The Work Before the Work

The Work Before the Work

Over the past fifteen years I have coached female champions and contenders across KRUSH, RISE, WBC Muay Thai, and obviously within Olympic national team pipelines .

I wanted to share a few insights observed, repeatedly, across programmes, countries, and coaching cultures rather than from the outside looking in; and it points to a professional failure that the industry has been remarkably comfortable leaving unnamed.

These failures are not complicated. Most coaches who work with female athletes have never examined what they assume about coaching female athletes. They have not done the preparatory work. Because they haven't, they produce a narrow set of predictable errors that have nothing to do with the athlete and everything to do with what the coach brought into the room, or failed to.

These errors fall along two axes. The first is attention. The second is engagement.

Attention failures

Invisibility is the quieter of the two. It looks like a coach who runs a session for the room rather than for the athletes in it. Female fighters train alongside male teammates, which is normal and necessary, but in programmes where the coach has not examined his defaults, alongside becomes behind. Pad rounds are shorter or less demanding. Technical correction is less specific. Fight preparation is less detailed. The athlete is present in the session. She is not present in the coach's planning.

Rarely would I say its conscious, which is precisely why it persists. A coach who is actively neglecting an athlete knows he is doing so. The coach whose attention simply defaults toward the male fighters in his gym does not experience himself as failing anyone. He experiences himself as coaching; and by the metrics he has never thought to question, he is.

The other attention failure is its inverse. The athlete is seen, but not as an athlete. The coach's attention is present but misdirected; oriented toward the person rather than the performer. What this produces in a professional context is a coaching relationship structured around something other than development. The athlete's progression becomes secondary to a dynamic that serves the coach's needs rather than hers.

I will not elaborate further. The industry knows what this looks like. The fact that it is tolerated as widely as it is tells you everything about the accountability infrastructure within which it operates.

Engagement failures

Avoidance is the most professionally corrosive of the four patterns, because it disguises itself as respect. A coach who is uncomfortable with the physical proximity that pad work, clinch coaching, or corner work requires will withdraw from those contexts rather than examine the discomfort. The withdrawal is subtle. He delegates. He adjusts the session structure so that the contexts requiring close physical engagement occur less frequently, or are handled by someone else, or are replaced by bag work and drilling that requires no coach contact at all.

The athlete notices. What she cannot do is name it without the conversation becoming about something other than her training. And so she adapts; trains around the gap, compensates for the coaching she is not receiving, and develops more slowly than she should because a portion of her technical environment has been quietly removed.

The fourth pattern is framework failure: the coach engages fully but applies his existing model wholesale, without adaptation. Periodisation designed around male physiology. Loading protocols that ignore hormonal cyclicity. Recovery modelling that does not account for the athlete's actual biological environment. Communication patterns calibrated to response profiles that do not match the athlete in front of him. The intention is not the problem. The preparation is absent. And the athlete, who is doing everything asked of her: stalls, or breaks down, or underperforms in competition for reasons the coach cannot explain. He sits in the debrief with no answer for why an athlete who looked sharp in camp fell apart in the third round, because he has never learned the variables that would make it explicable.

This is the pattern most coaches will recognise in themselves when it is described to them, because it requires neither malice nor negligence. It requires only that the coach never sought out the knowledge he did not know he was missing. Which, in an industry that provides almost no structured education on this subject, is most of them.

For what it is worth, in my own career some of the most attentive, technically gifted, and adaptable athletes I have coached have been female fighters. This is a professional observation that makes the patterns described above harder, not easier, to justify. When the athlete is not the limitation, the explanation for stalled development has nowhere to go except back toward the coach.

What the preparation looks like

All four patterns resolve to the same deficit: the coach has not done the work before the work. The technical, physiological, and communicative preparation that elite-level coaching of female athletes requires is not optional and it is not intuitive. It spans specific domains: communication, physical context management, periodisation and loading calibrated to female physiology, feedback and correction protocols; and each of those domains requires deliberate study, not assumption.

I am not going to lay out that framework here. It is not a blog post's worth of content. It is a body of professional knowledge that takes time to build and should be built with intention rather than skimmed as a list of tips.

What I will say is this: the coaches I have worked alongside who had done that preparation did not experience coaching female athletes as a special problem. They did not describe it as more difficult or more delicate or requiring particular sensitivity. They described it as coaching. Because when the preparatory work is complete, that is all it is.

The athletes I have worked with at the highest level: the champions, the contenders, the fighters building toward Olympic qualification and succeeding, never asked to be treated differently. They asked to be coached properly. The distinction isn't a subtle one, but it is apparently invisible to a significant portion of the profession.

The preparation is available to any coach willing to do it. Whether the industry builds the infrastructure to require it is a separate question, and one I expect will take considerably longer to answer.