If you are gonna be my coach, I want you to be an example for me!

Have you ever asked yourself, who are the people that athletes spend the most time with? Well I think that is their coach! And I think that besides being in charge of your training, they should also be an example to you. The coach is usually somebody you trust and somebody you look up to!

Well, lately I have been observing coaches I see at the pool, and tell you the truth I am kind of disappointed. Let's take for example the coach of the synchronized swimming team... she is a lady in her middle thirties and she ain't the best looking person you have seen. And I do not mean only appearance, she is always frowned and mad about something...she is just not the person I'd like to spend half my day with!!!

So that lady is always talking to her athletes how they are fat, how they look terrible and stuff like that. And some of the girls on the team are so young, they are too young to understand what somebody else really means. They take every single word literally and trust me those words really stab their heart.

The other day that "coach" made the whole team stand on the bleachers. She forced all girls to take off their clothes and stay in their swim suits, and as they were taking the clothes off she was making them turn around and was telling them that they had a huge butt, or jiggling legs, or big bellies and etc.




I had a friend that was a synchronized swimmer and she was practicing with the same coach. She used to love practicing. You could see that sparkle in her eyes when she talked about sport. But she always came to school sad after practice and that was breaking my heart. She was a really good looking girl, she had a rocking body and everybody was envious about it and wanted to look like her, but to her coach she was always fat. She never looked good enough. And you know what she was doing? She was always on these pointless, stupid diets that remind me of photosynthesis. She wasn't eating with days, she was doing that Moon diet, where you don't eat anything and you just drink tea... and let's make the long story short...what happened eventually with her is that she just quit practicing and trust me she really had an amazing potential!




Every day I go to practice and I see so many stories like the one mentioned above... And the saddest thing is that all the coaches themselves do not pay attention to their health and body. They are all eating tons of chocolate and drinking tons of soda... if you meet them on the street you would never guess that this person might have something to do with sports! But everything said above, doesn't bother them at all, they just keep picking on their athletes for how fat they are and encouraging them to loose the weight in a really unhealthy way.



I remember one time, there was that girl-she is one of the top swimmers in the country, but she started putting on some weight. So at one training camp the coach put her on a diet...and that diet REALLY SUCKED!!! I remember that one of the days she was supposed to eat something like 4 or 5 potatoes and that was all the food for the day, and we should keep in mind that this girl was spending about 4-5hours in the pool and another 2 and a half hours in the weightlifting room every single day!!

I have seen hundreds of stories like that, and I am always wondering could it really be true that most of the coaches are so uninformed and uninterested in healthy eating and nutrition??? I think that everybody should study those stuff before they become coaches and start messing up with people's health and life!!

You can't imagine how many girls that are athletes in their effort to loose weight turn to the "easy" way, respectively bulimia and anorexia...

So I think that coaches should change their point of view and in first place start caring about their health first, in order to be a better example for their athletes and give them good, adequate and helpful advices not only on the training part but also nutritionally!