A lifter messaged me last month with the question I get most often. "My coach is okay, I think. How would I know if he wasn't?" I don't answer that question with credentials. I answer it with three small tests, and none of them are about the certifications on the coach's bio page.
The cartoon villain is easy to spot. No programming, ego-lifts in the client's sessions, sells supplements out of the gym bag. A serious lifter is not going to sign with that coach in the first place. The coaches I would not refer my own clients to look more boring than that, and that is what makes them harder to leave.
They cannot tell you why this week is lighter than last week
Every program I have ever respected has shape. Loads move in waves. A week of accumulation, a week of intensification, a deload that is actually a deload. The shape is not decoration. The shape is how the SRA curve works.
If a lifter asks their coach "why is this week's top set RPE 7 when last week's was RPE 9," and the coach answers with "to give your body a break," the program does not have a shape. It has weeks. There is a difference. A coach with a shape can name where the lifter is in the block, what the block is building toward, and what the next block is going to ask of them. A coach without one is writing today's session in the same notebook they wrote yesterday's, with the same volume of thought.
This is the quietest red flag, because the sessions still feel hard, the loads still move up sometimes, and the client still gets stronger for a while. It looks like coaching until it stops working, and by then the lifter has spent a year of training on it.
They program the same accessory work for every client
I have a friend who coaches a roster of fifteen lifters. I have looked at six of their programs. The top sets vary. The accessories are identical. Same paused bench day, same Romanian deadlift volume, same tricep prescription, same week 4 deload. The coach is not writing programs. The coach is writing one program and changing the name at the top.
Autoregulation is not a luxury feature. Two lifters with the same one-rep maxes will respond to the same volume in different ways, and a coach who has actually watched both of them lift knows it within four weeks. Not knowing it after four months is the red flag. Refusing to change the prescription after the lifter brings up the data is a bigger one.
The honest version of this is rare and worth saying. Some coaches do run a stable program because they have evidence it works across a population. Sheiko did this for decades. The difference is that Sheiko knew exactly which population his program was for, and he adjusted within it. The red flag is not the stable program. The red flag is the coach who has never thought about whether their program fits the lifter in front of them.
They do not log anything
This is the one I weight heaviest, and the one most lifters do not think to check.
A coach who is coaching keeps a record. The record is for the coach, not the lifter. It captures what was prescribed, what came back, where the prescription drifted from the plan, and what the coach learned about that lifter from the drift. The format can be anything. A spreadsheet. A paper notebook. A notes app. Pavel writes on index cards. The point is that the record exists.
A coach without a record is not coaching. They are remembering. Memory is a worse instrument than a notebook, for the same reason RPE is a worse instrument than a velocity tracker if the lifter never calibrates. The signal degrades, and the coach does not notice it is degrading until the lifter stalls.
When a lifter asks me how to evaluate their coach, I tell them to ask one question. "Can I see what you wrote down about my last block?" If the coach has nothing to show, or has only the program file they sent at the start of the block, the coach is improvising. Improvisation is fine inside a session. It is not a substitute for coaching.
The lifter this is for
This post is for the lifter who is six months into working with someone and cannot quite explain why their progress feels flat. They like their coach. The sessions are hard. The bar still goes up most weeks. They are not going to leave over a vibe, and they should not.
But the three tests above are not vibes. They are observable. Ask about the shape of the block. Look at three of the coach's other programs, if you can. Ask to see the notes from your own last block. If all three answers are good, the coach is probably good, and the flat patch is on you. If two of the three answers are missing, the flat patch is going to keep getting flatter, and no certification on the coach's bio page is going to fix it.