Performing at your highest potential on a race day is, indeed, the most desirable goal coaches and their athletes wish for! But wait! Wish? How does wishing and coaching go together to get athletes at their peak form? The answer is, of course, they don’t. Training software, on the other hand, can!
Factors affecting an athlete’s peak form
A host of different factors can, potentially, affect an athlete’s performance on a race day. Physiological and mental parameters, weather conditions, training limitations, stress and anxiety. Nutritional reasons, race strategy design are no strangers to this list, either. And, of course, the list goes on, but you get the point.
The complexity inherent to the factors aforementioned is the main reason why a coach will typically be hired to train an athlete. Consequently, said complexity can prove to be a real pain for any personal trainer – depending on its severity.
The right way to do it
The best way a coach to see a training program through to success, is to not “wing it”. Instead, they need to design a tailor-made training program by taking into consideration a healthy amount of data, as an aggregate. That’s, including but not limited to:
- Past training sessions
- Injuries
- Social life
- Work responsibilities, etc.
After that, the coach needs to evaluate, track, monitor and analyze every aspect of the training program; and assess the progress of each athlete. That is typically done by making sure the program was executed as initially designed and planned. At the same time, the need may present itself to readjust the training plan, according to interpretation of the aggregate data. This is needed, in order to close the distance between current status and final objective, for each athlete; which, of course, can be generally described as “peak performance at the right time”.
Research and technology is on our side
To date, training logs, spreadsheets, guess work, and paperwork filled with workout details and specifications along with drafts full of raw data, have been an integral part of the average training procedure. In these last few years, coaching software has been able to help trainers manage hundreds of thousands of records containing training data. They’ve helped do it efficiently, more easily, and much faster. At least, where athletes can track each session and deliver pertinent information, using their sports watches or other types of training-specific sensors.
It’s no easy task either. Just one mistake or minor negligence and 6-months of hard-work and training can turn into a nightmare, come the race day. To do that, one needs a piece of specialized training software, to say the least.
Performance is directly correlated with a series of carefully designed steps a coach must see to completion, during the training procedure, which are respectively:
The Macrocycle
The very first step involves designing the Macrocycle, which is the “big picture” of the entire training program. It is also the high level guide to efficient training, up till the race day.
The Mesocycles
Once the Macrocycle is ready, the second step involves making the decision regarding how time-boxed weekly intervals will be turned into Mesocycles. The main goal for every period, is defined; and a balance is struck as to the distribution of intensity and duration for each session. That is, to achieve the desired goal, which is a point of paramount importance to the success of the program. The coach has to base the training schedule on the social, domestic, and professional responsibilities of each athlete. Including, of course, considerations such as past training history, starting performance ability, physical condition, and the athlete’s goals.
Training software: From paper, into the real world
There is a seemingly bottomless bucket list of things a coach needs to take into consideration before designing the optimal training program. Yet, the job does not end there. Getting some top quality insights into how each athlete perceives each training session and why, we need a way to analyze data into valid, useful information. This is the moment to take it “from paper, and into the real world”. And that’s where your training software comes in.
As your athlete executes the program, a plentiful stream of data will be collected through various devices; and sent to an online software platform. That’s your training software. As a coach, you will get the chance to track and monitor each athlete for the lot of it. Training stress, heart rate, rate of perceived exertion, total duration, intensity distribution, pacing characteristics, performance levels, etc. The sum of these indicators can provide a very detailed insight into the effectiveness of the training program, as it is.
Upon careful analysis of this data you will be able to accurately come up with just the right amount of micro-adjustments to greatly improve efficiency. And, consequently, increasing the changes of an athlete achieving peak performance, on the right day; the race day.
Is there another way?
Although another way to manage all this data could be to hire about a dozen coaches and have each one of them track only a couple of training aspects, one can use Endogusto leaving everyone else none the wiser. Endogusto is an all-in-one coaching platform. It’s your training software; complete with tracking, monitoring, and analyzing features. Such that can make a coaches’ life heaps easier, taking coaching effectiveness through the roof.
How about you? Why not give it a try? It can only get better!