So You Wanna be a Strength Coach?
I’m going to preface this article with the fact that I LOVE what I do for a living. I wouldn’t change it for a second and I’m grateful for the opportunities I’ve had in life because of this industry. It’s taken me all over the country and world, I’ve met some of the most amazing people and experienced things I otherwise would have never had the opportunity to if I were not a strength and conditioning coach. From Stanley Cups, to Super Bowls, to World Series, to World Championships and even Olympic Gold, I’ve had the opportunity to work with some of the best athletes ON THE PLANET. While this may come across as a long-winded bitch session, it’s not. I feel like students are being sold a false bill of goods as far as what this field has to offer and I’d like to use my story as a cautionary tale when it comes to deciding to dump your life into this field.
Exercise Science, Athletic Training, Kinesiology, Physical Education, Etc
There’s roughly 30,000 graduates from programs like the ones above across the country every single year. While they’re not all destined to become strength and conditioning coaches, many of them think of it as a possibility for their future. There’s paths from these majors that can lead to cardiac rehab, jobs in the clinical setting, becoming a PE teacher, being a personal trainer, going on to become a DPT, or even a physician. Not all exercise science degree seekers envision their lives with strength and conditioning being at the pinnacle, and hopefully after reading this blog there will be even less.
Now that may sound harsh, or like I don’t find value in what I do for a living but that couldn’t be further from the truth. I just think that students are being sold a bill of goods when it comes to potential within this field and there aren’t enough vocal coaches out there being honest and up front with the next wave of strength coaches coming into the field. They’ll intern at facilities that do NFL Combine prep, MLB Spring Training prep, or maybe they’re even fortunate enough to land with a professional team and they think the entire field is like this. It’s not and it’s a sad fact that the overwhelming majority of these future coaches will end up at facilities as contracted performance coaches working off commission, personal trainers working off commission, or at worst completely unemployed.
I remember my first experience as an intern at a place called the Athletes Compound located inside of Saddlebrook Resort in Wesley Chapel, FL. I was making minimum wage and working with CAA baseball players and prospects, ATP to 10 athletes, NFL Combine prep (we had three first rounders that year) and some youth athletes. I remember being in the gym at one point coaching three athletes who’s yearly salaries combined for over $40M and wondering how much money the director was pulling in every year. I mean it had to be a lot right? He’s in charge of the off the field preparation for multi-millionaires. A few weeks into my internship I was helping the director take some stuff out to his car at the end of the day and assuming it was one of the over the top G Wagons, Lexuses, Bentleys or Range Rovers in the parking lot and as we walked deeper into the lot I realized we were walking past all of those cars and towards what looked like a 1995 Infinity with a bunch of body damage that hadn’t been taken care of. It was his. I was really surprised, but chalked it up to the fact that he was probably smart enough to not dump a bunch of cash into the worst possible “investment” that is a brand new car. Come to find out a few weeks later that he was only pulling down like $55k a year. He had been in the field for a decade (he was actually an intern working with my hockey team at IMG back in 2002), had his masters degree and brought in athletes like Brad Richards, Derek Jeter, Derrick Brooks, Booger McFarland and the list goes on. This was my first insight into how terrible pay is in this field. His name alone brought in about $500k over the first 6 weeks of the year, but that didn’t matter because he was actually being paid OVER the going rate for a director in this industry at the time.
This isn’t an isolated case either, this is the norm in this field. You put in ungodly hours into your education and experiences and those hours are dwarfed by the hours you’ll put into your work once you get working in this field. You’ll put yourself into debt just holding on to the fact that it’ll get better one day but for the vast majority of coaches, it won’t.
I Hope You’re Ready to be Poor for a While!
There’s a saying in this industry and it goes:
“The best strength coaches are often the ones who can be broke for the longest”
While it’s said tongue in cheek, there’s some real truth to this. There’s very little money in this field especially starting out. Most entry level positions in this field pay a whopping $20-30,000 per year and that’s if you’re lucky enough to even get your foot in the door. Most entry level positions require either 2 years of experience or a masters degree for the privilege of working 70-80 hours per week and making $25K on average. If you look at these requirements you’ll understand that you’re going to have to either intern (work for free) for two years, or spend another 2 years and $40-80,000 getting a masters degree. But even with a masters degree you’re going to need experience coaching on the floor or your resume won’t even get a second look. Any way you look at this, just getting your foot in the door is going to cost you a serious amount of money and time.
