Vulkan Weightlifting Assistant Coach
USAW Sports Performance Coach
Darin’s path to coaching Olympic weightlifting started in his early 30s after spending most of his life sedentary when he wanted to get healthier. After a few years running half marathons he wanted to get stronger so started powerlifting and then transitioned to crossfit. He soon realized that his favorite part of crossfit was the Olympic lifts and quickly focused his training on the sport that he now loves – Olympic weightlifting.
By nature Darin tries to understand everything he is doing deeply, so as he began training at Vulkan Weightlifting he began asking questions to try to understand everything he was being asked to do. “I remember one time refusing to make a change my coach asked of me until he explained exactly why I needed to do it.” He does not encourage his own athletes to be quite so stubborn. This need to understand his chosen sport, and his own struggle to improve as someone who is not a naturally gifted athlete or strong person, led him to seek out as much information and feedback as possible. He spent time getting feedback from a former Russian champion athlete and coach, trying to understand the sport from every angle possible.
He began getting practical experience by providing peer coaching under guidance from Vulkan’s head coach at the time and eventually was asked to serve as Vulkan Weightlifting’s Assistant Coach, a position he is honored to have.
Darin’s perspective is informed by his own struggles to correct numerous issues in his own lifting, as well as his career as a clinical psychologist. Darin is able to bring a different perspective to the mental side of athletic performance that blends knowledge from the sport with decades of research in the field of psychology.
Darin hopes to rise to compete on a national level as a masters athlete himself, but is most excited about the opportunity to develop and grow a new generation of athletes who can far surpass his own competitive experience.