NSCA’s Coaching Podcast, Episode 62: Brian Gearity

“When coaches talk about program design,when they talk about relating to athletes, administrators overcoming some of the managerial issues, the complexities of dealing with conflict or knowing what exercises to choose, and how to vary programs, and how to move bodies through the weight room and train them, and what’s the best or optimal, and making sense of all the language in the field, sociology, to me, really helps give me an understanding, away of framing that stuff more so and make sense of it…” 10:13

“And that’s how I think of social and behavioral science stuff that I do is that, just like strength and conditioning, you’ve got a variety of tools to use. And I can use the variety of tools indifferent scenarios and also just be more of a complicated thinker, more educated…” 19:49

“Well, there’s the connection between your coaching philosophy and your training philosophy. What do you value, and what are you really doing in practice, and how are you integrating all those things? And you can say, scientifically. That’s why, I think, we have to go beyond science. Our philosophy is the science and the practice and the values. It’s all integrated together.” 23:14

“And that’s the critical thinking piece and the actual taking that knowledge out of the lab into practice, that requires education, that requires critical thinking, that requires understanding of coaching contexts and how those context matter.” 25:48

“Maybe the way that you’re approaching this doesn’t have to be like this, and you should make a tweak, and not just a little tweak that keeps the factory going, but challenged the factory, realizing, hey, people aren’t robots. The weight room isn’t a factory. You don’t have to train like this.” 31:06

“It’s about learning in those learning lessons, and one’s own experience in society and making sense of it too, so using theory and research to make sense of our experiences.” 47:54

“I do the Twitter. So it’s @drgearity, D-R-G-E-A-R-I-T-Y, Instagram, Twitter. I like a lot of LinkedIn requests, I can add you on that one. I got the Facebook.” 58:17

[00:00:00.00] [MUSIC PLAYING]

[00:00:00.69] Welcome to NSCA's Coaching Podcast, episode 62. So when I was coaching and looking at it, wanted to try to be empowering, transformational. I wanted to be a great coach, inspiring. I wanted all these great things to enhance performance, you know, just be phenomenal.

[00:00:18.71] And you start wondering, wait a minute, how come we're having conflict? How come the athletes are yelling back? Or how come they're not doing what they're told, so to speak. Or how come they are doing what they're told, unquestionably, and they're not asking questions? You know, how come this guy's back hurts, and he's not telling me?

[00:00:34.20] This is the NSCA's Coaching Podcast, where we talk to strength and conditioning coaches about what you really need to know, but probably didn't learn in school. There's strength and conditioning. And then there's everything else.

[00:00:44.84] Welcome to the NSCA Coaching Podcast. I'm Scott Caulfield. Today from Washington, DC, NSCA National Conference 2019, excited to have my guest here, Dr. Brian Gearity, program director at the University of Denver, sport coaching master's program as well as a number of other things. Dr. G, welcome to the show.

[00:01:05.53] Thanks for having me, Scott. It's good to be here.

[00:01:07.26] Finally got our schedules coordinated to make this happen, excited.

[00:01:11.27] I intend on breaking the podcast record with this one too.

[00:01:13.95] Yeah, I'm sure.

[00:01:14.58] Have all of our students just watch it.

[00:01:17.45] Yeah, you can embedded into all the curriculum in every class. And then you're guaranteed to get more hits that way.

[00:01:24.09] This link wasn't supposed to take me to the podcast. I can't find the document.

[00:01:27.71] Yeah, I don't know why all these links go to the podcast. It's so weird. No, but again, being a, you know, Denver alumni now, and one of the first people that went through the program-- it was pretty exciting. But even beyond that, I think, the cool thing too-- you know, and I'll let you talk a little bit about kind of your background.

[00:01:48.78] But you know, the cool thing that I see is looking at you. You've been a strength coach, worked in college, worked in pro baseball, and then kind of went down this academic path and to the point where you created basically a program that you wanted to create at a university and run that program and grow it, and now have to get more students. And you guys have already added certificate, etc cetera, et cetera. So yeah, I'll let you kind of rewind a little and maybe tell us about how you even got into strength and conditioning in the first place.

[00:02:22.70] Yeah, I'm over here looking at the NSCA, all the stuff they've got out for national conference and looking. And I joined in 1999. So I was a phys ed exercise science student, an undergrad at John Carroll, played football there, dislocated my shoulder and that was essentially the end of my playing career.

[00:02:39.28] But then at the same time, basically, I got an internship at the Cleveland Indians. So I got to work with-- at that time the head strength coach was Fernando Montez, assistants were Joe Hughes, Tippy Toe Joe, and Carlo Alvarez. Those guys are still in the field coaching. And I didn't realize it at the time, but they introduced me to the field of strength and condition. They introduce me to the NSCA, other organizations, and said, hey, take these classes, these certifications.

[00:03:04.29] And I remember, I joined May 19 1999, I think it was, or My 26. So I'm coming up on-- this is 20 years now. And so I just had a great experience with those guys and at the right place, at the right time.

[00:03:20.94] At one point basically half of Major League Baseball strength coaches had come through the Cleveland Indians system. They were kind of ahead of the curve on strength conditioning, head coaches at different levels. And then from there, luckily, one of the coaches there, again, knew somebody at Tennessee. I interviewed. Tennessee needed a baseball, football strength coach.

[00:03:39.90] I taught in the phys ed department, my first year was a head baseball strength coach, did that for eight years, did all my graduate work there, worked there with a lot of good people that are still in the field too, Johnny Long, Chris Stewart, Eric Ciano, and Bryan Van Vleet, Shawn Gaunt. There are a lot of great guys. Rod Moore has been in and selling now too four different companies.

[00:04:05.33] And then from there after I graduated with my PhD and realized I wanted to make a jump to a professor. When you finish your PhD, you're kind of hot at that moment too, and you're applying for jobs. I could see the athletic department tendency was changing, so it was a good time to go.

[00:04:17.94] And I liked the stimulation I got from research and writing and that kind of stuff, which writing-- I talked to other guys about this, at 30 years old or whatever you're never going to think, oh, I'm going to be a professor, you know, I'm going to start doing this kind of stuff. And next thing you know you really enjoy that process and doing that work. And it's harder and more challenging than I think we've kind of think, and get into it.

[00:04:41.77] So anyway, I owe a lot of credit too my doctoral advisor Norma Mertz, who is wonderful. She just retired. She was the hardest professor, strength coach. I had athletes come to my dissertation defense. And afterwards they were joking that my workouts were easy compared to what her and the other professors did to you and asked the questions of you during your defense.

[00:05:02.83] Then from there I was a professor at Southern Miss for five years, I coached. I was a high school football coach, a high school strength coach down there. And I actually coached at my kids gymnastics studio as well doing speed training with six to about 16-year-old, female gymnasts, girls. And that was an interesting experience too.

