Walk the Talk… Or Not?

A Question Worth Asking Honestly

This is one of those questions that tends to generate strong opinions in S&C circles, usually more heat than light. On social media, in coaching communities, in conversations between practitioners, the answer often comes out fast and confident in one direction or the other.

The coach who doesn't train is a fraud. Or: what the coach looks like has nothing to do with how well they coach.

Both positions contain something true. Neither is the full picture. And I think the question deserves a more honest treatment than it usually gets.

The Case For Training

The most common argument goes something like this: a coach who doesn't do what they prescribe lacks a fundamental understanding of what their athletes are actually experiencing. There is a gap between writing a programme and knowing what it feels like to execute it. Between prescribing a heavy back squat session two days before a match and understanding in your body what that residual fatigue actually does to you on game day. Practical experience of training closes that gap in ways that reading and observation simply cannot.

There is also the question of perspective. Having trained seriously, having pushed through a heavy block of work, having experienced the frustration of a stalled lift or the satisfaction of a personal best, gives a coach a frame of reference that is genuinely useful when working with athletes. It is not essential, but it helps.

And then there is something more superficial, but in my experience, more real than people tend to admit: in rugby especially, athletes pay attention to what their S&C coach looks like. They notice whether the person programming their sessions carries themselves like someone who has done serious physical work. It is not the most sophisticated form of credibility, but it is a real one. A coach who looks physically capable, who looks strong, who carries the weight of someone who has earned it, starts from a different place in the room than one who does not. That matters in a sport where physicality is central to everything.

These are not bad arguments. I do not think any of them are entirely wrong.

Where It Gets More Complicated

The problem starts when we assume that training means one specific thing.

When people say a coach should train, what they almost always picture is resistance training. Lifting. Bodybuilding, powerlifting, something that produces visible muscle mass and the kind of physique that reads as physically capable to a rugby player or a football team. But training is a far broader category than that.

A coach might be a serious endurance athlete. Competitive runner, cyclist, triathlete. Their body will not look the way a rugby player expects, but their understanding of effort, fatigue, adaptation, and periodisation may be exceptional. A coach might compete at a high level in a weight-class sport, strong relative to their size but not carrying the frame that reads as physically impressive to a contact sport environment. A coach might play football at a good level, highly aerobic, extremely mobile, technically excellent, but not visually built in the way that signals strength to a front row forward.

Basing an assessment of coaching competence on the physical appearance of the coach is, when you examine it clearly, a fairly unreliable method. It tells you something about their specific training history. It tells you almost nothing about whether they can coach.

What Actually Makes the Difference

Here is where I think the conversation needs to go.

The qualities that determine coaching effectiveness day to day are not primarily physical. They are methodological and relational.

Does the coach use the right systems? Do they understand how to structure a training week relative to the competitive calendar? Can they read a session in real time and adjust? Do they know when to push and when to back off? Can they build an environment where athletes want to work hard, where the energy is right, where there is genuine buy-in to the process?

These are the variables that drive adaptation across a squad over a season. And none of them are determined by what the coach can lift or what they look like.

The analogy I keep coming back to is the former elite athlete who moves into coaching on the basis of their playing experience alone. This happens constantly across sport. The assumption is that having performed at a high level gives you the understanding and the authority to coach at that level. Sometimes it does. Often it does not. Because performing and coaching are genuinely different skills. The ability to execute a skill or sustain a training load at an elite level gives you a frame of reference. It does not give you the ability to observe, communicate, correct, motivate, and manage a group of different people across a long season.

The coach who cannot coach is not made competent by their personal athletic history. And the coach who can coach is not made incompetent by the absence of one.

The One Thing That Does Matter

Having said all of that, I do think there is one version of this question where the answer becomes less ambiguous.

If a coach has no relationship with training at all, that is worth examining. Not because their body composition reflects their competence, but because a genuine disinterest in physical training raises a real question about their connection to the discipline.

Strength and conditioning is a profession that demands continuous learning. New research, evolving methodologies, ongoing professional development. It is also a profession built around the experience of physical effort, recovery, and adaptation. If someone has no personal curiosity about that process, no appetite to explore it in their own life in some form, I think that absence says something about their relationship with the work itself.

You do not have to be a competitive powerlifter to coach strength effectively. You do not have to look a certain way to command respect in a professional environment. But some form of engagement with physical training, some genuine love of the process, seems like a reasonable baseline for someone who is asking athletes to dedicate significant parts of their lives to it.

The coach who trains badly but loves training is, in my view, better positioned than the coach who could train well but simply does not care to.

Where This Leaves Us

Does a strength and conditioning coach need to train to be a good coach? No, not in the narrow sense of looking a specific way or hitting specific numbers. Physical appearance is a poor proxy for coaching quality. Former athlete status is a poor proxy for coaching quality.

What matters is whether they can build the right systems, apply them consistently, and create an environment where athletes develop across a full season.

But somewhere underneath all of that, there should be a genuine love of the discipline. A curiosity about training, a desire to keep learning, and some form of lived connection to the process they are asking their athletes to go through every week.

That is not a hard threshold to meet. But it is a real one.