5 Lessons Learned from Coaching an Untrained Lifter for a Year
About a year ago, my girlfriend told me she wanted to start lifting, and for me to coach her. I’ve lifted seriously since about 2021 and have learned a lot, but coaching someone else has taught me new things and highlighted the importance of some things I already knew.
1.) “The day you started lifting was the day you became forever small because you will never be as big as you want to be.”
I’m not sure if there is a more accurate quote about the gym. Personally, I can remember starting in the gym (120 pounds at 5’8, ~20% body fat) thinking I just want to tone up, have a flat stomach, and gain some strength. Now, leaner and 50 pounds heavier, I have way more substantial goals and sometimes feel smaller than when I started.
I would say my girlfriend made significant gains in her first year of training, way more size and strength than I did in my first year. However, the same phenomenon happened with her. Sometimes she’d say I feel like I’m not making progress, I look small, I’m looking chunky, etc. even though she was making substantial and obvious visual progress.
My perspective on this part of lifting is to just accept that it’s a part of things and that you’ll have days where you feel like Ronnie Coleman and other days you’ll feel like tiny Tim. I think you just have to accept this and just understand what’s going on. Practically, I think it’s a good idea to take progress pictures and measurements to keep yourself grounded and to remember where you came from and (hopefully) see that you’re progressing. This has always helped me, and it helped my girlfriend too.
2.) Training Momentum is the most important thing for progress
First, I would define training momentum as the culmination of how your entire program synergizes together to promote consistent and reliable progress that builds upon itself over time to where you can stack training session on training session for months on end without significant plateaus or setbacks.
Practically speaking this is having a system in place that allows you to consistently make progress. This means things can’t be too hard, but they can’t be too easy. Also, this means you can’t run yourself in the ground or get snapped up. Additionally, you can’t be too rigid with things because inevitably you’ll need to adjust things on the fly and listen to your body to avoid injury and plateau. I believe this is much more of an art than a science and one must learn their body and hone in their instincts over time.
I really picked up on this when my girlfriend’s progress got significantly derailed a few times by getting sick or get tweaked because of her job. This made me think back to when I made the most progress, which was a period of time where I had pretty much uninterrupted progress for 2 years straight, which wasn’t derailed by cutting or getting injured.
3.) If you want something to grow maximally, train it directly.
I know this may seem obvious when you say it out loud, but sometimes overly minimalistic approaches can easily trap you. My girlfriend’s top priority was to grow her glutes. I thought since she’s a beginner, she’ll be fine with a minimalistic approach of just training legs with fundamental movement patterns. We used this approach for the first 6 months. Her glutes definitely got bigger, and her legs got way bigger. However, this minimalistic approach slowed down her glute progress. Once she introduced a hip thrust, her glutes made way more progress. So train to your goals and if you want something to grow maximally, you need to directly target it. Don’t be lazy or minimalistic towards goals that matter to you.
4.) Individual variance exists
Before training someone else, I didn’t know how different individual variance could be. For instance, I’ve always been able to train through any sickness or being generally tired. It’s never been something to affect my gym performance. On the other hand, if my girlfriend is under the weather or under slept, then you can expect her number of reps to be cut in half for most exercises. Also, due to lower ability to recover in general and difference in leverages, I had to build her program more around rest, recovery, and not overly taxing her system in comparison to how I program for myself.
With all this said, I think one should take with a grain of salt what others recommend. I believe it would be better to take recommendations as a good baseline and just learn from how your body responds and feels and adjust accordingly, rather than taking what some guru or study said as gospel.
5.) There’s a big difference between training knowledge and wisdom.
I would say training knowledge is knowing an exercise trains certain muscles, how many sets to do, progressive overload, etc. but training wisdom is the ability to synergize all these things into a system that actually works in the real world for YOU. This means trying things out and learning what works for you and what doesn’t. Great training wisdom takes years in the trenches, figuring things out and learning. No amount of watching YouTube videos, reading studies, or listening to the biggest guy in the gym is going to teach you training wisdom. Although you can find great baselines of information, you must apply it to yourself and tweak your training system to yourself as you learn along the way.
The reason I say this is because my girlfriend after 1 year of training absolutely mogs myself after 1 year of training in both muscularity and strength. This is because although I had good enough training knowledge back then, I had no training wisdom which was self-evident by my lackluster progress. I could parrot popular influencers with training knowledge like train hard, progressive overload, and what exercises are supposed to be good. However, I only started making respectable gains when I stopped listening to everyone else and looked internally to develop my own system based on my personal experience and learning by trial and error.