Blog | Training Who’s in Your Corner?

Author / John

8 - 10 minutes read

You can find a program anywhere, finding the right people is different.

There has never been a better time to train. There has also never been a better time to waste your f***ing time training.

You can find a training program in about thirty seconds. Open an app, search YouTube, follow an influencer, ask AI to build you twelve weeks of training from a PDF you “borrowed” from a buddy.

Good training has never been easier to find. Neither have answers. You can track damn near everything your body does, search almost any training question imaginable and get an answer before you’ve blinked.

Athletes should take advantage of all of it. But training has never only been about having access to answers. Eventually you’re going to run into something you can’t see clearly from inside your own training. Progress slows. Life f***s with the plan. Your goal changes. Something hurts. You start wondering whether the thing you’ve been doing for two months is still the thing you should be doing tomorrow.

You can go looking for another answer. Or you can talk to people.

Answers Are Everywhere

Most training questions aren’t difficult to get an answer to anymore.

Want to build muscle? There are thousands of programs.

Need an alternative for an exercise? You’ll find one.

Only have two days to train? You’ll find plenty of opinions about how to make them count.

Want to know how much protein to eat, how long to rest between sets or what percentage to use? You can have an answer in seconds.

The problem is that athletes rarely struggle because nobody can give them an answer. They struggle with knowing which answer matters.

Your squat has stalled. Do you need more volume? Less volume? A different exercise? A different program? More food? More sleep? Or has your squat not really stalled at all and you’ve just had three shit sessions?

Search long enough and you’ll find a convincing argument for every one of them. More answers can be useful. They can also give you more ways to f**k with something that wasn’t broken.

Great Athletes Have Always Looked For Great Rooms.

There’s a reason serious athletes gravitate towards good training environments.

Walk into a good weight room and you’re surrounded by more than equipment and a program written on a whiteboard. There are coaches who have seen thousands of training sessions. Athletes further down the road than you. People chasing completely different goals. Someone who has already made the mistake you’re about to make. Someone asking the question you hadn’t thought to ask.

Knowledge moves around the room.

A coach answers one athlete and five others learn from it. Two coaches see the same problem differently and you hear both sides. An athlete tells you what happened when they ran into the same thing six months ago. Somebody stronger than you approaches the work differently and you start paying attention.

None of that requires the conversation to begin with you. You just need to be in the room.

You Came For an Answer. You Got a Conversation.

Say your progress has stalled and you post a question explaining what’s happening.

A coach answers it. Another coach spots something else and adds to it. An athlete who has been running the same program tells you they hit something similar a few months ago. Somebody asks a question about your situation that you hadn’t even considered.

The original question starts changing. Maybe the program isn’t the problem. Maybe the thing you’ve been obsessing over isn’t particularly important. Maybe someone says something that sends you in a completely different direction.

You came looking for an answer. You got a conversation.

There’s value in that distinction because training problems don’t always arrive neatly packaged with all the information required to solve them. Sometimes you don’t know which detail matters. Sometimes you don’t even know that you’re asking the wrong question.

Good people have a habit of pulling that stuff out.

The Best Questions Might Not Be Yours

One of the most useful things about a good training community is how much you learn from conversations you didn’t start.

Maybe you’re running Jacked Street and somebody asks about a problem they’ve hit six weeks into the program. You’re only on week three, but you read the coach’s answer anyway. Three weeks later, you run into exactly the same thing. Now you know what you’re looking at.

Someone else asks whether they should move from Grindstone into Field Strong because their priorities have changed. A coach starts breaking down the difference between the two. Another athlete joins the conversation with their experience. You come away understanding your own training better even though the original question had f**k all to do with you.

You don’t know what you don’t know. Sometimes the most useful thing you hear is the answer to a question you hadn’t even thought to ask. Someone else brings it into the room for you.

Good Coaches Can Disagree With You.

There’s another advantage to having coaches around your training. They don’t have to accept the premise of your question. You might ask how to change your program when the better question is whether you should change it at all.

You think you need more conditioning. Someone asks why.

You think you’ve plateaued. Someone points out that you’ve made progress for six months and had a bad fortnight.

You think the program isn’t working. Someone asks how many sessions you’ve actually completed lately and suddenly the conversation gets uncomfortable.

