Personal Trainers vs Strength & Conditioning Coaches
While these two roles may sound similar, they are different in their duties and requirements. In this article, I discuss both the personal trainer and strength & conditioning coach professions and offer you insight to determine who works with your child or teen.
What is a Personal Trainer?
A personal trainer is a fitness professional who provides guidance and instruction to support a person’s health and fitness goals. Health goals include lowering blood pressure or improving one’s lifestyle and activity level. Fitness goals might include improving bench press or the ability to do 10 push-ups. While some personal trainers instruct group classes, they often work one-on-one with clients to assess their fitness needs or goals and develop appropriate training plans. This profession requires being knowledgeable about human anatomy, fitness and nutrition to provide guidance and recommendations. However, the knowledge will be limited to their certification if they do not possess a Kinesiology or related degree. Their typical job responsibilities include:
Performing initial evaluations to determine clients' needs
Designing personalized fitness plans and workouts for clients
Monitoring clients' progress toward fitness goals
Reviewing training programs and making adjustments as needed
Demonstrating exercises
Providing general nutrition advice or recommendations
Ensuring clients' safety while exercising
Performing emergency first aid when needed
Staying up-to-date on diet and exercise trends or innovations
What is a Strength & Conditioning Coach?
A strength and conditioning ‘coach’ is a professional who provides guidance and instruction to improve athletic performance. These professionals often work one-on-one with athletes or with entire sports teams or organizations. Strength and conditioning coaches study specific sports and players' positions to design training programs that address performance-related components such as speed, agility or power. The methods used to addressed these components require advanced training and are quite technical in nature. Therefore, this profession requires more specialized education and training, providing these coaches with knowledge regarding injury prevention, biomechanics, motor skill ascqusition, pedagogy, psychology and physiology. Therefore, to become a Strength & Conditioning Coach, one must have a degree in a related field such as Kinesiology. This is a pre-requisite to become certified.
Their typical job responsibilities include:
Performing testing to assess relevant fitness components and motor skills to the sport
Creating seasonal training and exercise programs for teams and athletes
Maintaining athlete records to track performance and progress
Reviewing training and exercise programs for effectiveness and making changes as needed
Leading athletes during training sessions
Providing instructions for proper execution of drills
Motivating and encouraging athletes during the training program
Providing nutritional advice or guidance
Collaborating with sports medicine or athletic training staff to develop rehabilitation programs
Personal trainers and Strength & Conditioning coaches both represent professionals in the industry of fitness.
However, because they work with different clientele, their responsibilities also differ.
Personal trainers work with clients to assess their needs and develop training programs based on goals. For example, a client may want to lose weight or strengthen particular muscles. Personal trainers develop a personalized plan to meet those goals, then meet with the client regularly to assess their progress and make changes as needed. These types of goals are not related to performing well in a sport or improving qualities such as speed or power.
Strength and conditioning coaches focus on improving or maintaining athletes' performance rather than changing their bodies. The improvements in body composition we see in athletes who train are a side effect of training. Their primary responsibility is to improve performance for sport and to mitigate against injury risk from sport. When creating these programs, they consider the athletes' sport, the profiles of the elite, injuries that are possible and the amount of mechanical load an athlete could face in their chosen sport. As you can see, this is a much more in depth approach to physical development.
Scope of Practice
So, you might be curious if your son or daughter should see a personal trainer. What is the harm in that you might wonder? Well, it really does depend on the person. While many PT certifications do allow PT’s to work with youth, very few have modules in their certifications that pertain to the growth and motor development of youth. This is a very in-depth area and anyone working with and prescribing training to young athletes who are still developing should strive to obtain training in this area.
My advice to parents
Unfortunately, this is an unregulated profession (Fitness PT as well as S&C Coach) and this means that level of quality you will receive will vary. Not all certified and degreed S&C Coaches are good! And not all PT’s are bad when it comes to training athletes.
However, it is a red flag when you see how they market themselves. If they rely heavily using the likeness (Images) of athletes they train and they boast about / leverage their personal athletic career, it can distract the reader away from what’s important: actual credentials. I can bake a cake, but it doesn’t make me a chef. I do think it is important to have experience, so it’s not a terrible thing to have played a sport, and then becoming a S&C Coach. In fact, this can often be an advantage, but it should NOT be the only highlight on the reel.
Parents - Do your research and observe.