[00:05:21.78] So you know, I had an athletic director once say, you know, coaches just coach. He was just referring to a kind of type of coach, that it doesn't matter who you're coaching. I'll coach anybody. I'll coach six-year-olds, or I'll coach 60-year-olds. And I've coached.

[00:05:35.47] I've been a personal trainer and done that too. So I don't really care. I just like coaching, being around people. And now I like doing the educational aspects and growing programs and writing papers and special issues and that kind of stuff.

[00:05:46.56] So when did the switch flip? I guess, like you were like, OK, this PhD thing, I can do this. I'm going to try it and make that move. Did you know that was going to lead you into more academia and that kind of stuff?

[00:06:04.18] So I think of three threads that popped up. So one, very early on my mom had a PhD, my dad had a MBA. So my mom was a superintendent of a school district in Cleveland, Ohio. So I kind of-- she passed away when I was 13 from cancer.

[00:06:18.08] So early on it was never unfathomable to do it. You know, I had a great model in her, and just being a very sharp, strong woman that people respected and knew you better bring your A-game with her. At Tennessee, I knew I kind of wanted to keep going and to keep taking classes. But when I started the program, I thought I might become an athletic director.

[00:06:40.33] I thought I'd probably coach until I was 45, 55 or whatever. And if I need to either retire, or if I get fired, that's kind of my backup plan. I always enjoyed teaching.

[00:06:51.41] Right, we talk about the similarities between teaching and coaching. I enjoyed teaching classes at the university too, so I knew the PhD would help with that. But it really wasn't towards the end until I started actually writing more and more on my dissertation. I wrote a little article in Training & Conditioning magazine. I really started to feel at home and find the fit.

[00:07:12.01] There's some literature in psychology about person, environment, fit. And you find the fit of higher education and writing. And so really towards the end, it was kind of like, I'm getting a little bit stale in my coaching and not being challenged as much. You know, the baseball team had been to the World Series. The football team had been to SCC Championships.

[00:07:32.31] And you know, coaching is tough, because you can do a great job, I think, and still not have a lot of career mobility or opportunity for growth. And I thought that professor world would be a little more meritocratic, and it would be more stable. So I took the leap to that. And I actually had a couple of interviews and phone calls right after I left coaching to get back in, like pretty decent jobs. And it didn't work out, or I declined them. And kind of found, I think, where I'm supposed to be.

[00:08:05.80] Nice. No, that's cool. My mom was an educator as well. So I mean, definitely, I think I'm the first person in the media side that has a master's degree. But it was definitely never-- yeah, it was always something that was attainable or looked highly upon, you know? So definitely the motivation was also within.

[00:08:28.43] I think too, you touched on a little bit about not being fulfilled or knowing there was something more once you start going down this path. And you're looking into a sociological and psychological sides of coaching, you realized, right, that there wasn't maybe as much out there, or there's a ton in the sport coaching world, there's a ton of research that's been done, but not in strength and conditioning. And so that's obviously and clearly become a passion of yours. And you're one of the leaders writing about it and stuff, so may be talk a little bit about what you saw as disconnects and how you even went down that path.

[00:09:08.65] Yes, that's a great observation and point, is that I like to refer to-- and I'm actually working on a presentation about this for the fall. But I think sociology of coaching 101 or 1.0 was really the 2000s. And there was a lot of scholars at that point, not a lot, a handful of scholars, Jones, Potrac, Cushing, Gilbert. [INAUDIBLE] from a more psychological or social psych perspective. Robyn Jones, Jim Dennison, Paul Potrac came afterwards. Chris Cushing was in there. But those guys really laid the foundation.

[00:09:41.26] You know, they wrote a lot of similar articles. And the one article that we published, I published with Jill Mills in Strength and Conditioning Journal towards the sociology of strength and conditioning, was kind of modeled after some of their work and pointing out some of these aspects. Again, this what's sociology does.

[00:09:55.10] And when I found that in grad school and came across that more, I found it more and more interesting. But you could see it in other fields, in education, health care, but not so much in coaching and definitely not so much in strength and conditioning. But it gave you the theoretical language just to make sense of the stuff that coaches talk about.

[00:10:12.52] When coaches talk about program design, when they talk about relating to athletes, administrators overcoming some of the managerial issues, the complexities of dealing with conflict or knowing what exercises to choose, and how to very programs, and how to move bodies through the weight room and train them, and what's the best or optimal, and making sense of all the language in the field, sociology, to me, really helps give me an understanding, a way of framing that stuff more so and make sense of it what I-- you know, theoretically. And all I mean by that is, a greater understanding, a more broad, deeper understanding of it, not just kind of repeating the same words or the same cycle and saying stuff without really making sense of it. It's more like ranting or complaining and observations than it is we'll say analysis.

[00:11:06.81] And I think too from obviously from what you're just saying there too, you are able to now be like, all right, well, we also need to give these people practical application of it, right, and kind of also why you ended up getting to start the DU program and what you guys are doing, which I would say, it's a very applied program, even though it is 100% online. The way that you have people doing different exercises throughout the program, and things you're doing, whether they'd be reflecting, whatever, looking introspectively at your coaching practice, kind of stems from that. It's not just like, well, this is the problem, blah, complain about it, but here's how you change stuff.

[00:11:54.63] Yeah, I mean one of the things why-- and this is no novel thing. This is in education. And that's where myself and Dr. Clayton and I come from education backgrounds, Dr. Mills as well, that you're going look at-- you know, one of the guiding questions we ask ourselves is what does the coach need to know and do at the end of this course or the end of this program? What's the essential or the what's called in education, the signature, pedagogical assignment or act? So what's the key thing that we're going to do and build on in this class?

[00:12:23.44] And it varies from class to class. And that's where it helps to understand learning theory and being able to have an appropriate activity and assignments that are going to help facilitate that outcome. So if it's demonstrating that you can do various feedback, instruction cues, and motor learning, then that's what we do.

[00:12:41.53] Biomechanics, it's developing projects analysis. In my sociology class, it's critically thinking and actually role modeling and role playing how you would interact with around sensitive subjects, such as race and gender, diversity. It's also going to be looking at the social construction of knowledge and what effect it has, right? How power and knowledge combine to influence people, and why we privilege some knowledges over other knowledges.

[00:13:06.18] And so we do this. And we show this in all of our work. We try to have very applied examples, because we live in coach in the real world, you know? It's not a matter of just the technical, rational model, which is that you just need to know a technique or rationally pick an exercise selection in a load, and three sets of five, 70%, everything is great, we're good.

[00:13:28.60] You know, we're not going to replace, I think, the critical thinking and the dynamics of coaching with a technician that is just going to fine tune and really be knowledgeable about one piece, specific piece, that doesn't understand the whole and how that piece intersects with a multitude of other factors.