It’s a sad fact that the majority of people who start out in this field don’t last more than 5 years. My internship class at the University of South Florida had 15 aspiring strength and conditioning coaches. There are three of us left. THREE! So there’s three of us that are either incredibly stubborn and don’t give up on things or we’re just complete dummies who didn’t know what else to do. Either way that you look at it, this field can and will chew you up and spit you out if you’re not ready to suffer financially for a few years, almost assuredly longer.
After you get your foot in the door in the field be prepared to work for super low wages for at least 2-5 years and also be prepared to make lateral moves in an effort to increase your pay. My first six years in this field I worked at 5 different facilities. There’s very little upward movement in-house in this industry. Director turnover is pretty low most of the time, leading to you either having to take a better position elsewhere, or leave the industry all together if you want to make enough money to pay your bills. And here’s a dirty little secret: when there actually is director turnover get ready to lose your job instead of being offered the director position. There’s gonna be a new director coming in and they’re going to want their own people with them. I’ve known very few strength coaches who can seamlessly transition from an old director to a new one, so make sure that resume is consistently up to date and you’re continuing to network every chance you get.
If you wanna be in this field, get ready to be poor and in debt for a good while, possibly the entirety of your career however long it lasts. The average pay for ALL fitness professionals in the US is roughly $35,000 per year. With that being the average, understand that the vast majority of coaches are making less than this. While doing what you love for a living is incredibly rewarding, just remember that you’ve got stuff like rent/mortgage, student loans, car notes, insurance and food to pay for. And that’s all before you do any hobbies, which you probably don’t have time for because you’re working so much.
If you’ve got a little bit of time on your hands go do a search for strength and conditioning jobs on indeed or some other job board. While there’s a few jobs out there with tactical strength and conditioning that are paying well thanks to the new H2F program, the vast majority of those jobs will say “$15-30 per hour” or “20-25k per year”. $30 an hour sounds pretty ok right? I mean that comes out to about 62k per year and for most people that’s plenty to get by with and even some left over at the end to invest. But what you have to understand is that’s $15-30 an hour for the sessions you coach and honestly I’ve never been at a facility where we’ve had 8 sessions per day to run for each coach contracted there. You’re probably working 2-3 sessions per day at this rate (and it’s NEVER the higher rate it’s usually around $20), and they’re spread out between 5am in the morning and 6 or 7pm in the evening. So now you’ve boxed yourself into being at this facility from 4:30 in the morning until 7:30/8 in the evening and you’re doing it for a grand total of $40-60 a day. Do the math here and you’ll realize that’s no longer $15-30 an hour, but roughly $4.30 per hour give or take. These facilities will tell you “but you can make up to 60% of your private training throughout the day” and you’re probably sitting there thinking you could make pretty solid money doing that. BUT here’s the thing, you’re boxed into coaching classes at $15-30 an hour during prime time slots. Those are the hours that people want to and can train, and instead of making 60% of the $80-120 private session, you’re making $15-30. And I have never in the history of my entire 13 year career had a 1pm client during the school year (summers are a little bit different), and filling in the gaps between 10am and 3/4pm are damn near impossible. On top of that, the facility you’re working at more than likely isn’t going to be marketing for you to have clients at their facility so that’s going to be 100% on you. If you’re looking to get clients plan on spending about $20-30 A DAY in digital marketing via social media and google to see any kind of return. You’ll also need either a pretty big social media presence or a website for people to take you seriously and that’s going to cost you as well. Now doing this when you’re only making $40-60 a day makes it impossible to pay your bills, as if it wasn’t already impossible when you’re only pulling in about $1200 a month. Some facilities will do this for you because they understand that they’re going to be making 40-60% on your private training, but the vast majority of gyms don’t have that kind of foresight or they’re operating on such small margins that they legitimately can’t afford to do it.
