What makes a good coach? It’s not humiliation. Maik on the swim coach who tried to break him, and why he spent his career doing the opposite.
When I was coming up as a talented young swimmer, I had a coach who believed the best way to make himself feel bigger was to make everyone around him feel small.
Nothing was ever good enough
After a bad race, he would berate you. Because, obviously, athletes deliberately swim poorly.
He controlled our lives, humiliated us, and did things that probably should have landed him in jail.
The abuse was both psychological and physical, and it went on for years.
His idea of motivation was humiliation.
And for a long time, I carried that trauma with me.
That’s the thing about bullies. Their voices can stay in your head long after they’re gone. Sometimes for decades, especially if you never address the damage.
Becoming a coach myself
Years later, when I became a coach myself, I knew I wanted to do things differently.
Not by sugarcoating things or telling clients what they wanted to hear. I’ve never been particularly good at that.
But by showing people the way forward without belittling them.
Initially, my approach was fairly mechanical.
I tell you what to eat, how to train. Your job is to follow the plan and then we’ll get results.
Simple enough.
But then something happened.
I started seeing my first real client transformations, and I realized this was about much more than losing body fat or gaining muscle.
These people were accomplishing things they had genuinely believed were impossible.
And something changed in them.
Yes, they looked better. As in, a lot better. But they also carried themselves differently. They weren’t just building better physiques.
They were growing as people.
What makes a good coach: helping people see what they can’t see yet
That’s when my perspective on coaching shifted.
I realized I had a gift for helping people transform themselves, often far beyond what they thought they were capable of.
And that was far more rewarding than simply handing someone a workout and a diet plan.
These guys are examples of what I mean.
They did the work, the diet, the posing… no need for me to scream or become some sort of clipboard-carrying coach.
My role was to help them see what they couldn’t see themselves yet.
When the day of the photo shoot came, I used all the tricks of the trade—such as posing, carb loading, oil and angles—to make them look like Greek gods/goddesses. Afterwards, one client pointed at the photo and said to me, “I can’t believe this is me.”
At 50, after decades in this industry, that’s still one of the most rewarding parts of what I do.
I still push my clients hard. I hold them accountable. I tell them when they’re not doing what needs to be done. And yes, at some point my sarcasm might come through but I never put someone down. I will always be my clients’ biggest fan.
You don’t have to break someone down to build them up.
Maik Wiedenbach
The greatest thing a coach can do is help someone discover potential they never knew they had (sidebar: it will also be the most fulfilling thing for you, the coach!).
And somewhere along the way, without even realizing it at first, I had become the opposite of my old coach.
Perhaps that’s my biggest accomplishment.
Maik
Related reading: Three Bodies. Three Stories. One Culture. · Five Years. Still Building.
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Maik Wiedenbach is a Hall of Fame swimmer turned bodybuilding champion and fitness model featured in Muscle & Fitness and Men’s Journal. An NYU adjunct professor and award-winning coach, he founded New York’s most sought-after personal training gym.