[00:13:45.25] Right, and that's such the biggest picture, because when you get into this field, all you hear about is like relationship building, connecting with athletes, all this stuff. And that's not in the essentials textbook. There's not a section on the exam on, for lack of a better word, the art of coaching, right?

[00:14:08.79] Yeah, so when people say that one too-- Robyn Jones wrote a paper years ago too, where he mentioned, that we use the word art, when really we should be talking about the social complexities and the interactions in coaching, which I think is a better way of understanding it. We talk about-- right on the billboard behind me, it says, the science and art of strength and conditioning.

[00:14:27.09] What the heck do we mean when we keep saying art? I mean, who in here-- like when we think of art too, I'm an artist or that the art of it. What does that mean? Like, oh, I choose different variables. Or the way I approach things is like in a sculpture? Are we painting pictures? I don't get it.

[00:14:42.94] So on that regard in terms of being the artist, that we associate with the aesthetics of things, no, nobody in the field is like that. That's not what we mean. What we're talking about is the interaction of factors, the complexities of coaching.

[00:14:55.81] But when we don't have the language to describe it any better, then we reduce our-- discourse our language to art. Something's complex, or we don't have a clear regression model where we can't predict this thing. You know, forbid we should use qualitative research or other analytic tools to make sense of it, which is what I'm trying to do.

[00:15:18.06] That's a perfect segue way too into what we're going to talk later about. Go ahead while you're hot.

[00:15:23.73] Yeah, no, I got to tell you, because I forgot to mention that the paper I'm doing right now with Clayton Kuklick, Dr. Kuklick, I work with, and then two of our students, Joe Maldonado, former NSCA intern, and then Sean Maloney, is looking at strength conditioning coaches, and what we're calling their language and their practices, on YouTube. So we've analyzed about 60 videos right now. And when you listen to the coaches and see what they do, so much of it is related to the social psychological aspects, the managerial aspects.

[00:15:56.19] Overwhelmingly, on the coding sheet that we've developed, there's not much about-- you know, there's the stuff about reps and sets and exercise selection and load, but the other 80% of it is about relationships, motivation, identity, culture, et cetera, et cetera. And just like you said, in the essentials textbook, there's only one chapter on psychology, but there's a little bit on the managerial side.

[00:16:20.28] But all of the social, cultural, pedagogical aspects-- again, the overarching kind of theme seems to be that we use biomechanics, physiology, nutrition, and we take those findings from research unproblematically, do them to people, and things work out great. And that's even how we talk it in the field at times is exercise prescription. You know, as I write you a prescription. I tell you what to do, and you go do it.

[00:16:48.30] And we think that that solves all of the problems somehow. And pedagogically we don't even understand that that's a particular framework or approach to it. And there's other approaches as well. We don't have to do it that way.

[00:16:58.46] Yeah, what made me think of when you were talking about the art of coaching and how we just use that as a catchall for whatever else is philosophy too. And again, we're doing a pre-con today on crafting your coaching philosophy. We wrote an article on it in NSCA Coach 5.1, which wasn't too long ago published. And you did the research in 2010 in the SCJ article that you can talk about a little bit, because I thought that was a great article that I obviously-- was kind of one of the cornerstones of what inspired me to pick that as my kind of final project for the class that we co-authored, because you had to edit so much.

[00:17:42.69] [LAUGHTER]

[00:17:44.81] Right, we talk about it, everybody gets edited, man. And we're like, you know? And people submit to NSCA Coach. And we did a presentation. [INAUDIBLE] Coburn and I did a presentation at NSCA, I think, last year about this stuff, but just read the books on writing and work on your process, just like you would tell an athlete. I mean, you're not going to walk in the first day and be great at the power, clean, or snatch.

[00:18:03.61] It's the same kind of thing, man, get feedback, work on it, you'll get better. I got ripped up too. And I love my advisor for it, but dang, she was brutal.

[00:18:11.40] 100%, made me better, a million times better of a writer. But yeah, let's talk about that, because just like we were saying that art, you know, it's kind of a catch-all phrase in this field philosophy, especially related to coaching. As I've seen it, it's really been ruined as a term.

[00:18:30.94] Basically, 99% of the time when someone asked you, what your philosophy is when it's in this strength and conditioning profession, they really just mean, what's your attitude on this, or what's your stance? It doesn't have anything to do with philosophy. It doesn't have anything to do with anything bigger thinking.

[00:18:49.93] What's your philosophy on speed training? What's your philosophy on training in sand? What's your philosophy on juggling kettlebells?

[00:18:57.60] It's crazy. And hence why I went down that rabbit hole. But again, you did the research that set it up to be able to take it to another level, so may be talk about what you found.

[00:19:08.66] I mean, real quickly too, which you made-- I think in that article, you made the observation of trying to differentiate between what we end up calling a coaching philosophy and a training philosophy, that in the field of coaching we tend to think of our values, beliefs as our coaching philosophy. But then the thing like, what's your stance, what's your belief on Olympic Lifts or power lifting, sand training, bags, whatever the device might be or the method?

[00:19:33.74] So I think, that's an important differentiation. And that's all we can try to do too is to offer insights and new observations or challenge existing observations to see how we can think more fluidly, flexibly, and have a variety of so-called tools in our toolkit. And that's how I think of social and behavioral science stuff that I do is that, just like strength and conditioning, you've got a variety of tools to use. And I can use the variety of tools in different scenarios and also just be more of a complicated thinker, more educated, and too what we think of education.

[00:20:07.36] So in that article I think about too, what I've tried to do and why I get excited about doing what I do. I wrote that article in Strength & Conditioning Journal, The Discipline of Philosophy in Strength Conditioning. So I basically reviewed the literature, because the same thing, I was reading it, and I felt this problem, you know, right? Like I'm reading the stuff, and I come back to strength and conditioning, and I sense something is off, [INAUDIBLE].

[00:20:29.49] And so I wanted to write this article so people would quite using philosophy in a very low lever way, like I think you pointed to, but also in a derogatory way. I think people would-- some of the so-called, hardcore scientists would say, you know, philosophy, that's all wishy-washy. And we really can't understand objectivity and scientific facts and that kind of stuff.

[00:20:54.07] And to me that's not what philosophy is. And I think even hundreds or thousands of years ago, a lot of great philosophers didn't create the binary between science and practice or between scientific thinking and other ways of thinking, you know, the thinking about-- for example, like Einstein, now we can develop bombs, and he's developed his theory of physics and relativity. And he also was very concerned though about how that could be put in practice, you know, what would that lead to? And it would lead to mass destruction at times too.

[00:21:28.55] So I want to, in the same way, kind of pull back philosophy from being thrown out and dismissed as something that's wishy-washy, but also let's look at it and see what people are doing. So I think we came up with five categories, how people in the field had tended to use it as a method. And they talked about philosophy as a method, as a training theory, as a framework, as a belief or a value.

