Yearly Coaching Review- How we Get our Athletes Ready for Next Season

28 Oct Yearly Coaching Review- How we Get our Athletes Ready for Next Season

For athletes, this is most often the time of year to kick back, relax and let the body and mind recover, the former may be slightly fresher this year, with the latter potentially more fatigued due to an increase of stressors linked with isolation and frustration, which are not usually encountered in a standard season!

For a coach, I find this period one of the busiest times of the year, reflecting on how the year has gone and discussing strategies with athletes to keep progressing through the Winter, into next years hopefully more frequent race calendar.

In terms of our coaching operations, a lot has changed this year. We’ve worked hard on integrating experienced practitioner’s input into decisions concerning each athlete and having an infrastructure that makes it as efficient and effective as possible on a remote basis. There’s certainly still a lot of work to do to optimise the cohesiveness and efficiency within a business model, but the value for me personally in the enjoyment of the work and the service for the athletes has been well worth it.

With that in mind, it’s made the content for the reviewing process self-explanatory, we’ve got input from the team from each athlete and collated data from all profiling sessions to create snapshots of how the year has planned out. This has led to having clear priorities to consider within upcoming training blocks and set aims into the season.

A key outcome within this review is to recognise trends in fitness. Considering what has led to positive training outcomes and deliberating whether or not to turn those same dials in upcoming training blocks. If both the coach and athlete have a good understanding of the purpose and context of each training block the programme can really start to take shape with commitment from both.

As part of Hayden’s (Physiology) input to the review, he summarised the years training duration with a really nice visual. This gave the opportunity to match instances within the year really easily and to recognise how they impacted training. Each athlete’s graph tells a different story and certain trends based around lockdown are fairly consistent. Consider the inevitable reduction in swimming on the below graph and the reduction in total training time as the season became more and more depleted. What’s also clear across all reviews as always, is the consistent time training spent pays off.

You can pull data from training peaks in excel format via the export function and if you’re looking to build your training based off previous lessons, that’s a sensible place to start.

 I’d like to thank Hayden (Physiology), Pete (Strength and Conditioning), Claire (Physiotherapy), and Caroline (Nutrition) for their valuable contributions across our group calls, group content, and individual interactions with the athletes.

For your own training purposes, really examine the impact of the interventions you’ve used throughout the year and use that to sculpt your approach moving forward. Seek out any opportunities you can to gain more information about yourself as an athlete and don’t underestimate the patient progression caused by the basic principles of training.