WELCOME BACK…
Dear Fellow Coaching Nerds,
It’s been a while since I’ve had the chance to write to you. Please allow me to explain my absence while catching you up on what I’ve been doing this last decade. I have been busy like a beefy beaver trying to build a company that I hope will contribute to changing the landscape of the coaching industry for the better. At the inception of Training Think Tank, one of my main goals was to professionalize the industry of coaching. In future articles, I’ll explain specifically what I think that means. But first…
I was raised in a well educated, money minded, and some may argue ‘pompous’ area of New York. I had many friends in high school who went to Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, and other prestigious universities. Those great young minds went on to become software sales executives, engineers, and to work at the world’s best hedge funds. I had a different dream. I loved to be physical and I loved sports. There was a time, like many young athletes, where I had dreams of becoming a professional athlete. I would train in the gym with visions of myself being in the NFL. I would wrestle my training partners envisioning I would become an Olympic caliber wrestler. When people asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up, I would tell them I wanted to be a coach. In spite of having good grades and access to some of the best schooling in the world, I wanted to participate in an industry where there wasn’t much money. I had teachers and friends tell me I was ‘wasting my intellectual talent.’ These words greatly affected me and instead of chasing my passions in the educational system, I decided to go to University and study finance. Instead of continuing to learn about what I loved, I chased the money.
It didn’t take long for me to realize I wasn't going to thrive in that purely financially motivated world. My heart was always in athletics. When sitting at desks all day and staring at computer screens, my mind was restless. Also, I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea of wearing suits every day to work. That felt like a form of suicide to my sweat pant loving self. So, even though it was the most impractical thing I could do with my education, I decided to pursue a career in the fitness industry. Over the first five years of being in the industry, I was not really living up to my University education. I worked jobs as a fitness equipment salesman at Dick’s Sporting Goods, a wrestling coach at a jiu jitsu school, a personal trainer at a CrossFit gym, a general manager of an online fitness education company, and a manager of a large scale traditional gym. I learned a lot in the trenches of the industry and saw how things worked. But, a lot of these jobs left me feeling like I was not truly fulfilling my passion.
It also became apparent to me that I needed to be a leader and find my own people. It was hard for me to integrate into teams where I didn’t trust the leadership and was not in charge of the hiring process. So, with absolutely no credibility to do so, I founded Training Think Tank. I was twenty seven, in over my head in debt, had no money in my bank account, and no real idea how I was going to make ends meet. All I had was a vision of the future business, an idea of how I would get it started, and a burning desire to build a career that helped me live according to my desires.
In the last ten years, I can say I’ve found a fair bit of success in that realm. At first, many people scoffed at Training Think Tank. It was just a guy with an idea and a couple of coaches. But, I was determined to build something that was going to contribute to the world at a larger scale. I truly wanted to help serious athletes gain access to better coaching. I aspired to turn coaching into a profession that was respected as much as engineers, lawyers, and financiers. I had this desire to share honest information with the general public. It was difficult to see how many lies shaped the fads of our fitness landscape. I started when it was just me and one administrative employee. In the beginning, I’d be laughed at because it was just three of us coaches spending a lot of time in the niche market of competitive CrossFit. But, I believe things have changed. We are now the corporate home to fifteen coaches, two media staff, and are respected in the industry as a contributor to the space. The idea is now much more than that and we have built a community fulfilling these early missions. My journey in this process has been eye opening, exciting, and challenging.
Those years have given me the good fortune to coach athletes who participated in the highest levels of the CrossFit Games, the NFL, UFC, MLB, Korn Ferry Tour, a variety of collegiate sports, and recreational hobbyists who participate in different challenges of athleticism. It has been a wild ride and I’ve learned so much. I am much more confident in helping the next generation understand what it means to be a professional in our industry. I know I still have a lot of work to do to get better, but I can say with certainty I’ve made progress I want to share with the greater market.
In the process of trying to fulfill my mission of professionalizing the industry of coaching, I knew I would need to do a better job of disseminating the lessons I’ve learned to the coaching market. I would need to help people understand how I view the standard of professionalism. There is so much complexity to strength development, conditioning, movement, advanced program design, and the professional skills that make a coach capable of serving a large market. I’ve spent thousands of dollars and years acquiring knowledge from other experts. I’ve applied much of that knowledge into my own training so I could learn with my own body. Most importantly, I’ve gained experience using those methods with a variety of athletes to build my own best practices and stress test them with my coaches. Throughout the years, we have tried many forms of education and as I continue to learn, I have continued to refine with my team how we can share our ideas with the world.
We are excited to announce the return of this coaching education focused blog. In this blog you can expect our Training Think Tank team to share ideas that have helped us to build a living as coaches in the industry. We are going to write to you, the intellectual coach; those of you who want to, or who already have, become professionals that redefine this industry in the future. We hope you will enjoy this journey with us. I look forward to sharing what we’ve learned over these past years and what we will continue to learn along the way.
Let’s get nerdy together!
Sincerely,
Max El-Hag
Commander of our Meathead Nerd Community