[00:21:52.05] So try to offer something on that one, and then where you went with it was to kind of add and extend, I think, to training philosophy. So as a coach, here are your beliefs and values. And we had very concrete examples, right? So we got to think about this in practice. We talked about like the Olympic Lift.

[00:22:10.69] Like if you do a snatch compared to a med ball throw, both of them might improve your power output, but the snatch is arguably riskier. It's got more dangers, more complexity to it. It's harder than a med ball throw. I've never knew a coach or anybody that hurt themselves during a med ball throw, but occasionally somebody will tweak a wrist or-- whether they've got good technique or not, the forces on a snatch are much greater. So right, they can add up and lead to cumulative stress.

[00:22:38.17] What that says about you as a coach and what you value and how much risk you're going to take, and how you're going to approach training and then tying it into your training philosophy. So our training philosophy values safety of the athletes primary. Well, does that mean you're going to do heavier loads? And you see this all the time on social media, right?

[00:22:55.98] Somebody who's got a video of usually a teenager doing a heavier load than they should be, because they've got bad technique. And half of us lose our minds. And the other set half will, oh, you know, maybe they're trying to work hard and just kind of overcome that hump, and they're trying to get the kids fired up, and this and that.

[00:23:13.63] Well, there's the connection between your coaching philosophy and your training philosophy. What do you value, and what are you really doing in practice, and how are you integrating all those things? And you can say, scientifically. That's why, I think, we have to go beyond science.

[00:23:26.52] Our philosophy is the science and the practice and the values. It's all integrated together. It's not a binary between philosophy and science. I think the great philosophers even said that too, is they used scientific thinking. But they also thought about the values of science, how they collect the data, how they analyze the world. It all goes together.

[00:23:45.72] And we live in a world right now sometimes where we think we are so objective, and it's not. And we're trying to go over that and measure things and reduce things to certain minute variables. And that's one way of doing science. But it's not the only way.

[00:24:00.82] And even that science thing can be understood sociologically, more reflexively than that science itself. That science itself then can't analyze itself as well as, I think, social sciences can.

[00:24:14.32] Yeah, and like you alluded to, it goes into the coaching practice. So what's reflected in our coaching practice, is probably what our philosophy is, or it should be. And therefore, too, if we're saying that safety of the athlete is its primary importance, but then you don't teach kids how to miss lifts, all of a sudden, wait a minute, well, this is now not demonstrated in my coaching practice, even though I said this is something I stand for. And so there, I think, gives us a better opportunity as practitioners to evaluate ourself a little better, be a little more self-reflective.

[00:24:56.23] Just another example, right, we know that Olympic Lifts and their derivations, a lot of research on that, a lot of research lately on isometric mid-thigh pull, people talk about it. We talk about it. We talk about it. We talk about it. Next thing you know, that's our thinking, right? That becomes the dominant way that we think about it.

[00:25:11.66] And we're teaching students. And others in the field are making observations. And they're watching us lift and who's coaching. And they all go, oh, I'm going to have to do Olympic Lifts and derivations in my program now, because scientifically it's being studied and so-called valid, right? We're showing that it produces a lot of power, so in a way, we kind of validate it.

[00:25:31.17] Then everybody starts doing it. But there's no thought process of, wait a minute now, what's your context? What's your context? You're one coach or two coaches in a school of 500 athletes, do you really have to do that? Well, I guess I don't.

[00:25:46.49] No, you don't. And that's the critical thinking piece and the actual taking that knowledge out of the lab into practice, that requires education, that requires critical thinking, that requires understanding of coaching contexts and how those context matter. And then I'll go further to say that even when you tell an athlete, or if you have that-- again, we talked about with the snatch then, that when you pick a certain exercise, and it says a certain thing about you and what you value and what you're trying to do. And so just being mindful of that kind of stuff. So it's--

[00:26:20.69] You know, one of the theorists that I draw up on is Michel Foucault. And he talks about how all knowledge can be dangerous. And so whether it be in a lab or an applied practice, making that observation that I need to be mindful about what's going on and not-- and we're always trying to push the field too. I think that's one of the fundamental differences in our field compared to-- people make comparisons to medicine and health care and nursing and physicians in strength conditioning.

[00:26:47.37] They're about homeostasis. They're about correcting from injury and bringing people back to return to play. Whereas, we're constantly tinkering to enhance performance, to have the team or the individual run faster or perform better, which requires a different approach. It's just fundamentally different too.

[00:27:07.06] That's a great point. And since you brought him up-- you went into the Foucault rabbit hole. Why is strength and conditioning coaches-- or let's say this, maybe not all of them, because not everyone's going to listen to this and run out and look this stuff up. But why do strength and conditioning coaches may be that are a little more self-aware and interested in changing the way they do things, why should they look at Foucault and what he's written about?

[00:27:36.28] So this is where we smile at each other.

[00:27:38.85] And everyone that's in the DU Spark Coaching Program that's listening to this is smiling as well.

[00:27:43.75] This guy, Foucault, Foucault, OK, OK. So you made me think too, as people are looking for books-- right, obviously, Foucault is a prolific author and wrote a lot of books. But Google sociological imagination or top-10 books in sociology or world's best sociological or social theorists if you really want to challenge yourself to think differently and have a new perspective.

[00:28:07.97] We often share the leadership books and the coaching specific books, but we all know those things. So if you want to think a little bit differently, expanding, do something like that, not just the same periodization books and the resistance training books. And again, those are all fundamental and have a purpose too.

[00:28:24.61] For me, Foucault-- when I read Foucault-- and I read specifically-- I started with actually Discipline and Punish. And then I also read Madness and Civilization, his first book. So I've been studying Foucault now for about 10, 11 years.

[00:28:38.36] But he offers a way of kind of metacognition, if you want to use that term. He offers a way of understanding the knowledge that's produces in the world, what that knowledge does in practice in everyday life. He was not just thinking about ideals and logic. He was a philosopher of practice.

[00:28:56.29] That's way I think sociologist gravitate towards him, because he was talking about this world that we live in and looking at our thinking about things. And he studied medicine and the sanity and people's mental capacities in hospitals, and people that were insane.

[00:29:17.89] So in sport coaching, there's quite a few people that have used his work to look at coaching. And so when you read Discipline and Punish-- and people before me said this, and I read this afterwards. But while you're reading Discipline and Punish, you're going, yeah, yeah, this is good. This is right.

[00:29:33.99] This is how the factory works. This is how we train athletes as machines. This is how we'll be efficient. And we're going to do the best we can. And we're going to keep people moving along. And this is great.

[00:29:44.40] But that wasn't Foucault's point. Foucault's point was to show that, as well-- so he minutely detailed it. But then we show the problems of it. We show the unintended consequences. We show how that logic, that overall knowledge that we've created, is creating some problems in producing.

