You see them everywhere in Hollywood, attractive guys and girls, with a ton of print ads, and background tv extra appearances to their names, but what they really want more than anything, is to be recognised for their fantastic thespian abilities, rather than their hotness.

But while they wait to be discovered as the next De Niro or Streep, they do the swimsuit shots, and the product endorsements, and the launch parties to pay the bills.

Each week I receive at least one email from someone looking for coaching work.

Sometimes they are experienced coaches relocating to Auckland, and hoping to continue working in an area that they are passionate about.

Sometimes they are straight out of university or a fitness college, with no experience, but all fired up to make a difference.

Sometimes, they have no qualifications at all, no experience with CrossFit, and not even living in New Zealand!

And sometimes, they include an action shot of them exercising that removes all doubt.....

Then there is the athlete .

The most common job application we get, starts with a list along the lines of:

1st place at Timbuktu Throwdown
6th place at [insert small town here] 5km fun run
28th place at CrossFit Regionals 2012 (team, alternate)
Top of gym leaderboard for all non-technical movements....

It's quite a common thing in the fitness and sporting world for an athlete to move into coaching.

It's incredibly prolific in CrossFit, and somewhere along the way, athletic prowess became synonymous with coaching ability.

However, successful coaches have a desire to help people, a fascination with movement and it's application to the human body, or the simple fact that they are just really freaking good at getting people to do stuff they aren't good at, better.

While the above reasons might be stated by the athlete/coach as motivation for their hunt for gainful employment, generally the real reason is to earn just enough money to spend more time in the gym pursuing their own training.

We've had more than our share of top athletes training here, who also coached for us.

But like Fabio, it's important to us that they are first and foremost recognised as coaches/athletes and not the other way around.....

Like many other CrossFit affiliates, we breed our coaches in house.

This way we not only ensure that every single part of their learning can be of use to them practically, but we also ensure that they're a good fit with our community, liked, respected, trusted.

We have a great bunch of interns right now, working through their Phase 2 Coach Development. They've been at this since February, and we're only just getting into the hands on, practical side of coaching. It's exciting to watch their progress, but we're not in a rush.

We're building coach/athletes here, not athlete/coaches.