A Look at the Education of One of the Best, and Busiest, Strength Coaches in the Country
by Kim Goss

Play sports, lift weights, get a degree in exercise science and maybe take a weekend personal training certification course – now you’re all set to become a highly paid, competent strength coach. At least, this is the sensible approach followed by many who enter this profession. But there are other roads that successful strength coaches have used to educate themselves – roads less traveled, such as the one taken by Ben Prentiss. Click on the graphic to read the newspaper article

Prentiss is owner of BodyTuning, a 2,000-square-foot private gym in Fairfield County, Connecticut. He has seven trainers working for him one-on-one with a clientele that ranges from housewives seeking to lose a few pounds to professional athletes training hard for an upcoming season. Prentiss is a Level 4 PICP trainer (which means he not only has book smarts, he also trains world-class athletes), and he has interned with Charles, worked as an associate trainer at two of Charles’s gyms and helped conduct several certification seminars with Charles.

As one who employs strength coaches, Prentiss believes that one way to determine how good a coach is really is to find out whom they have trained – Do they “walk the talk?” so to speak. If you ask Prentiss this question, his response is, “Come down to my gym tomorrow and see!” If you take him up on his offer, you’ll most likely see him take eight to ten professional athletes through intense, hour-long workouts designed to enable them to achieve physical superiority. And if you listen in, you’ll find that Coach Prentiss is capable of answering all their questions about the latest findings in diet, supplements, anatomy, biomechanics and all the science behind his Poliquin-based workouts.

In this exclusive interview (performed late at night after he had finished with his last client), Coach Prentiss talks about his career path and offers sensible advice on how you – if you’re dead serious about it – can become a top strength coach.

KG: How valuable was your college education to you in becoming a trainer?
Prentiss: In college, I began by studying exercise science, taking basic classes such as biology and anatomy. But because the exercise science program at this college was mostly aerobic based, I didn’t believe pursuing this degree would prepare me for what I wanted to do. So I decided to switch to communications, and I researched the field on my own.

KG: What type of books or magazines were you reading at the time?
Prentiss: I absolutely loved Muscle Media, as it had information you could use; and their company EAS was releasing cutting-edge supplements. When I was a sophomore in college, my roommate and I were like excited kids and would literally run to the newsstand when an issue came out.

KG: How did you get involved with Charles?
Prentiss: When Charles was conducting an internship with a trainee in Stamford, I went up to him and said, “You don’t know me, but I’ve been reading all your stuff; and I really believe in your system. I have a gym down the street, and it’d be great if you could come and check it out.” Charles agreed; and when he came inside, he started laughing and said, “This gym looks exactly like mine!” I had no clue. I had never met Charles before – I just thought at the time that this was the best stuff. He then asked me if I’d like to do an internship with him in Colorado Springs for the summer, so I did.

KG: How did that work out?
Prentiss: We developed a good relationship. In the summer I would work for Charles in Colorado Springs, and in the winter he would come to my gym and work at my place.

KG: When you started working with him, was it what you expected?
Prentiss: Going into it I remember being really nervous because I didn’t know Charles at the time and what to expect. I had been training a lot of athletes, but not at the caliber that Charles was used to dealing with.

KG: What would you say is the most valuable aspect of working with Charles?
Prentiss: Learning how Charles wrote programs, seeing how he used cluster training and wave loading and the proper way to use hooks and bands. For example, we trained David Boston, Ethan Brooks and Doug Weight, and it was quite a learning experience to see how Charles would put together his workouts every year, as they were all so different. For example, when Charles started working with DB, he had a very strong upper body, but his hamstrings and VMO were nonexistent. So with David, Charles emphasized sled work and different types of squats – you name a squat and DB had done it.

KG: What you’re saying is that you can’t just look at one workout and expect to write training programs like Charles does?
Prentiss: Absolutely. Like with DB, you can’t look at one of his arm workouts and say, “OK, I understand what Charles is doing,” because every workout is designed with an end goal in mind. You know, I’ve watched some of the trainers at major health clubs, and I’ve never, ever seen any trainer at those gyms log workouts – they’re just walking around, flying off the hip, machine to machine, 3 sets of 10 – I don’t even know why these clients need a trainer.

KG: What would you say is the major problem with strength coaches failing to achieve the results they want with their athletes?
Prentiss: One problem with young coaches is that they get so involved with all the cool gadgets out there, such as chains and strongman equipment, that they often neglect the basics. There’s a place for all that stuff, but you’ve got to build the athlete up to be able to use those things. I’ll tell you a funny story . . . well, not really funny, as it almost made me throw up. I was at a gym on vacation, training; and I saw this high school kid, maybe 150 pounds and as weak as can be, working with a trainer who had him squatting with chains on an unloaded bar – I’m not kidding you. This trainer was so eager to get the kid on chains, but I tell you, this kid would probably struggle doing just 10 bodyweight squats, let alone squats with chains.