[00:30:02.01] So he wanted to connect power and knowledge, which is briefly-- power is like a force. It's a force relation of how things are influenced and how we move, kind of like magnets. And when you tweak one magnet, moving other magnets, they intersect, and things are constantly in flux. And when you think about knowledge in the interaction of people, in place with different physical bodies and tools, Foucault provides that resource that those theoretical tools to make sense of it.

[00:30:26.49] So when I was coaching and looking at it, I wanted to try to be empowering, transformational. I wanted to be a great coach, inspiring. I wanted all these great things to enhance performance, you know, just be phenomenal.

[00:30:39.86] And you start wondering and going, wait a minute though, how come we're having conflict? How come the athletes are yelling back? Or how come they're not doing what they're told, so to speak? Or how come they are doing what they're told, unquestionably, and they're not asking questions? You know, how come this guy's back hurts, and he's not telling me, you know, right?

[00:30:56.13] When you have all these little things going on, and you're like, man, what is it-- and what Foucault does is, he says, hey, may be you're producing some of the problems here. May be the way that you're approaching this doesn't have to be like this, and you should make a tweak, and not just a little tweak that keeps the factory going, but challenged the factory, realizing, hey, people aren't robots. The weight room isn't a factory. You don't have to train like this.

[00:31:22.08] And when you look at it-- whenever I point it back to strength coach, strength coaches tend not to be so strict and controlling and regimented in their own programming, but we do it overwhelmingly with athletes. Right, we're all experts. We're all scientists. We all have to tell the athletes what to do all the time, so rigidly, that they don't like being there, that they're going to be resisting what you're doing.

[00:31:42.70] You know, they're going to maybe keep their scholarship or make their money. Or they're going to suffer in order to achieve that goal. And that says more about their character and their resilience than it does about our coaching.

[00:31:52.20] Right, yeah, that's one of the things I think about too. And that rigidity, you know, when you think about-- well, because we say it all the time, oh, you know, we want to empower our athletes to be better, whatever, whatever. And then we've never give them a single choice. And they've trained for four years. And they couldn't even figure out now if they go into the gym, what they should be doing. Like shouldn't they be pretty darn good at figuring out what they should be doing after playing a sport for four years?

[00:32:20.68] And people have used Foucault to look at athlete career transitions and have showed, right, what you just said, right? We keep telling people what to do and don't really educate them. We just train them like dogs or like horses, right? We train them. We reinforce what they can already do.

[00:32:34.74] We don't actually educate or empower them to make decisions, so when they get out of a sport they can't or they don't They have a hard time adjusting. And sport then doesn't really build character like we keep saying, but it really creates what Foucault says, is docile bodies. It creates moldable, shapable pieces of clay that are productive at times, but then problematic and unintended consequences at the end too.

[00:32:58.90] Yeah, so anybody looking into Foucault, you're going to have a heavy read. I'm going to forewarn you, jeez. He's pretty smart. And he's been doing it 10, 11 years. He's got a grasp on it.

[00:33:10.76] But we, you know, cool thing too, you mentioned-- you know, again, you've written so much, books and articles. And we had a special issue of SCJ that you were a co-author on or an editor on. And myself and Dr. Mills and a couple other students had an article in there related to some of the Foucault stuff. So if you guys are interested in that, maybe start with that article in the special issue of SCJ.

[00:33:37.88] But may be, again, you know we've gotten to a point now where we have a special issue of SCJ on sociology and strength and conditioning. So it's a pretty good sign that we're moving--

[00:33:47.83] I started with a special issue-- this is about six years ago or seven years ago I think now, maybe even eight, with Coach Education. So I remember I wanted to take all that stuff I kind of had been doing in grad school and bring it to strength conditioning. And so I sent in a proposal to Jeff Chandler and thank him as editor of SCJ to entertain that opportunity. So we published that one in Coach Education.

[00:34:12.00] And I helped with one on football and female athletes. But then the last two were really-- with Whitney Moore, we did just this year, earlier this year in 2019, the one in [INAUDIBLE] Issue on psychology. And then the December issue, I think it was of last year, 2018, with Dr. Mills, we co-edited the one on sociology.

[00:34:30.07] So for me, again, when I look at it, the Coach Education one and then the psychology and sociology one are really bringing the social and behavioral sciences. And I was glad to see too, that here on the research abstracts admission process now for the NSCA and National Conference, you can submit proposals under social and behavioral science. And it's great.

[00:34:52.04] I mean, much of the field of strength conditioning has been scientifically, again, unproblematically at times, you know, been validated and where you have tons of physiology, biomechanics, nutrition, and has improved our understanding of performance and why do some of the things happen, what are the mechanisms of hypertrophy or strength gains and power gains. And that science is very useful for that. But now I think we're entering, hopefully, bring other people on board and largening our view of the field to take care of social and personal psychological concerns.

[00:35:25.68] And we can bring in-- it's hard, because the CSCS exam, which is kind of our gateway to the field too is heavily physical science. And we need to make room for people to theorize, to think, to problem solve in a rigorous way about some of our personal coach development issues, personal trainers. I say, coach, I mean, everybody. I mean personal trainers, TSAC facilitators, operators, but then also the researchers and scholars and the policy makers, that when we want to try to have more diversity in the field, when we want to try to create different pedagogical aspects.

[00:36:02.92] And this isn't anything new. This is for the folks that were the phys ed majors in the field as well. You know, some of us that are old enough to be old phys ed majors, you used to have to lead the class, you had to do student teaching. You can see a difference in the field, in the applied actual doing of coaching, somebody that has that pedagogical background compared to somebody that's got an exercise science background that's all lab based, or even somebody that maybe came into the field from a different background in business or social science humanities or something like that.

[00:36:35.70] Yeah, how much do you think of the emotional intelligence? That side of things to comes into play from-- like you said, we've all seen it. We've seen people come from a super-- which is a great, a super exercise science based, heavy physical science program. And now they might be lacking, for lack of a better term, the other side, right, the emotional intelligence, the connectability, the relatability, and empathy side of things, you know? What's that disconnect?

[00:37:12.46] And to add to the ethical side of that, a lot of times we think that, I just need enough interpersonal skills and enough empathy, enough trust. And then what? And then all is good. No. Wait a minute now, right? That's how people get hurt too. That's how they get abused. That's how we tell them we are just using the interpersonal skills to manipulate and coerce people. So it's a very subtle form of power.

[00:37:40.21] You know, oh, they won't care how much you know, until they know how much you care. Well, what is care mean? When we say caring-- and I'm doing a study on this now too. When coaches talk about care, they often talk about it in a very altruistic way.

[00:37:57.23] But what they're really doing is suddenly influencing people. They're not really aware of power, because again, we don't theorize power enough. And then what they do is, eventually, they're just using their interpersonal-- it's like a cracker, right?

