail is what the focus is here.
Sam Rhee
Host
42:41
Right, and I have made mistakes For a long time. I misspelled Jasmine's name, yeah, like Z S, but I now take the 10 seconds it takes to look at it. Ben, it is a two Ns, two Ts. I can't remember, I gotta look. It's always about attention to detail. That's why, and it's about a connection to the athletes. That's why, when I start the class, I test myself and I, I do.
David Syvertsen
Host
43:06
I'm the only one that does that anymore. I'm like afraid to do it.
Sam Rhee
Host
43:08
I need to because it's a test for me to see if I can remember and connect the name to every face, every time People appreciate that too.
David Syvertsen
Host
43:16
I've had people critique me and say, Dave, if you used to say her name, she'd no longer do Like. That matters to people.
Sam Rhee
Host
43:22
Yes, I don't always get it right. Sometimes I call Nick Squire something else once, but I don't care who cares about it. My brain was, yeah, like fogged a little bit. It was early, but yeah, I think, whatever way you can find to pay your attention to the details, like you said, like on your like as a boss, like when you look at me, you gotta say, is he really paying attention to the little things? And that's a little thing, that it means a lot to someone If you get their name wrong, like it literally almost means like you don't care about that. So you're right.
David Syvertsen
Host
43:53
And, lastly, this is something that's at the end of my eval for the coaches and it's not even hey, I'm going to evaluate this man, I'm spoiling this R&I, but whatever, this is the last part of the coaching you've got. That everyone's going to get from CrossFit Bison is if I came up to you at any point in class because I'm going to start doing that more is come to classes not to work out, just to watch you coach. And if I came up to you and asked, why did you do that? You should always have an answer. Every single thing you do, whether it's a cue, whether it's a warm up, whether it's how you explain to work out, whether why you put that person there and not there, you know how we always zone with pull-up bars and boxes and wall space. So, like we have some people that here's an example we have some people that do not go upside down.
Sam Rhee
Host
44:42
Yeah, which is fine.
David Syvertsen
Host
44:44
No, absolutely. If anything, I prefer it Right. A coach will sometimes in a big class. A coach will sometimes put that person in a zone with available wall space. There's a few zones in our gym that don't have ideal wall space. Yeah, you should always put that person in that zone that's not going to use the wall. Right, why waste it on someone that's not using the wall? Right? Right, like, why did you put that person there? Why did you partner these two people together? Those are things. There should be a why, and I challenge myself on this every single time I warm a class up, especially why I write the workout, which I'm unique, in that fashion. Right, so I'm the one programming. Why, why, why, ask yourself coaches, why am I doing this? And I actually think that will provide some eval self-eval for yourself.
Sam Rhee
Host
45:33
Yes, you should always have a purpose for everything that you do as a coach, Even if it's sometimes a little bit of a frivolous reason, like the way I program my music for the class. Sometimes it's just because I want to hear a song that I haven't heard for a while. So if you ask me why, it's like yeah, I just want to throw it up. I haven't heard 90 stuff. I figured some people might like it, so I'll throw it in there. It doesn't have to be a dead series.
David Syvertsen
Host
45:58
No, it doesn't have to be philosophical at all, but I would love that to be an answer. Why did you play this place today? I don't know. We have a lot of people that grew up in the 80s and 90s and they like this kind of stuff and, honestly, they should probably get a lot of positive feedback, probably. But again, you know what I think it is. Now that I'm just talking about it it makes.
46:15
One thing I want to trust about a coach is that they're thoughtful. They're putting a lot of thought into running that class. They're not just here checking the box, and that's probably the biggest thing that I'm talking about. I can really understand. That Is are you a thoughtful coach? Are you a thoughtful person? So that's going to sum up how to evaluate, how I'm evaluating our coaches at CrossFit Bison. There's a few things I want to talk about in terms of what to avoid when you're evaluating a coach, though, because I think that can be. There's only a couple here, but I think that's something just as important.
46:47
When you're evaluating a coach, you have to make sure that you're coming from an unbiased perspective. It's not just about what you want. It's not just about what you like. You have your favorite coaches, I have my favorite coaches, so do all of our members. That doesn't necessarily mean that coach is doing a good job. Really Like, if the best thing you could tell me about a coach is that they play your favorite music, that coach is probably not doing a good job. So that's why you can't always use every opinion. You can't weigh every opinion the same when it comes to evaluation of a coach, but you're unbiased. The style of the class, the music, the personal desire, all this stuff like the pull-up bars, the boxes, like who you're partnering with on Saturdays that can't be a part of your vow. Yes, you got to agree.
