anyone ever think about getting into personal training for this type of stuff? i've considered it, but it seems like once you teach the basics (squats,deadlifts,sprinting,jumping, etc) theres not much to it, just a long grind. seems like if i wanted to train a client for an extended period of time, i'd have to hold back and draw the process out to try and make the training look more complicated than it actually is lol.
ya well there's a few types of clients.. the first type who will pay you just to teach them the basics etc.. and the second type (athletes) who will pay you to plan out all of their training, make adjustments based on their life/work/competitions/fatigue/adaptations etc.
making it look more complicated than it actually is, might get a few people interested initially.. but, in the end people want results. So keeping things simple/clean/free-of-fluff&filler is the best way to go, IMHO.
not sure how you should go about starting out.. some people get degrees, degrees + certs, certs alone, or none of that -> each can be successful or not.
I mostly enjoyed working in s&c .. It feels absolutely amazing when you have clients/athletes show up day in day out & you have direct control of their training (and possibly nutrition), and then you see them morph over time, peak for competition/a season, achieve their goals etc.. We experience it here on the forum at times, but it would be extra-enjoyable if we were all training together, celebrating PR's, amp'n up for workouts/sessions etc. It can also be very stressful.. ESPECIALLY when athletes are getting "worse" due to some concentrated loads/volume/intensity, and they start to question your programming. When they start bouncing back from it and supercompensate, then they understand -> and won't bug you much ever again about it.. but initially it can be frustrating. But ya it's just stressful regardless, IMHO. I mean people put alot of trust in you - and you're dealing with the human body + their lifestyle + their mentality .. it's not like a computer where I can just program something, run it 10000 billion times and it does the same thing.. So in my experience there's definitely some added stress to trying to "program athletes". Also, it usually means so much to your clients.. lots of these goals have been life long dreams - and in many cases, dreams that people they've interacted with have said will never happen etc.. So ya it can be extremely fulfilling, daunting, stressful, etc.
I didn't enjoy training people who didn't want to train though.. It's one thing that bothered me alot. I experienced it in 2 internships and when I worked as an s&c coach for Memorial Sportscenter. We trained kids, high school athletes, college, pro etc.. At every level, there were people who just "showed up to show up". Or in the case of kindergarten through high school, kids who showed up because their parents paid. I dno, personally it was just annoying and I didn't like it. That's one thing that caused me to drift away from the field a bit. On several occasions I actually tried to see if I could ban certain kids from sessions, or move them into their own knucklehead session with all of the other knuckleheads who didn't care.. Having to train 90% "go get it types" and 10% "knuckleheads" in one session is beyond frustrating... It also does a disservice to the go-get-it types. And FWIW, it's not only non-pros.. I've dealt with pros who didn't want to train either - mostly during my first internship.
Then I caught the programming bug again and went in that direction.