Mildly entertaining, somewhat obscure guests, relatively interesting topics,

semi-professional production quality, reasonably well-informed commentary, a great value for the money,

hundreds of fans all around the world. It's the starting strength gyms podcast with your host, Ray Gillingwater.

All right, everyone. Welcome back. Today we're joined by Tony Stein, starting strength coach

at Starting Strength Houston. And I wanted to have Tony on today because we got a request from Francesco DeCaro on the forum to answer a question for him, which essentially is what is the process like for an aspiring coach to become an apprentice at one of these gyms to become an SSC and then to become a head

coach. And Tony's done all that. So if you're interested in this topic, please proceed,

continue to listen and watch. If not, we'll see you on the next one. This is a rather niche

episode, Tony. So we're talking to primarily

aspiring coaches, and we're talking primarily to people that are so into what we're doing

that they want to hear what it's like for an aspiring coach to do what you've done. So let's

start there, break it down for us. What did you do? Where were you in life? What motivated you? Just kind of give us the context about how you got started with JD and the team over at Starting Strength Houston.

Well, so I guess this is a real fun story to tell because I was on the sort of on the cusp of there being a planned path to the credential. Historically,

there hadn't really been a planned path to it. So I really first started lifting in kind

of like late 2016, early 2017, read the book, got super excited about it, started putting

on weight, getting my lifts up, eventually saw it coaching for it. And I was super excited about it, started putting on weight, getting my lifts up, eventually

saw it coaching for it.

And I was really excited to, you know, just like everybody share this with, you know, family,

friends, to anybody who would tolerate me talking about it, basically.

But at the time, if you wanted to pursue the credential, it meant that you went to an affiliate gym,

because these gyms didn't exist yet,

that you got into contact with somebody,

that you lurked on the forums,

...