Sam Rhee
Host
47:31
Yeah, I cringe when people tell me, oh, I love your music so much because I'm like, if that's really how you're how, if I snatch them out Right, then that's the best part about me, then I'm a pretty sucky coach. But you're right, it's hard to eliminate your bias and you're never going to eliminate it completely. You picked all of the coaches. Yeah, you chose them based on your knowledge, but also your biases as well. So there was a certain sort of orientation, bent sort of group think that you were looking for when you picked your coaches. So you might emphasize one quality about coaching more than another. And so when you talk, like if someone else were to evaluate this whole group of coaches, they might evaluate and place more importance on another factor as opposed to this factor. Like if we had Adrian Bosman come in and evaluate the coaches, I bet you his evals would be totally different from your evals. Very true. And so, of course, you're going to be biased.
48:38
But you know what? This is your gym. Yeah, you're the owner, you run it. So if you own a gym, you have your coaches. Feel free to judge them and evaluate them based on what you think is important. It may be right, it may not be 100% right, but it's your business. Be consistent with it. That's the other thing you can't be like. Well, I really like Sam, so I know he's not so good at this. I'm going to let it slide, but this guy's been kind of not. He's been on my crap list so I'm going to just hammer him Right. So you're right, you've got to take some of that out of it and really and it's hard that's probably one of the hardest things to do.
David Syvertsen
Host
49:15
Yeah, and just like, in addition to that, the lack of ability to separate friendship and business. If you have a really hard time doing that and you're not aware of it, you probably should stay out of the E-file process, right? Like Sam just said, if you have a really good coach but you're not friends with them and you're hammering him Sorry, you're not confronted, you're hammering him but then you have a bad coach but you're really good friends with him and you let him or her kind of skate by, that's a red flag for the evaluator that you probably shouldn't be doing this. You probably should give this to an unbiased party. Someone else should be in charge of evaluing the coaches, because I'll put this out there before I give it to the coaches. Like there's no friendship included in these, like it's almost as if I don't know you guys. I'm just going to evaluate you guys and you have to try your best not to get personally offended by it. Right, are there? How often should a coach be eval?
Sam Rhee
Host
50:19
Ackerman and those guys say monthly. They said it depends. They also kind of split up between part-timers and full-timers.
David Syvertsen
Host
50:27
Part-time.
Sam Rhee
Host
50:28
Yeah. So I would say I thought that was a lot when I listened to them. I would say as often as you feel like you are helping them.
David Syvertsen
Host
50:41
I want to give them time to make corrections too. I think some of these issues that coaches have, it's not fair to expect them to fix it in some cases.
Sam Rhee
Host
50:50
I'm only coaching two, maybe five classes a week at top Right. So if I'm doing Saturday too, that's not that many reps. I need more reps before you can say OK, he's getting better or worse at this.
David Syvertsen
Host
51:02
So I've tallied up this is part of the eval I've tallied up how many coaches every coach has coached in 2023. And it's an interesting number. It's very interesting to me to see that and it helps me move forward with some of the stuff I need to get better at as running the staff. But I think, instead of saying time, like I was thinking twice a year, but if you want to say an amount of classes, I think every 40 classes, 40 to 50 classes, a coach should be eval. That's a great way of putting it. That gives. I mean that for a full-time coach would be monthly, yeah, close to monthly Part-time. That could take most of you part-timers. That would be about four to six months, yeah, yeah, you're right, and I think that gives you an objective like, hey, you've had 50 classes to fix this stuff and it's still a problem. We need to have a more serious conversation now.
Sam Rhee
Host
51:58
That also means the part-timers. It's going to be longer and harder for us to get better. Yeah, it is. We just don't have enough reps as the full-timers Yep, but on the other hand, the full-timers better and get better a lot faster, yeah.
David Syvertsen
Host
52:11
I could see a five to six week eval for a coach. Yeah, every five to six weeks, and it doesn't have to be extensive and long. It could just be like, hey, did you fix these two things, or is this still a problem? All right, thank you, guys. I hope you had a good time. Owners or head coaches coming from someone that hasn't done it in official fashion like this, don't make the mistake I made. I think you should get on it ASAP. Start a process right now. Moving into the new year, maybe put it on your new year's resolution list.
52:40
Coaches, don't be afraid to be evowed. It's probably, at some point, the only way you're going to be better as a coach. So if you truly want to get better as a coach, you have to get these evals and swallow some hard pills and be comfortable being uncomfortable and all of us are uncomfortable when we get critiqued, myself included. But CrossFit has taught us this you will never get better if you avoid discomfort.
53:05
And members, I think you guys have a voice in this. You guys are around the coaches more often than some of the owners and head coaches are. You see them in action. You see them at their best, you see them at their worst and if you are good at removing some of the stuff we said to avoid your personal bias, your friendships, I think there's a lot of value in your word. So if you have things to share confidential with the person that's doing the evaluating, I think your words should be heard and you shouldn't hesitate to reach out. All right, thank you guys. See you next week. Thank you everybody for taking the time out of your day to listen to the Herdfit podcast. Be on the lookout for next week's episode.
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