KG: Do you focus a lot on nutrition, and do you find that athletes are more careful about their eating habits than in the past?
Prentiss: My system is a reflection of Charles’, so of course, good nutrition is key. As for the athletes that I’ve seen, many of them don’t have a clue about how to eat well. There are athletes I started training who don’t have any idea how to make a good post-workout shake. And it shows. I have seen guys who have worked with trainers for 10 weeks and they’re fat and weak – it absolutely amazes me. And if you were to pinpoint the reason, it’s not so much the training as it is because these guys don’t pay attention to their diet or take the right supplements.

KG: But many of these athletes have worked with trainers who have given them advice, right?
Prentiss: I have an NFL player, and for some reason the coaches wanted him to get down to 217 by training camp. He came to me – remember, this is a professional athlete – because the trainer he had been working with for the past 10 weeks gave him no supplement advice. I had him write down what he was eating: He was eating a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich in the afternoon, peanuts and a protein shake; and that was about it. He was so weak and tired that he thought he had mono, and he had to get a mono test – and this was a professional athlete getting ready for training camp!

KG: What is your philosophy on injuries in sport?
Prentiss: We all know athletes get hurt in sport; but as professional physical educators, we have to do everything we can to ensure that the athlete is mentally and physically ready to move on to the higher levels. You can’t have a gymnast perform double twisting backs on the second day of practice when they can’t even do a forward roll yet. And just because a freshman football player is big and strong doesn’t mean he’s ready to play on the varsity team, especially if he can’t run 20 feet without gasping for air.

KG: Are certain types of injuries more common to today’s athletes?
Prentiss: One of the most common mistakes coaches make today is that they rush their athletes into doing things they are not ready to do. The sports medicine doctors I’ve talked to say that about 85 percent of the injuries they see are overuse injuries.

KG: Where do you start with a new trainee?
Prentiss: After we test someone, we put them in what we always call our first phase – Charles calls it accumulation, and you can also call it the structural phase – where you’re using lateral work and trap 3 work, and you’re doing hamstrings. You’re basically balancing out the athletes. These are things that these athletes have never done before they came to train under Charles. I would say that 90 percent of the athletes that I have trained have never done these things. In the first phase, which lasts about four weeks, we rarely have an athlete squat, because we have to balance them out. After that we’re off and running.

KG: Do you only work with athletes at your gym?
Prentiss: We have all types of people working out at our facility, and that includes the general population. I usually work only with professional athletes whose livelihood depends on following what I tell them to do, but I have other trainers in my gym who work with clients from the general population.

KG: What type of workouts do you use with your general-population clients?
Prentiss: Generally, we put these types of clients on the German Body Comp program, which I must say is hard to do at a regular gym because you have to be able to switch back and forth between so many exercises; and you might find that while you were on the squat rack, some guy decided to start reading a newspaper on the leg curl machine you need to use.

KG: Is it hard to motivate yourself to train after working in a gym all day?
Prentiss: Absolutely. As a trainer, you know that the number-one thing you’ve got to do is get results; but I tell people that if you want respect from your athletes, you have to look the part. I hear my athletes talking about other trainers: “That trainer is a joke; it doesn’t even look like he works out!” I practice what I preach – I always remain at a low level of body fat, I eat right, I train hard and I always get five or six workouts in a week. After all, how can I expect my athletes to eat a strict diet if I go home and eat chicken parmigiana?

KG: Do you find that after some strength coaches enjoy some success they develop big egos or start believing their own hype?
Prentiss: Yeah, but you have to understand that everybody’s motives are different. Some guys are just in it to make money by selling books and videos, and that’s fine for them. I like being in the trenches training athletes – that’s where I’ve got my experience, and that’s what I like to do. But then I may eventually get to the point where I might want to do other things. Charles has trained high-level athletes for – who knows? – 27 years; and now his interest seems to center around medicine and teaching.

KG: Have you developed a skeptical attitude about all the strength coaching gurus who keep popping up in the magazines and on the Internet?
Prentiss: You know, it seems that about every six months or so some new guru comes out of nowhere. I’m leery of these guys, because 90 percent of these guys on the Internet claim to train athletes all day long; but when you look into it, these guys haven’t trained anybody.

KG: What about those trainers who claim they can’t talk about whom they train because of confidentiality agreements?
Prentiss: Oh, please! I always say to people, “You want to see who I’m training, come on down to my gym tomorrow. Good trainers can name names, and they’ll tell you how many gold medals their athletes have won. If these guys want to call themselves gurus and have people pay for and follow their systems, let’s see the results!

KG: What are your future goals?
Prentiss: I’d just like to keep my business growing. I’ve developed a quite a niche in working with NHL players, but it’s a lot of work because I not only write their programs but also train them. I love writing workout programs, so I’d like to get to the point where, as Charles was doing, I’m primarily writing programs and having my trainers put the athletes through them.