Athletes are remarkably good at turning small problems into big ones. One shit session becomes a plateau. A missed week becomes a reason to start again. Something you saw online at 11:47pm suddenly has you questioning months of training that was working perfectly well until you picked up your phone.

Sometimes the most useful thing another person can tell you isn’t what to change. It’s to stop f***ing around.

A Coaching Staff Makes The Room Better

No coach knows everything, and anybody pretending otherwise probably isn’t someone you should be listening to.

Strength, speed, nutrition, recovery, mobility, conditioning, building muscle, preparing for competition and training around a demanding life all bring different problems.

Good sporting environments have always dealt with that by putting good people around athletes.

Different coaches bring different experience, perspectives and areas of expertise. One might see something another doesn’t. One has spent years working through a problem another athlete has only just encountered. Someone else can contribute when the conversation moves into their wheelhouse.

The point isn’t having one person with every answer. It’s having good people in the room.

The Athletes Are Part of it Too

Coaches aren’t the only people worth listening to. There is experience scattered throughout any good training community.

The 45-year-old dad figuring out how to train around three kids and a demanding job has learned things about consistency that the 22-year-old athlete hasn’t had to think about yet.

The athlete who has spent a year on Jacked Street knows what month nine feels like.

The person who moved from Bedrock into Field Strong has already made a transition someone else is considering.

They aren’t there to replace coaches. They don’t need to. They add experience to the room.

Over time, you start recognising names. You know who’s running what. You see people make progress. You watch questions turn into conversations and conversations turn into knowledge that sticks around for whoever needs it next.

People Helping People

You still have to do the work. Nobody is going to move the weight on the bar for you. Nobody can do the conditioning you conveniently hoped everyone would forget you skipped. Nobody can turn inconsistent effort into consistent progress because you joined a Discord channel.

But doing the work yourself and figuring everything out yourself aren’t the same thing. Power Athlete has had a phrase for that for a long time: People Helping People. Not people doing the work for you. Not people removing every difficult decision. Good people around you while you do the work.

Because the strongest athletes have never been built in isolation. They’ve been built around other people who expect more from them, know when to help and know when to tell them to stop f***ing around and get back to work.

All Access Puts You in The Room

Power Athlete All Access gives you ten training programs under one membership. That’s the obvious part.

Your goal changes? There’s another program. Your schedule changes? There’s another tool. Want to build muscle, get stronger, prepare for the field, train for the fight or simply become harder to kill? The training is there.

But access to ten programs isn’t the whole point. All Access puts you in the Power Athlete room. Inside our private Discord, Power Athlete athletes and coaches are talking about training every day.

You can bring your questions. Ask about the program you’re running. Talk through what you’re trying to accomplish. Figure out what comes next.

But you can also shut up and listen. Read the question somebody asked before you got there. Watch two coaches work through a problem. Learn from an athlete six months ahead of you. See somebody make the mistake you were about to make. Find the conversation you didn’t know you needed.

The programs give everyone something to train. The people make the room valuable.

That’s why we don’t see coaching and community as bonus features bolted onto All Access. They’re part of what you’re paying for. There will always be another program. Another piece of information. Another answer available in seconds. But if you’re serious about getting better, there’s still something to be said for surrounding yourself with people who give a s**t about the same thing.

You bring the effort. We’ll put good training and good people around you.

10 programs. One membership. People Helping People.

$59/month. Less than the cost of two individual programs.

GET YOUR ALL ACCESS PASS

John

John Welbourn is CEO of Power Athlete and host of Power Athlete Radio. He is a 9 year starter and veteran of the NFL. John was drafted with the 97th pick in 1999 NFL Draft and went on to be a starter for the Philadelphia Eagles from 1999-2003, appearing in 3 NFC Championship games, and for starter for the Kansas City Chiefs from 2004-2007. In 2008, he played with the New England Patriots until an injury ended his season early with him retiring in 2009. Over the course of his career, John has started over 100 games and has 10 play-off appearances. He was a four year lettermen while playing football at the University of California at Berkeley. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in Rhetoric in 1998. John has worked with the MLB, NFL, NHL, Olympic athletes and Military. He travels the world lecturing on performance and nutrition and records his podcast, Power Athlete Radio, every week with over 800 episodes spanning 13 years. You can catch up with John as his personal blog, Talk To Me Johnnie, on social media @johnwelbourn or at Power Athlete Radio.