How to be your coach’s favourite athlete

Of course, there are no favourites hehe. But there are a few things we can do as athletes to make our coaches froth a little harder and enjoy the pants off coaching you (the individual athlete). Or in general, just make their coaching lives easier. 
In the interest of keeping things positive, I’ll attempt to stick with the things I love to see as a coach, but don’t judge me if I throw in a few pet peeves either.

Lapping intervals within a session
Weaved strategically within sessions across the week, are what we call intervals. They are generally there to bring on a specific stimulus, relative to the phase, and goals of that particular session. Let’s use a race specific longer ride on a weekend for example. Athlete has a 4 hour ride set as: 1 hour long warm up in zones 1-2; and then into a main set with 5 x 25 minutes @ race power/RPE/HR with 5 mins easy spin between each one. As a coach, what makes me super happy is 1. Opening up Training Peaks and seeing a granny smith for that session (sessions light up green when completed within 10% of the set duration); and 2. That the intervals within the session are clearly lapped, making each segment clearly visible and separate, within the overall session. Voila, easy peasy for me/us to analyse within the session. And it shows the athlete has read and understood the session, and on a global level, gets the big picture, or ultimately, trusts their coach 😊

Executing sessions as they are planned
Across the days/weeks/months (even years), there is method to the madness in achieving the big goals your big athletic heart desires. When an athlete, for one reason or several others, deviates from the planned session because a. they felt great and wanted to ‘feel the breeze’ a bit more, turning a zone 2, easy aerobic run, into a full blown tempo run (if I had a dollar) b. they let their ego take the reins and joined a group ride or chased down a Zwift race c. their legs felt shit and couldn’t handle the set intervals because the easy aerobic ride yesterday somehow turned into a criterium race? I hope you are picking up what I’m putting down. When I open up Training Peaks, and can see that an athlete has a stream of granny smiths and has been executing their sessions as planned with A+ discipline, my heart skips a beat with joy. Conversely, errrmm, we won’t go there. Let’s just say I get my dad hat on and feel disappointed.

Quality subjective feedback
I know, this is likely subjective to each coach. For me, I like to hear how the athlete felt pre/during/post session. Basically, anything that is pertinent to the specific session and how the athlete performed within that session. Notes on nutrition or anything specific to do with holding pace, power, HR etc. It makes for a complete picture when I can see that an athlete has executed the session well (their data aligns with the planned session) and then their subjective feedback is specific to the session. 

Uploading session data
In this day and age, we are hooked up and linked into a variety of tech. Important to a coach is GPS data, HR data, power data, and usually cadence numbers too. Generally speaking, this can all happen automatically once the session has been saved. i.e. we push save session> it saves and then gets auto uploaded to Training Peaks and overlayed/matched with the planned session to light up that granny smith. A little homework on Dr Googs or YouToob and you can find the answer on how to sync anything with anything, so no excuse there please team 😉 

There we have it. Lap your intervals, stick to the prescribed work (execute your sessions well), give good feedback, and upload your data. Easy as pie, and we have a team of favourite athletes and happy coaches.
Need help with any of the above? Just ask. We all start somewhere, and we never learn unless we ask. 
Good luck.

SF

Click here to learn more about Head Coach Scotty Farrell

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