Sometimes you may be offered incredibly fun and awesome roles in this field. Working with USA Hockey was an amazing experience and looks great on a resume. During their Olympic prep I was paid $50 A DAY. PER DAY. During camps and tournaments it was a little bit better at $100 a day, but still divide all that up by 15 hour days and realize that if you’re a contract coach being paid commission at your regular job it won’t make financial sense to take off to do these things. I was incredibly fortunate to have an employer who let me use PTO for these trips and camps because it would help us sell our programs back home but many of the other coaches I worked with weren’t that fortunate.
Another aspect of this is if you’re lucky enough to snag a position that pays a salary, you won’t have to live in a world of projections as far as your income goes but you’ll absolutely be whored out throughout the day while you’re there. You’ll probably be working 6-7 days per week, and more than likely 60-80 hours a week. My first paid gig in this field paid me $25,000 a year to work “full time”. I worked 6 days a week, from 6am until 8pm. I commuted from Brandon to Lakewood Ranch at roughly an hour each way (my burden, not my employers) so my day was 5am until about 9pm and Saturdays were 7am until 1pm but throw in the drive and it was 6am til 2pm. My “short” day was 8 hours. Thats 88 hours per week with 12 hours of commuting thrown in the mix and if you do the math that’s about $5.40 an hour, take away the commute and it’s still $6.33 an hour. FAR from the $15-30 an hour the job was posted at. To be fair after the Combine prep season was over my employer upped my pay to 30k, and I was able to negotiate a “bonus” for the busy summers that paid out at $7,000 more or less depending on how good of a summer we had, but that only happened because I pressed for it and my boss was actually a really good dude who understood that I did more than he originally expected of me.
Just realize that while there is an incredibly high ceiling in this industry as far as pay goes, getting to that ceiling is a combination of toughing out years or even decades of trash pay and brutal hours coupled with a good amount of luck in most instances.
You’re Gonna Work in the Show? Probably Not
I always wanted to work in the team setting whether it was at the university level or in professional sports. It’s why 99% of us get into this field in the first place. I wanted to work at a Power Five or in the NHL but the facts just don’t support that goal. There’s only 65 Power Five schools in this country and 151 professional sports teams in all of North America. There’s a couple things to consider when understanding how badly the deck is stacked against you in this endeavor:
What are the odds that one of these teams is looking for a director of strength and conditioning in any given year? If they all had turnover every single year, there would still only be 216 openings yearly for these positions. There’s roughly 30,000 exercise science/exercise physiology/athletic training/physical education graduates per year, EVERY year. What are the odds that you’re better than those 30,000 new grads PLUS the current 60,000 (number of NSCA members, this number is substantially higher as not everyone is a member) certified strength and conditioning professionals?
What are the odds that your resume even gets a look? Most of these positions are filled before they ever even open up for resumes with someone the coach already knows and trusts. Read the job descriptions very carefully when they’re posted, they are 90% of the time filled with verbiage directed toward one individual’s exact experience/credentials that they’ve already picked.
How much networking have you done? For the jobs that aren’t hand picked these sports coaches, athletic directors and general managers tend to lean on their colleagues for references. Let’s say you have everything this team wants in a strength coach; the experience, certifications and maybe you even played the sport in college giving you one more leg up over the competition. If you don’t know them or the guys they know GOOD LUCK getting hired never mind even getting to sit down for an interview.
While I encourage you to dream and goal set as big as humanly possible, please please go into this industry with an understanding of how high this mountain is going to be before you put all your eggs in the Power Five university/professional team setting basket.
We All Live in the Private Setting
My favorite positions in this field have been in the team setting. My time with the Women’s National Hockey team was easily the most rewarding time I’ve had in this field and my time at USF with their football program was, while incredibly intense, incredibly rewarding to be able to see your product in real time on the field of play every week. And guess what? My time with USA Hockey was a product of being in the right place at the right time with the right experience under my belt. I managed to turn that luck into a two year gig and helped coach them to winning a ton of hardware, but if I hadn’t been in the right place at the right time there’s virtually zero chance I would have gotten offered that job (see number 3 above).
