By: Joe Siegel 


What to expect when you’re expecting…to hire a coach

As an endurance athlete, hiring a coach could be one of the best investments of your money you can make. It can all depend if you’re willing to invest another one of your precious resources – time. Yes, I’m saying that not only do you have to pay your coach a fee, you have to spend time on him. That investment can be quite large initially, but will taper off the longer you work together. When I rushed a fraternity, the brothers liked to tell pledges that the fraternity will return ten-fold what you put into it. A similar statement can be made for the time you put in teaching your new coach about you as an athlete.

All metaphors aside, it is very important for an athlete to share everything about themselves to their coach. During the initial phase this means training history, injury history, and typical training patterns from the past. A good coach will want more – what are you goals? What are your ambitions? What is a successful race to you? How do you balance work and life? Where are your constraints and where are your opportunities in your training? Answering these questions is not a one-time thing – they require attention, reevaluation and discussion throughout the year. These are more obvious discussions you’ll need to have with your coach, but I want to discuss when you should be filling him in with more information.

Athlete Responsibilities

  Ok, you’ve met your coach, you’ve talked, emailed and skyped at length about yourself. You’ve probably got a couple weeks under your belt. You’re comfortable with each other, your coach understands you training/life balance a little better and is providing you workouts accordingly. It’s all smooth sailing from here on out, right? Not exactly. Your coach still needs regular feedback from you. Power files, miles logged and completed swim sets are great, and they go a long way in telling your coach how you are doing. But they don’t tell the full story. How did you feel during those threshold sets? Did you complete them easily? Did you struggle but felt confident? Or maybe you had to reach shoulder deep in your suitcase of courage just to hit the lower end numbers. How did the workout leave you able to complete the next day’s workout? 

Completing a workout isn’t just as simple as checking a box many times, your coach can use your feedback to plan better for the next day, the next week and beyond…but only if you can take the time to fill him in on the details. If you struggled, have you been feeling fatigue building up and this was the last nail in the coffin to draining you? Or maybe you just spent all day at a trade show working on your feet, hauling equipment around. You coach not only needs to know what you accomplished during your workout, but how it felt and why it made you feel that way. Sometimes your coach may be planning for that workout to crack you, maybe he just wants to see how far you can go in the red, so don’t expect to walk out of the week with your suitcase full. That feedback is critical to help him understand how you are responding to the cycles of stress and recovery periods in your plan.


What to report

 Sometimes the difference between a successful and unsuccessful relationship is letting the coach know more about your life outside of training before he notices its effects on your workouts. Changes in your typical work/life patterns for example. Perhaps by the time a coach can see something’s up by your training files, a few days’ worth of workouts have been non-optimal, or he may not notice it at all. You may not always know as an athlete what feedback is critical and what is trivial, so oversharing is fine. Your coach can sift through some of the unimportant details to find what really matters. Isn’t that why you pay him after all? 

 Now, just to be clear, not every workout requires a novel. If something went amiss, a couple sentences in an email/text is great. Not every workout requires feedback either. After awhile, you’ll understand the cycles of fatigue and recovery and understand how you’re supposed to feel during and after typical workouts. If that’s the case and everything went peachy, no worries. At minimum, I would recommend a once per week quick update of the past week and the week ahead, if only to let your coach know everything is going well (after all, maybe Thursday’s VO2 sets were supposed to break you, so knowing they didn’t is important).

Injuries

Yes, yes a thousand times yes! Let your coach know if something is bothering you. You’ll learn the difference between good hurting (e.g. fatigued and sore muscles) and bad hurting (e.g. joint or sharp pains) if you don’t know it already. Err on the side of caution if you are not sure which it is and you coach will help you figure it out.  Even if you know you will get over it in a couple days, maybe your coach can adjust a recovery day to get you better quicker with no impact to your overall training goals.