[00:38:10.22] They're using that as a pathway to the dip. The dip is, I want to tell you what to do. I want you to do what you're told, but I care about you. And let me build trust in this relationship and tell you nice things and be nice to you. Right, I'm a nicer, friendlier coach, now watch me manipulate you. And I'm going to get you to run through a wall.

[00:38:27.17] I mean, even that language like, oh, that kid would run through a wall for me. There's a problem running through walls, right, guys? Like there's a problem when you go out to practice, right? And there's certainly a benefit too going out there, but also looking into basketball.

[00:38:39.21] When a guy sits out or when the guys aren't playing a ballgames now, hey, there's a reason why they're doing that too. They're not trying to go out there and end their careers. And they're trying to keep their scholarships or go get paid. That has some sense to it.

[00:38:51.49] So anyway, I think the emotional points are huge. There's a scholar right now too, one of the guys, Paul Potrac. Potrac is probably the leading scholar on the emotions, or one of the leading scholars in emotions in coaching. You know, we cover some of his work and Arlie Hochschild and Erving Goffman's work. And it's very useful to understand this.

[00:39:12.17] I remember when I coached down in Mississippi, I was already familiar with this work, because it wasn't too long ago. And the way that I slowly integrated into this high school system, I didn't go in there telling everybody, hey, I coach. I've been coaching, strength coach for 10 years, and here's what I've done. And I've got championships, and blah, blah, blah.

[00:39:29.54] No, the football coach down there was 65 years old, had been coaching twice as long as I had and been very, very successful. So I hang out. I do what I'm told. And I coach up to his technique. I've let the relationship and the trust slowly build to where after a couple months, they're like, all right, you obviously like the strength conditioning thing a lot more than we do.

[00:39:49.93] We're happy watching film for six hours. You're happy in the weight room for six hours. So why don't you go ahead and start training the guys and take what you want and devise the program, yada, yada, yada. So that's part of the swap.

[00:40:01.19] Yeah, no, that's critical too, be able to realize where you stand in the big scheme of things. Like you said, the guy was probably coaching longer than you've been alive almost, right? You're not going to come in there on day one and tell him, well, you know, my master's degree was in X.

[00:40:19.64] Coach Wheat, he asked me too. He show me some of the speed videos and says, you know, I think you can help our guys learn how to run a 40 and this kind of stuff. You know, meanwhile like in the back of my head-- he's got my resume there. And he was playing me too. He wanted to see how I came off, you know?

[00:40:35.11] He was really bright, really bright guy. And those guys had studied. And they got degrees in phys ed from Southern Miss years ago. But I remember thinking, yeah, I'm USA Track and Field level three sprint certified. I've worked with guys, like, yeah, this will be no problem.

[00:40:51.95] But you don't want to come off like that. And you also want to be a team player too.

[00:40:59.55] You've talked about writing and all the articles you've done. I know you've got a bunch of books going on or some chapters in books as well, tell us about that, because you also-- before we started rolling here, we were mentioning how your actual editing still at this point in your career-- you know, how these guys who are editing the books you're writing were editing the crap out of what you wrote.

[00:41:26.79] And like at this point, I'm pretty sure it's obviously a lot easier for you, right? You know, you've got a decade now of mental lifting of writing. So probably your starting point and my starting point even now, writing, are totally different. So we would think, you're just going in and banging this out and getting done, send it in, and print that thing, it's good.

[00:41:51.45] The unfortunate side effect at times from my dissertation advisor, from reading more books actually on writing, and trying to really study your writing as a craft just like we study coaching, has got me so slow nowadays at times, because I scrutinize the organizational structure. You know, what's the composition of the entire piece? Does it have to flow like this? What about this sentence? You know, do I have the reference for here, do I need a reference?

[00:42:18.84] What point am I trying to make? What research and reasoning do I need to use to justify it? And then like word choice, and you've seen this, because I look up words. You know, I try to look up and realize that I'm using the wrong word or that there's a better word.

[00:42:33.83] And those things kind of stop and give me pause and pings. And you're looking at-- the same thing when we edit for various journals, you're just looking over all of this stuff. And I've had to be faster at times, because people don't need everything, or they don't need every little word and red ink on everything, that's not even effective, but going through things and just trying to pick out the main points.

[00:42:54.95] So I just did this yesterday, yeah, yesterday morning on NSCA Coach article I had a young coach, stock student, that is supervised by big name professor in the field. And I was putting the word out months ago about some [INAUDIBLE], a NSCA coach. And he sent in a draft of an article, so a manuscript.

[00:43:14.72] And I looked it over. And when I was skimming it, I wrote up the email back to him. I had about six different points of feedback, you know, just kind of big ideas to help structure, change some pronouns, help the flow, and also one very practical point, because he talked about a comprehensive model of core training, but didn't really give a for example. So I just wrote back, I said, hey, the coaches that are reading this journal in particular would really benefit from and want to see a more fleshed out program design now, not just talk about it, but actually show them one thing and use that as a tool throughout the article.

[00:43:51.53] And it's not like a huge rewrite. It's going to take some work. But I think it's a very good point. You know, and it provides-- so anyway, the more you do this type of thing, you get over again that fear. It's just like when you learn how to lift or run and your technique stinks and you're kind of embarrassed about it, you know, you've got to have a good coach and a supportive network to keep learning about it.

[00:44:12.14] So the two big projects that we've got going on now, myself and Dr. Patina Khoury, who's been to the NSCA headquarters. She's now a--

[00:44:20.78] Dr. Khoury.

[00:44:21.64] Yep, Dr. Khoury got a shout out. She's a professor up in Cape Breton University and coaching and stage Masters athletes. And we've got an edited book hopefully coming out-- realistically, it probably be early 2020, yeah. But it's a 23 or so chapter textbook on instructional strategies for coach developers.

[00:44:42.94] So coach developers is the term basically of teachers of coaches. That could be not only professors, but could be you as a coach developer for the NSCA and all the coaches who reach out to you. Anybody that works with the National Governing Body is a coach developer.

[00:44:58.27] So we've got 23 chapters or so in there for a variety of tools to help coach developers develop coaches. So we're looking at online learning, hybrid learning, face-to-face. We've got a special section that's really cool too to be able to have-- we've got chapters on coaching or teaching coaches of Special Olympics, Paralympics, women in coaching, race in coaching, so racial issues in coaching. So then we've got a kind of special section there.

[00:45:29.80] Then we've got chapters on using case study, projects, a personal learning coach, kind of like a consultant, taking world tours like a touring kind of coach, using-- actually, one of the contributors is Katherine Russell too--

[00:45:43.46] Oh, nice.

[00:45:44.00] --with the NSCA.

[00:45:45.58] Cool, very cool. Yeah, so that one's going to be a bunch of different people on each chapter kind of a thing?