The fact is that you’re almost assuredly going to end up in the private setting. Whether that’s in cardiac rehab, personal training or working with youth and professional athletes is up to you. I took my first job out of school personal training at Lifestyle Family Fitness in Hyde Park here in Tampa, FL. Not exactly where I wanted to be but I had to start making money and as stated above there aren’t a ton of open positions in this field at any given time so personal training is where I ended up. At this place I was one of 22 personal trainers who were all trying to cut each other’s legs out from underneath one another because this was a commission based job. If you don’t sell, you don’t eat so it was pretty cutthroat. I’m just not that kind of guy so I realized super quick that I’m not cut out for the globogyms and left after being there for about four months. I ended up working in a warehouse after that because again, there just aren’t that many jobs out there in this field and I had bills to pay and hands to occupy. I had over two years of interning and a degree/certifications under my belt, but I just couldn’t find a home. After applying to what seemed like 50 university positions and even some professional teams I ended up taking a job down in Lakewood Ranch at a place called Athletic Edge in the private setting. Ever since then I’ve been in the private setting.
Here’s a little tidbit that you don’t learn in school: if you choose the private sector you’re boxed into it. There’s very few universities who will hire a private sector strength and conditioning coach and in choosing to be in the private setting I signed my death certificate for any open positions at the university level. It is what it is, but please understand that when you take your first position in the private sector, you’re essentially stuck there. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible, but there are a lot of things that go on at the University level that you don’t deal with in the private sector and while training is training, the two sectors in this industry are incredibly different and athletic directors and football coaches understand that.
DO NOT WASTE YOUR TIME GETTING A MASTERS IN EX PHYS!
I don’t understand why in this field people don’t think it’s a good idea to diversify yourself. If your undergraduate degree is in exercise science, why then hell would you go get a masters in exercise physiology? You’ve got the basis of knowledge from your undergraduate degree and now it’s up to you to go learn on the floor as a coach. Getting a redundant degree is stupid and a waste of your money and more importantly your time. An exercise physiology degree, no matter where your concentration is, to go into a field where you’ll start out at roughly 20k/year is shortsighted and STUPID. While I’m all about continuing to learn and grow not only as a coach but as a person, you already have a piece of paper that says you’re proficient enough to be hired and getting another 2 year degree and saddling yourself with another $40-80,000 worth of debt makes zero sense and you will be kicking yourself in the ass daily when you realize that extra 80k worth of debt allows you to pull in another 2k per year starting off. That extra money isn’t even enough to service the debt you accumulated getting your masters degree let alone pay it off over time.
Diversify yourself. Go get an MBA, get a masters in psychology, take the entrepreneur tracks that some universities offer or get a masters in sports management. The money in this field is in management and gym ownership, not in coaching. Unless you’re wanting to teach at the university level, spend that time getting a masters degree in something that you can fall back on or utilize on your track to management in this industry. DO NOT waste your time getting an ex pays degree, just don’t do it. It is in no way shape or form worth it. Your clientele won’t give a damn that you’ve got your masters, in all honesty most of them probably assume you didn’t even go to college due to the stigma personal training has around it.
Enter This Industry at Your Own Peril
All throughout my career I’ve had interns and I’ve been the internship coordinator every step along the way at the facilities I’ve worked at. I tell every single one to keep this as a hobby and find another way to support yourself because this field just won’t provide you with a lifestyle that’s worth living most of the time in all honesty. We’ve got to stop asking kids what they want to do for a living and instead ask them what kind of lifestyle they want to live. Your job is hopefully only 40 hours of your week and it’s great to be happy doing what you enjoy during that time, but don’t forget that there’s 168 hours in a week and your work isn’t even 25% of that time. You’re better off hating that 25% and loving that other 75%!
I’ll finish off this little rant of mine with this: I love what I do for a living, I love being able to impact kids and people every single day. It’s incredibly rewarding, but there’s been plenty of times that I couldn’t pay my bills, couldn’t really afford to eat, got my cable or electricity shut off, had an unexpected bill come up and had to decide if I would pay it or eat for the week, etc. It’s taken me 13 years to get to a place where I have my own facility and I only have that because someone saw that I was capable of doing this and making a good living doing it. This field can be awesome, but that’s only if you’re strong enough to get through the journey that is starting off in this field and even then there’s no guarantee that all of that grinding will pay off.