Final Takeaway

The takeaway here is that as an athlete you need to be responsible for keeping your coach in the loop about the hows and whys of your training, not just the whats and whens. A good coach will also make sure to remind you that feedback is necessary, but as an athlete you should want to provide feedback without being asked. Don’t be afraid to overshare. It is a coach’s job to know what is important and what is not (Even if it doesn’t end up impacting your training plan, he can at least offer his condolences that your cat is not feeling well). Remember, you’re paying your coach to deliver the best plan possible, so make sure you get the most out of your dollars. Developing a smooth, feedback rich and consistent dialogue is critical to the value a coach can provide.

Quite possibly the most neglected form of training in either athletics or life is psychological in nature. When athletes or individuals in general talk about their success, they often talk in terms of miles ran, power on the bike, or hours they put in at the office. While there is no doubt that physical stress will lead to positive adaptations, there is still an entirely different side to success that does not get mentioned. This side to success is called sports psychology. This blog will touch on some techniques and how to use them either in athletics or day-to-day operations. 

What is Sports Psychology?
- Without pulling a definition from the dictionary, sports psychology is the science (or art) of preparing the mind for the stressors of your event. Just as athletes train their muscles and cardiovascular  systems, they also must train their mind for different circumstances that will arise during an event. Athletes at the highest level who are fighting for that 1% will tell you that a strong mind is what makes the difference between winning and finishing mid-pack. In life, a strong mentality could be the difference between getting that promotion or just meeting the status quo. 

Does it actually work?
- There was a study done with olympic divers in which they refrained from practice due to an injury. The injury lasted 10 weeks but during this time the athletes would visualize their dives and dissect them spin by spin. After the injury was healed, the divers returned to the arena and actually had improved their form and scores. How this works is that visualizations can trigger your neurological receptors. If you can go through your sport with vivid detail and target the muscles you will use neurologically, you can actually trick your body into thinking you are performing the movement. It is a great tool to have for off-days or if you're going through an injury that prevents movement. 

What are some methods I can use?
- As noted above, visualization is one of the most popular forms of mental training. The key to performing it correctly though is to include all five senses while going through your visualization. For example, if you are imagining running on a trail: See the trees passing by and sun shining through the woods, hear the sound of the birds chirping and your feet hitting the ground, taste the sweat running down your face, smell the pine in the air, and feel the foot strike as it propels you forward.
- Secondly, the most popular form of mental training is relaxation techniques. There are many different ways to utilize relaxation techniques but my favorite is breathing techniques. It involves inhaling deeply and then releasing stress as you exhale. This is a great tool to have in your bag during a triathlon swim start, 5k start, or prior to a cycling race. It can really calm the nerves and get you in your zone of optimal performance
- The last one I'll discuss here is mental toughness. This is key for many of my athletes. It involves using visualization during your training sessions when things get hard. You need to be in a painful situation during training and start to visualize race day and meeting your goals. You need to be able to curb the pain and instead focus on meeting your goals and the thrill that will give you. The more you can practice this in training, the more effective you will be able to push through the pain on race day. As the old saying goes, How you practice is how you play. Start adding in psychological threats during training so you can learn to cope with them and overcome these obstacles. 

Should I do this everyday?
- No. The mind is the same as the body in terms of training. It needs rest days, it needs to be built up, there should be periodization to your mental training (off-season, general, specific, peak). Trying to always be mentally tough or visualizing success will lead to burnout. It is critical that during your off-season you don't focus on the mental aspect of training. You are simply just putzing around. However, as your program picks up and you start to focus on an event, that is when your mental preparation should also pick up. Learning how to utilize these tools and build them is only going to increase your overall performance. 

Last Thoughts
- The mental side of athletics or life is just as important as your physical shape. The mind is what allows you to keep going when the going gets tough. If you don't have a strategy in place to train your mind then you are neglecting your goals and selling yourself short. In order to fully optimize your results, you need to be just as strong mentally as you are physically. When you reach that point and understand that you can control your thoughts, that is when the fun begins and anything becomes possible!