BAD coaching – Borrow, Adapt, Deliver

When an athlete stands out apart from their peers, it’s automatic to think that they must have discovered some secret form of training. In the 1960s, after the short but meteoric career of the Australian Herb Elliott, young athletes in the UK were clamouring for their parents to holiday in Devon so that they could train on sand dunes as he had done. More recently, the double threshold approach taken by the Ingebritzens has been in vogue, although we’ve heard a bit less about it since Jakob has lost his aura of total invincibility. Many runners seek that magic session, they might not expect it to turn them into world beaters overnight but surely by next weekend …

Access to information

Coaches are far from immune when it comes to seeing what the stars of both today and yesteryear have been doing in training. Accessing information from all over the planet has never been easier, and this is a good thing, a very good thing, as it contributes to the continual development of any coach – there is always more to learn, new angles to explore on things we thought we knew something about. In the words of a top coach, the late David Sunderland, “anyone who says they know it all is a fool” and “minds are like parachutes, they work better when they are open”.

This is where the health warning comes in. Young and inexperienced athletes in particular are often prone to lifting sessions from articles on the current stars, in the belief that if they train like them they’ll become as good as they are. The chances are that they choose the most ferocious of sessions for which they are totally unprepared, doing them on top of their existing programme. They forget about all the effective, hard, consistent and progressive work that a star athlete has done in the years before they reached the top – Paula Radcliffe was not running 120 miles each week at 13 years of age.

Alternatively, these athletes look at what their current rivals are doing on Strava and make sudden changes in volume and/or intensity just because it appears that someone else, or indeed everyone else, is doing more than they are. Just as you shouldn’t believe all you read in the papers, don’t believe everything you see on Strava either. In fact, I think there is a very good case for keeping your own space on Strava to yourself and ignoring those from everyone else. It’s what happens in competition that matters.

Nothing new

Coming back to coaches however, in practice there are no real secrets in training and very little that is truly original, rather an evolution from what has gone before. Coaches have always been inveterate borrowers of ideas from each other (and I include myself here). That’s a very healthy state of affairs, and besides imitation is a great form of flattery.

Borrow

So what should we do when we come across that little nugget that we think might benefit our group? I’ve done a few workshops and demonstration sessions over the years, and when I give examples of sessions that work for our group I always stress that simply unbolting the plan from us and applying it to a totally different group is not a good idea – it might work, it might not. Why? - because our sessions have evolved taking account of factors including the athletes in the group, their age and training background and the environment in which we are training (I’ve written before about “use what you have”).

Adapt

OK, we have a session that we think we can make use of, but first of all we need to look at its objective and the athletes it’s being applied to. Some sessions will fall at this first fence – obvious examples being throwing younger athletes into sessions designed to improve acid tolerance or sending newcomers out on a 20-mile run.

Once we’ve got past that hurdle we need to think about how we might be able to adapt the broad session plan to our group of athletes. For example, when was the session being done? If it was done in January but in Australia (ie during their summer track season) then it’s not going to be much use for cross country in January in the UK (although it might be helpful if the athlete is to compete indoors). That’s pretty obvious, but what about other northern hemisphere countries such as the USA? Some years ago a series of videos became available showing US college and university students doing cross country sessions in September. They were the sort of sessions that I wouldn’t think of doing until January, when the big races are coming up. So what was going on? A glance at the US competition schedule provides the answer – their cross country season runs from September until the end of November, with important races coming thick and fast as soon as the athletes return to campus. So not surprisingly they were doing race-specific work in September.

After we’ve gone through this sort of evaluation (and the above examples are far from exhaustive), we may come up with a rather different session from the original altogether. However, it’s still one that we might never have developed at all without the nugget that we had to start with.

Deliver

Only now should we think about delivering that session to our groups, and even then it should be regarded as an experiment. We learn a great deal from the athletes that we work with, so look for their feedback – could they see where the session was coming from? And of course there is your own gut feeling - did it work for me? Do I need to adapt it further before we do it again? Is the session OK but would it be better to do it at a different time of the season? Or is it a complete car crash that we should never go near again (hopefully not if you’ve given the adaptation process sufficient thought).

Conclusion

So there we are, we can be deluged with information, some of which is of dubious quality and can be jettisoned straight away. But when you do come across that that useful nugget, that item that might not always be the flash of a light bulb but more like a flickering candle, then making it work for you and your group is a 3 stage process

1. borrow the idea, but then

2. adapt it to your own circumstances before you

3. deliver it to the athletes

In other words, there are times when bad coaching can be good for you.

As ever, all views are my own.