Social media is a blessing and a curse. This article focuses on what is awesome about social media, learning new things. As strength coaches, physical therapists, other movement professionals, or just regular people interested in fitness; we are always looking for new ideas and inspiration. Instagram has become the “go to” medium for the advancement of our professions and fitness or performance training. Every year we scour the internet looking for the best 5 accounts to highlight. These are the people who consistently make us say, “Why didn’t I think of that?”.
What we considered when making our list –
- Actual experience in the field programming and coaching athletes or reviewing and creating research related to strength and conditioning.
- Someone who has a specific athlete population that they work with, but it’s obvious their programs and techniques would crossover to other athlete types.
- Fitness models are not strength and conditioning coaches. They are not on our list.
- We appreciate creativity, but not gimmicks,when it come to exercise creation and selection.
- While we love when a coach is someone who is keeping him or herself fit…we put more stock in coaches who consistently get OTHER people to perform better, improve their fitness and become more resilient.
This is not a ranking of best to worst, just our top five for 2021. Here is the Movement Guides Top Strength and Conditioning Coach Instagram Accounts to Follow in 2021:
- realgame.athletics – Get ready to drop your jaw. Alex Whitehair brings some of the most creative exercises and progressions that I’ve ever seen on Instagram. Better yet, they are all performed with exquisite form and with obvious benefits. I find myself hitting the “save” button on almost all of his posts. He seems to primarily focus on plyometrics and rotational power and he uses boxes, bands and pendulum (landmine) movements in ways you’ve never considered. This man is a tremendous athlete and if nothing else you’ll be hypnotized by his hand movements! If you train top end athletes or are a high level athlete yourself, you must give this man a follow. While you are at it, create a realgame collection in your “saved” folder and get ready to fill it up quickly. https://www.instagram.com/realgame.athletics/
- nooch_13 – Carmen Del Mastro is just so damn smart. I’m serious, his combinations of movements and modalities can be applied to just about any team sport or explosive individual sport. His technique is always on point and you’ll find consistency across movements. What do I mean by this? Well, for one, his videos always demonstrate “triple flexion” of the up leg and “triple extension” of the power leg. These details are not important sometimes, they are important all the time. Much like Alex Whitehair above, Carmen is very creative but not stupid creative. You will find many useful progressions and tweaks to many of the movements you’re probably already programming. If you have not already done so, click on the nooch_13 profile, hit follow and start taking notes. https://www.instagram.com/nooch_13/
- coachtaragarrison – Tara Garrison is the real deal. She has an incredible story. Losing everything at one point in her life, going through a complete transformation and building herself up to the incredible fitness coach and motivational person that she is now. Tara promotes training heavy, hard and often to women…which I think is so needed. Too many female fitness “influencers” promote incessant boot camp, HIIT, pink weight bullshit. She is on a mission to crush workout “myths” that seem to perpetuate women’s fitness culture. Coach Garrison understands physiology, training science and proper form. This means she is not just a good follow and coach for women but for all genders. What’s really great about her feed is that you get top level workouts, seriously intelligent nutrition advice and also emotional/mental coaching. I love Tara’s feed and I think you will too. https://www.instagram.com/coachtaragarrison/
- pjfperformance – As I mentioned in the intro, we love when a coach works in one specific sport but their work obviously crosses over to others. Well, enter Paul J. Fabritz. Paul is known for and works primarily with basketball athletes and he is a great player in his own right. This means he is able to combine a deep knowledge of the game with his strong command of sport science and research to provide extremely powerful posts about improving all aspects of human performance relevant to basketball. His feed is a mix of basketball skill acquisition, strength and conditioning drills and breaking down game tape to show how it all relates. This guy is a pro’s pro. If you want to know what it means to be a strength and conditioning PROFESSIONAL watch and better yet listen to how Paul communicates his depth of knowledge. If you can understand angles, leverage, and positioning at his level you will soon find athletes of all types banging down your door for help. https://www.instagram.com/pjfperformance/
- thehpm – Now known as the Human Performance Mechanic, Dr. Nicholas Rolnick, DPT is best known as one of the leading educators on Blood Flow Restriction training (BFR) in the world. His selection as one of the top strength coach accounts may not seem obvious but the science behind BFR is really revolutionizing and reverberating through the research concerning strength training and rehab. For that reason I think the more people who get exposed to BFR the better as it will continue to spur new ideas and questions. What’s great about Dr. Rolnick is that he is not affiliated with any one particular BFR device or system so you can trust that what he is preaching is just what the research is telling him. He does an excellent job of digesting the research and then explaining it in tangible ways (when possible). If you are interested in getting yourself or your clients stronger, than you need to learn what is going on in the BFR world. Much of the what is being learned can actually be applied and inform your programming without a BFR device. As a strength coach, physical therapist, personal trainer or other movement professional you should be able to speak intelligently about BFR even if you don’t use it. Let the Human Performance Mechanic be your teacher. https://www.instagram.com/thehpm/
I hope you enjoyed this article. You should take a moment to follow each of the amazing accounts on our list. We find the very best highlighting different accounts each year. By no means did the people on our prior lists fall off the map. Keep reading on to find our prior top 5’s. Also, if you think someone deserves to be on the list next year let us know in the comments.
We’d also appreciate if you gave us, Movement Guides, a follow as well. We try to post interesting and helpful training content. Check out our online store where you can find our unique pieces of fitness equipment aimed at helping people move better.
Finally, if you like this list you should read who made our 2020 and 2019 top 5
Top 5 of 2020 article can be found here: https://movementguides.com/top-5-strength-coach-instagram-accounts-to-follow-2020/
Top 5 of 2019 article is here: https://movementguides.com/top-5-strength-and-conditioning-coach-instagram-accounts-to-follow-in-2019/
Thanks for reading and feel free to share!
Respectfully,
Kyle Sela, PT, DPT, OCS, SCS
