Holding the Standard: What Good Coaching Really Means

Holding the Standard

CrossFit is supposed to be confronting.

What doesn’t challenge us, doesn’t change us.

My mission is to make you better. To train you to do hard things. Because conquering hard things in the safety of the gym better equips you to tackle hard things in life.

I am your biggest fan. I am cheering for you to succeed.

But you won’t always like me.

Because I’m the one you can count on to push you outside your comfort zone.

Yes, I will help adapt the workout to your fitness level and needs. That is an important part of good CrossFit coaching, whether you are a beginner athlete, an experienced athlete, or an adult over 40 training for strength and longevity.

But adapting the workout doesn’t mean making it easy.

Coaching Means Caring Enough to Hold the Standard

The root of coaching is caring.

I care enough to hold you to the standards. I care enough to have uncomfortable conversations. I care enough to risk you not appreciating my feedback.

It’s not a comfortable place to stand.

And most people don’t care about you enough to do it.

It is easier to just cheer you on. It feels safer to be liked. It is easier to avoid conflict than to hold the standard.

But holding the standard is the foundation CrossFit is built upon. It is at the core of the methodology’s effectiveness.

If you want to cling to your limitations and weaknesses, you can do that most anywhere else and reap the inevitable consequences of that choice.

But at Empower, we build better bodies for life.

You Came Here to Get Better

When you walk through our doors, we assume you have come to be coached because you want to walk out better than when you came in.

You aren’t paying us to tell you how good you are. You are paying us to help you become better.

And that doesn’t just mean working harder and sweating more.

It means learning to move well.

What does moving well mean?

It means mastering universal motor recruitment patterns in order to counteract the debilitating effects of a sedentary lifestyle in the modern world.

It means reclaiming strength and mobility through a full range of motion. It means relearning correct, functional movement mechanics and training your body to move more effectively so you can reduce compensations, address imbalances, and become more physically capable.

This is what functional fitness is really about.

The goal is not simply to get better at working out. The goal is to build a body that serves you better outside the gym—a body with the strength, mobility, resilience, and confidence to do the things you want to do throughout your life.

That becomes increasingly important as we age. Strength training isn’t just about what you can lift today. It is an investment in your future independence, physical capacity, and health span.

But in order to build those things, we will need to address your weaknesses.

We will need to alter habitual compensatory movement patterns.

We will need to challenge you to venture into ranges of motion you have been avoiding.

It won’t be easy.

But it will be worth it.

The Juice Is in the Coaching

Yes, I am cheering for you to succeed. I see your struggles in the gym, and I am rooting for you to overcome them.

But the juice is in the coaching.

I hold you as capable, even when you do not. I see the possibilities that you won’t allow yourself to see.

My payoff is bearing witness to the transformation awaiting you on the other side of that struggle.

My reward is seeing you empowered in your physical mastery. The moment when you truly realize the potential you have always possessed. The instant that the scales fall from your eyes and you see that the only limitations are those that you constructed yourself.

Until then, my role is to hold you to the standards, knowing that you might not appreciate it at the moment.

How do I know?

Because I have coaches too.

The Coaches Who Changed Me

None of my coaches made me any better by letting me shirk the standards.

The ones who made the greatest difference in my life were the ones who cared enough to hold my feet to the flame. The ones who rejected the disempowering beliefs that I held for myself.

They scared me.

They pushed me toward possibilities that felt beyond my capacity.

I didn’t always appreciate it at the moment. But looking back, I recognize the profound gift that they gave me.

Looking back, I am embarrassed by how small I was, how limited my vision for myself and my potential.

They taught me not to underestimate myself by repeatedly proving me wrong about what I could or could not do.

They refused to see me as incapable.

They insisted on holding me to the standard, no matter how I struggled, until I realized that all the limitations I had been hiding behind were fictions of my own creation.

Until I learned that “I can’t” is not a fixed condition, but a path more accurately described as:

“I am working toward.”

There Is No Finish Line

The struggles never end.

There are always new horizons to work toward. Excellence is a journey, not a destination. Mastery is something we pursue but never achieve.

The moment you think you have arrived, you stop learning. You stop improving. And entropy sets in.

You are growing or you are shrinking.

In fitness, there is no status quo.

This matters whether you are 25, 45, 65, or 85. Healthy aging is not about preserving yourself exactly as you are. It is about continuing to build and maintain the physical capacity that allows you to participate fully in your life.

The job of your coach is to keep you growing.

And all growth comes from discomfort.

So yes, I am going to challenge you.

And no, you do not have to like it.

I get it. I’d rather hide in the back of the class and have the coach pass me by without comment as well.

But does that coach really make me better?

No.

The coaches who changed me were the ones who cared enough to hold me to a standard outside my comfort zone. The ones who cared less about whether I liked them and more about whether they were contributing to my progress.

Why I Coach

Those coaches have made my life possible.

They awakened in me the desire to contribute to you as they did to me. Because each of us hungers to be a contribution in the world.

And CrossFit is the methodology through which I have been able to contribute to the betterment of people’s lives.

Here at Empower in Vancouver, I get to see that happen every day. People arrive with different backgrounds, different abilities, different limitations, and different goals. The standard isn’t that everyone performs the same workout with the same weight or range of motion.

The standard is that we keep working toward better.

Better movement. More strength. More mobility. Greater confidence. Greater capacity for life.

Coaching is my purpose. My calling.

It is a gift I get to both give and receive.

It is not something I do for the money, but for the satisfaction of bearing witness to your breakthroughs.

So yes, I know: when you see me walking toward your station, you might hope that I will pass you by.

But I hope that I don’t.

I hope that every class you attend, I am able to contribute something that helps you move better, become stronger, and expand what you believe you are capable of.

Because that’s what I came here to do.

I am here to hold the standard.

I am here to coach.