The Coach-Athlete Relationship: Who's in charge?

Alan Couzens, M.S. (Sports Science)

May 5th, 2015

There seems to be a bit of an energy flow of late related to the above qu. Tawnee & Brett courageously addressed this very qu face to face in this podcast. Sue and Marilyn tackle the same question here and here.

I went for the easy way out :-) and fired off a quick tweet a few days ago so I wanted to take the time to expand a bit on that..

PSA: Don't be 'sort of coached'. The only way to assess the efficacy of an approach is to commit to follow it through. All the way. 100%

— Alan Couzens (@Alan_Couzens) April 30, 2015

It might surprise you guys that, given my ‘quant’ tendencies, that one of the pieces of athletic data that I prize most is an athlete’s results from a Myers-Briggs personality test. Empathy isn’t a natural strong suit of mine and it helps my brain to be able to think of athletes in terms of these categories. Anyhow, I was looking back over a description of an athlete with my own type – INTP last night and I came upon the following line…

“INTP’s can frequently come across as arrogant or condescending”

Putting this perception together with my angry tweet, I didn’t want you all to take it *that* way so I want to set the record straight...

I have been extremely fortunate in my past 2 decades of coaching to work with some really wonderful people that I respect to the utmost. Beyond being good hearted, honest and sincere, folks who are absolutely brilliant in their respective fields – guys who’ve reached incredible levels of business success, engineers coming up with the latest and greatest, computer coders who think on a different level, top notch Doctors, lawyers, you name it…

In fact, I would almost say it’s par for the course these days that the age-group athletes I work with are at the next level on a general achievement scale. You don’t get to that point without being “smarter than the average bear!” Frankly, when I started working with adults, this was a bit intimidating. Telling a 14 year old swimmer "do it because I said so.." is one thing. Saying it to the CEO of a major company who is used to being the alpha dog & somebody who has more money than I'll ever see in my life is entirely another. But I still did it. How?

One word: Context.

I said it above, these guys are brilliant in their field. Fortunately, for me, this chosen field wasn’t high performance athletics! All of the years that they have spent honing and polishing their crafts, I’ve spent doing the same in the world of high performance endurance training. That’s where my confidence as a coach comes from and, in terms of the dynamics of the relationship, this is what it all comes down to...

... the mind-dumbing lectures, the endless physiology texts, the research studies, the stacks of .wko, .tcx & .srm files clogging up my hard-drive, the mounds of Annual Training Plans in various states of development, the hour upon hour walking up and down pool decks.. and so they make the decision to bring in a specialist….

All of my truly great coaching relationships have begun with this mutual respect and this honest realization. It’s not a question of ability, or of intelligence, merely a question of the time it would take you to accumulate the same level of contextual knowledge as a full time coach who has been deeply immersed in this, to the exclusion of all else, for a decade or more. It’s math: If that number exceeds your current free time + the training time necessary to reach the level you want to be at = hire (and outsource those decisions to) an experienced coach!

“OK, so you have a lot of data from a lot of athletes, but nobody knows me like me.”

Yes and no. There are 2 problems with this common retort…

1. Based on my experience, the best athletes are very good at doing but frequently quite poor at tracking what they do.


2. Even if they do track the data & have the time to analyze it, doing so objectively is a very tough thing (when you’re the subject of the data)

This is not a put-down on the athlete at all. These things, positivity, confidence in ability and an extreme bias for action are traits common to all truly great athletes. The fact that I’m on the other end of the spectrum is, in fact, what makes me a mediocre athlete but a good coach. This balancing of strengths is also what make a 'thinker' and a 'do-er' such a powerful team!

But the reasons to trust your coach implicitly, go beyond 'math' and rationality. You want your coach to be deeply invested in your success...

On an emotional level, for me, the Coach, to have a genuine interest in your success as an athlete, I need to have faith that, when push comes to shove, you will follow the plan. I’m not in this for all of the fame and fortune associated with full time coaching (ahem :-). I am in it because nothing revs my motor more than being a part of an athlete’s success. Thanks or not, if I don’t feel, on a gut level, that my plan & I were a (small) part of your success, frankly, I lose interest. As I said above, I’m not in this for a paycheck.

For all of the above reasons, when it comes to the big picture, if I’m coaching you, while I welcome and encourage discussion & feedback, when the bike tyre meets the road, I need to know that you'll follow the plan.

In other words, I'm in charge. Well, most of the time, I’m in charge, except when I’m not….

There’s a caveat here. In the modern age, a lot of the coaching that I do is remote. This presents a real problem when working with serious athletes who are training ‘at the limit’. So, when it comes to the day to day.. the athlete has to be in charge. More specifically, their body (not their head) is in charge of the day to day.

There is so much that goes into an athlete’s ability to handle & respond to a training plan – things that, as someone often several thousand miles away (and not part of the athlete’s immediate family (or inner-most thoughts), I’m just not privy to (at least in a time effective manner). So, when it comes to the day to day management of the load, I completely defer to the athlete's bod – plan says hard day, legs say easy day. Legs win! Of course, all of this gets fed back to the long term plan in the long run so that we make better long term decisions but attempting to predict all of the fluctuations in an athlete’s life & corresponding energy is a fool’s errand. In this sense, through this conversation, between long and short term management, we’re very much a team & the whole thing is very much a learning process for both of us.

Long and short…

If you’re going into a new coaching relationship with the belief that you know more about endurance training than the coach you’re employing, I wouldn’t recommend going into that relationship. It won’t be satisfying for either of you. If you do believe that your coach is in a better position to direct things than you, go with that - 100%! Follow the plan even if you don’t immediately see or understand all the ins and outs. In the absence of complete knowledge (that only comes with time and experience), a certain amount will always come down to that precious word - faith.

But…

Don’t abdicate your own awareness or responsibility for what is going on, on a day to day basis. It’s your body. Get to know it!

Two heads are always better than one, so long as those heads know their respective strengths, work together, and don't waste energy and time constantly banging against one another

Train smart,

AC

**************************

Don't miss a post! Sign up for my mailing list to get notified of all new content.

**************************