[00:45:50.76] Yeah. It's a edited books. So we're the editors. So we had a framework for every chapter. We kind of knew what we wanted. We saw a gap in the field again and said, hey, this is the framework that we think we want to do, provided that structure. And we reached out to teaching experts that are in those areas that have done those methods, those instructional strategies, to offer their theory in practice, so offer up their insights to help a coach developer teach coaches.

[00:46:21.34] So there'll be something in there for really anybody trying to get better as a coach, as well as teach others. That's kind of like our next thing I'm thinking about too, a little bit too is, you know, when I was leaving Tennessee too, I was kind of in charge of coach development on the staff. And so people-- and in that Coach Education, special issue in SCJ, we started that kind of stuff, talking about the internship and how to make a curriculum and that kind of stuff, so.

[00:46:43.90] And that book is going to be available through who?

[00:46:46.53] Rutledge.

[00:46:46.81] Rutledge, cool, yeah. And you've got another. What was the one we've read, you have a chapter in, the sociology of sport coaching? There's another--

[00:46:57.94] Was it the research in sport coaching one?

[00:47:00.07] May be the research one, yeah.

[00:47:01.35] The autoethnography one?

[00:47:02.14] Yeah, autoethnography, talk about that a little bit. That's a subject, autoethnography, that I had never really heard about. And it seems to me an interesting way that I think more coaches might get into writing from that stance, you know?

[00:47:18.18] Yep, so I think autoethnography is also called-- so auto means-- that's in that Research Methods in Sport Coaching textbook. So that's a few years old. In that chapter, autoethnography auto means self, ethno meaning culture, ography meaning the writing of or the producing of it. So it's an analysis of culture, but a focus on yourself too, not in a-- and this is a critique of it. Not in a self-serving, navel-gazing, narcissistic way.

[00:47:44.29] It's not, well, here's my altruisms or aphorisms. Here's me telling you why I'm such a great coach type of thing. It's not that.

[00:47:53.68] It's about learning in those learning lessons, and one's own experience in society and making sense of it too, so using theory and research to make sense of our experiences. And then also another option is a more of a literary approach, where the story of it is the beginning, the middle, and the end. There's a plot. There's conflict. There's resolution.

[00:48:19.02] And you're trying to provide a moral and a point. You're providing that wisdom to somebody within a very rigorous way, not just in, I guess, in John Wooden or Nietzsche's kind of aphoristic kind of a style. We could do that, that would be really interesting.

[00:48:36.25] But you see, the published autoethnography is really a more, here's what-- well, hell, I did one on strength conditioning. That's where I used Foucault. And the first paper I did was Foucault. I looked at my own experiences of disciplining athletes of how I used strength conditioning knowledge to control time, bodies, the spacing of athletes, the orderly flow of training, and some of those unintended or negative consequences that I've talked about. So that was an autoethnography of my own experience coaching in the weight room.

[00:49:10.60] And I've written a couple of those now. So that's a theoretically or a qualitatively rigorous way of offering knowledge and constructing knowledge of yourself with a focus on yourself in certain cultures and contexts.

[00:49:24.43] Yeah, I thought it was a super interesting way, a little different from a readership standpoint too. The message that you're picking up is may be a little bit easier, for lack of a better word, to read, to grasp because of that storytelling type of it.

[00:49:40.90] The storytelling, I really like that as a way of producing scholarship, is telling stories, because we resonate more easily with stories than we do traditional, academic papers. We're like, you know, falling asleep halfway through, or you can't see yourself in this. And you're like, all right, am I suppose to extrapolate from this.

[00:50:01.48] Right, because it can be hard to do that, absolutely.

[00:50:04.74] And that's the difference right between sociology and other fields, is sociology is already everyday life. Whereas, the other fields, they talk about translational research. It's, oh, I'm going to take my lab findings or my really-- I'm thinking like biomechanics, where we've got markers on people. And we can study them in everyday life, but somehow-- or GPS trackers. Somehow we're supposed to take this data and translate it into something meaningful and effective, to enhance performance too.

[00:50:38.78] So I think sociology in that regard kind of has a different, obviously, a different approach, where it's already talking about everyday life. So the idea of being applied does even not make sense to me, because I'm looking at practice. You know, we're making sense of practice.

[00:50:52.07] Yeah, it's applied all the time. All right, so kind of wrap things up, let's go back. People are super interested in this, give me three books that they need to pick up first and foremost, or articles to tee this up and get on the path to their coaching practice, getting improved.

[00:51:15.82] So for me, I don't know-- so one would be-- because it's any type of handbook does this. There's a Handbook of Sport Coaching. And there's excellent chapters throughout that book, but there's also a lot of excellent authors. It provides a who's who of kind of doing people, things that we're doing stuff in the field, and then all those references. And that book is going to be updated probably every five years. It's like the essentials. So you got the Handbook of Sport Coaching.

[00:51:40.10] There's a-- for me, The Sociology of Sport Coaching is a go-to. That book, as well, edited by Robyn Jones and company. For me too when that came out-- well, it didn't come out until 2010 or so, 2009. But those guys were doing the research in the 2000s for that book. And that really was the first kind of sociology of sport coaching book, both published by Rutledge.

[00:52:06.42] You want one more, huh? I'm trying-- the third is always the hardest. You've got the Learning in Sports Coaching book. I like to think that our textbook with Dr. Gearity will be a go-to source. I think it will be actually for coach developers.

[00:52:28.10] I'm thinking. There's another. I mean, there's just so many good books. There's one I had a chapter in on women in sport coaching by Rutledge as well. Nicole LaVoi wrote a great book on that one. I don't know what else.

[00:52:42.31] That's a good start. That's a good start. Again, if anybody is more interested in this than before-- or well, maybe quickly tell us a little bit about the sport coaching program at Denver. Obviously, we touched on it on the surface. But if someone, strength and conditioning coach, sport coach, whoever's listening to this is interested getting a master's degree, it's 100% online.

[00:53:03.72] I thought the content was awesome and applicable to my everyday life. But may be talk about that and the certificate a little bit. And I don't know, may be you guys have something new coming down the pipeline.

[00:53:12.70] Oh, we always got something new. I've got the big reveal here at the end for anybody that's still tuning in, right, of course I do. So the master's degree, they hired me to start the program from scratch back in 2014.

[00:53:24.19] It's 46 credits. We're on the quarter system. So we've got four quarters throughout the year. They're all 10 weeks long.

[00:53:30.99] Each class is about preparing coaches for applied practice. So again, there is no science and practice or theory and practice. For us, it's praxis, P-R-A-X-I-S. It's all together.

[00:53:41.77] You're talking about practice?

[00:53:42.85] Just talking practice, man.

[00:53:43.74] Practice? You're talking about practice.

