Why are Steve Magness and Jonathan Marcus compiling and selling free material as some sort of master coaching course?

I once read all his blog posts, and then I bought his book. Money well spent. Having everything organized in one place in book format was very useful.

The experience and expertise required to know what is worth including, and to organize and contextual the selected work, is not easily acquired. Organizing knowledge is work, and it's reasonable to seek compensation for it in a free market. If you don't want it, don't buy it.

You sound like the guys who complain because pirated anime downloads don't include English subtitles.

Han Solo wrote:

Care to comment on why then you compile others' free resources and then try to sell them to people as some sort of master coaching course?

If that's a problem, then most coaches should be free. A lot of athletes pay coaches simply because it's easier than scouring the internet for months to make the ideal training plan. So perhaps you are paying these guys for their time spent compiling everything and summarizing it nicely, which in turn saves you time.

I get it, and don't see a problem with it.

I guess you pay for the service of it being compiled.

I say the same thing about college courses.

Of course, I am working on online content that is widely available and will charge for it once it is up and running.

I do not think there is anything inherently wrong unless they are were passing off all the information as their own in which case it is plagiarism. One issue could be using someone's copyrighted material without permission.

If you think that's bad, consider for a moment that people actually pay these two for coaching, like Sara Crouch.

His first book with Brad is a compilation and repackaging of Dweck, Duckworth, Gladwell, etc.

Steve is going through his personal journey and posting it on Twitter. So every time he makes a discovery or finds something that validates him, he posts it and those who identify like it. It is what it is.

He is an intelligent guy who probably needs to focus more on his job at UH, although they may have an understanding that he is there to do what he can and score a few conference points here and there.

I only get irritated when he tweets stern absolutes regarding the coaching world. He really doesn't have the pedigree or skins on the wall to do so. In the end it's UH so nobody really gives a crap.

Weird - looks like you're now paying for it?

These guys are thieves in every sense of the word. They steal other peoples information/research, and they steal money from people they con into paying.

Magness and Marcus are the biggest grifters and con artists in the coaching industry.

Only problem I see is retaliation

Steve blew the big whistle & sadly it’s costing him

Magness was literally the only "athlete" that Salazar doped...and he was retired at the time.

You can't even call it a whistle-blow because Magness was more involved with the science of it than Salazar was. Magness got fired from NOP for dating an athlete, then spoke out about the doping to get revenge on his firing.

If Magness had the integrity that he claims to have now, he wouldn't have CREATED and PARTICIPATED IN the tests in the first place.

+1000

It’s been this way forever. All these “Gurus” want to pretend they’ve reinvented the wheel when they’re just repackaging standard training plans to make a buck. Get a real job.

Salazar coach lifetime ban by USAFA for doping offenses & physical assault! FACT
This retaliation is relentless.

Nike marketing at its finest.

The fact is that what Magness and Marcus are providing and discussing has value, including Alan Webb's training and an organized compilation of Canova's training methods. Have you ever tried to figure out Canova from publicly available information? I have, and it's a mess. And they worked directly with Canova rather than relying on what little is publicly available. Maybe you aren't interested, but don't pretend that all they're doing is copying and pasting.

I appreciate the two for challenging training dogma and diving deep into why we choose to do what we do in selecting workouts. It was refreshing listening to their first several seasons of the podcast to think of the big picture. At a certain point though, you need credibility and results when you are implying that you are a coaching guru by having a podcast and selling the public training theory. When my cousin played football at Houston, I couldn’t help but see the results of the distance squad on Saturdays scrolling by and they were pretty poor:

Conference championship finishes with Steve Magness as coach:

2016: Women - 9th, Men - 8th

2017: Women - 10th, Men - 6th

2018: Women - 7th, Men - 9th

2019: Women - 8th, Men - 11th

I think coaching pros, writing books, and having a podcast might have distracted Magness a bit.