[00:53:44.48] Just talking about-- you know I use that clip in class too. So you get the masters. Yeah, I had a guy that I like. He is an art professor, a sports psychology guy and more. And he looked at our curriculum. He said, man, I wouldn't have designed it any other way.

[00:53:57.81] And it's funny, because he's really an interdisciplinary kind of scholar too. And I said, well, that really means a lot coming from him too. And so it's half kind of physical science, half social science, and humanities.

[00:54:10.33] So we've got that. That's been going strong. It's about 40 or so students in that program, and that's great. We're able to have small classes. You know, I think our average class size is about 12.

[00:54:18.52] I've got a class this quarter with three, the other one was six. And then my strength conditioning this quarter only has 12. And then from there, we offered-- last year was the first year. We have a 24-credit graduate certificate in strength conditioning and fitness coaching. So that's more of a streamlined learn how to be a strength coach, personal trainer now, get introduced or have a career transition or build on to some of your-- a lot of people, right, don't have the degrees in exercise science or phys ed, coaching, and so we've developed that program.

[00:54:51.13] And then just this fall we're starting two other certificates that are 16-credit, specialized certificates in, one, again, the strength conditioning and fitness. So it's four classes. And then the other one is in the psychology of coaching.

[00:55:03.34] And so we're looking-- I just had a conversation yesterday. We're looking, I think, next may be year, to try to launch another psychology of coaching or a cultural sports psychology certificate, 24 credits certificate program. And this just builds on what we talked about, because a lot of coaches get in with the heavy physical science background. And then they realize, wait a minute, I'm dealing with people and organizations, and this stuff is complex, and people don't-- conflict, right, what do we do about conflict?

[00:55:31.81] Oh, we just resolve it. It's going to exist. So it's not just resolution. It's also managing on a daily basis.

[00:55:39.13] So anyway, we're going hopefully do the cultural sports psychology, a lot of work on the sociology of coaching, mental skills of athletic performance, the psychology of coaching, reflective practice. And then my goal would be to develop an undergraduate program. So I'm starting to kind of sketch that out. We don't have one in Denver, and then even a doctoral program as well, and focusing more on the social behavioral aspects, but then also the sports science aspects too.

[00:56:03.32] I'd love to continue to be interdisciplinary, not just in our silos doing our own research in our own ways, but experimenting and thinking and integrating in practice, and let's see what happens. You know, not just one way or the other, but let's look at it truly kind of holistically or the use of the word 360. Let's look at it that way and not just kind of pay lip service to it. Let's really try to integrate and experiment and innovate.

[00:56:30.88] That would be actually innovative, not just saying, well, we're all using X device, so we're all innovative. No, you're not, not really.

[00:56:39.55] So these certificate programs, you need an undergraduate degree, but you could also have a masters to take the certificate?

[00:56:47.64] Yeah, yeah, I mean, somebody too that's got a masters in exercise science or maybe a MBA or something like that or counseling even, education, but you really want to focus on the coaching aspects of things? Yeah, that's where you're going to take a mini or a specialized 16-credit certificate or come back and add on that 24-credit certificate. By federal regulations too, it's supposed to be a job-ready streamlined process. Whereas, the masters degree is more comprehensive, has more of a research component to it as well, and that's graduate-level standard.

[00:57:23.09] And graduate certificates are meant to be a little bit more about the here and now and quicker.

[00:57:27.52] Cool.

[00:57:27.75] You know--

[00:57:28.26] I like it.

[00:57:28.85] --for somebody that's looking for more like we say, read a book or people to talk about it, oh, I'm going to go back and get a-- I know in the exhibit hall today, in this week, I'll talk to 10 people that want to get a second masters or may be a PhD. They're not really sure why. Well, let's think about that and really what you need to do and why you're going to do it. And does this makes sense for you? What's the best way for you to invest in your professional development?

[00:57:54.86] Yeah, I love it, talk about deliberate practice. There you go. How about also anybody wants to follow up with you-- I know you're a savvy, social media guy trying to keep up with me. So talk about how they can hit you up on social or wherever they can find you.

[00:58:11.50] I need all of Scott's Instagram followers. There's too many options on Instagram. So I do the Twitter. I do the Twitter. So it's @drgearity, D-R-G-E-A-R-I-T-Y, Instagram, Twitter.

[00:58:25.91] I like a lot of LinkedIn requests, I can add you on that one. I got the Facebook.

[00:58:30.53] Nice.

[00:58:31.24] I don't have-- my kids have TikTok.

[00:58:32.96] TikTok.

[00:58:34.33] I'm not quite sure what TikTok is.

[00:58:35.93] I only put energy into Instagram. I can only handle one of them. That's all I got.

[00:58:40.13] I need to go to the class, The Glute Guy's class.

[00:58:43.47] Oh, yeah, Bret Contreras. I can't remember what day it is. I think it's Friday or Saturday, talking about--

[00:58:49.54] Since we're there, and I know you want to end, but that's an interesting sociological observation to me. Is that, right, we're in the day and age of social media, of Instagram followers, and we got people-- I mean, there's-- you open it up and right away everybody's got an exercise video. And it's just like, wait a minute, let's critique this. Let's understand what this is doing, what effect it has.

[00:59:11.42] Why are people spending 45 minutes at the gym working on their glutes? Or why are they doing a particular exercise that they saw somewhere? And you're just scratching your head, going, man, you know. We need to be careful. That's why knowledge is dangerous.

[00:59:24.23] We have to be careful about what we see from everybody, myself included. You know, I tell our students to question everything I'm saying too.

[00:59:31.61] Right, knowledge is dangerous. Knowledge is power.

[00:59:34.76] Not power, no, not that one. No, no, it's not power. Knowledge is not power. Power is a force. It's away of mobilizing and moving and influencing and having impact. It is not synonymous with knowledge.

[00:59:47.63] That's a great point. Good, this has been awesome, again, appreciate you being on the show. We got all your info. Obviously, we'll put that in the show notes as well.

[00:59:56.87] And I'm going to definitely be looking forward to the book that you and Dr. Khoury are coming out with soon. So thanks again for being on the show.

[01:00:06.38] And if you're new to this podcast and want to learn more about NSCA's strength and conditioning certifications, you can get all the details at nsca.com/certification.

[01:00:16.04] And again, we want to thank our sponsor Sorinex Exercise Equipment for supporting the podcast and everything we do here at the NSCA. I look forward to, again, talking with everybody soon. If you like this, please go on the method that you choose to download, iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, whatever, give us a review, like, subscribe, all that good stuff, send me a message on Instagram, whatever it is. Anyway, thanks for listening, appreciate everybody.

[01:00:44.13] This was the NSCA Coaching Podcast. The National Strength and Conditioning Association was founded in 1978 by strength and conditioning coaches to share information, resources, and help advance the profession. Serving coaches for over 30 years, the NSCA is the trusted source for strength and conditioning professionals. Be sure to join us next time.

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