Wellness and the Safety Line
The wellness of athletes is a coaching priority. If an athlete’s training regime causes an injury or breakdown in physical or mental health, then performance falls and the purpose of training is not achieved.
However, it is also a coaching priority to develop the performance capability of the athlete. This inevitably means that the training regime cannot stay constantly in a safe zone but must instead systematically progress to a higher training stimulus. It’s a basic training principle called progressive overload.
An unknowable parameter
The trouble is that neither the athlete nor the coach really knows where to draw the safety line to preserve athlete wellness. It is an unknowable parameter of training that seems to be a “knife-edge”. On one side, training may be safe but it does not provide sufficient stimulus to cause performance improvement. On the other side, the training stimulus is too punishing and the wellness of the athlete begins to deteriorate.
It’s a knife-edge for two reasons. Firstly, it is a very narrow territory. On a session-by-session basis, the training load need only be increased by a small amount and potentially the safety line is crossed. The idiom “the straw that broke the camel’s back” comes to mind. Secondly, the optimal training load is a knife-edge because it is sharp and hurts! It is not reality that the optimal training place is any sort of comfortable place.
Managing the athlete’s training
All a coach can do with each and every athlete is to tweak their training load carefully and observe the effect. This involves watching for signs of injury, asking questions about energy levels, pain, and general well-being, and assessing whether the training appears to have a positive effect on performance. As every athlete is different, monitoring the athlete for signs of excessive overload seems the only reasonable approach to take.
However, in the initial programming situation where a coach is unfamiliar with the athlete’s training capacity, a good approach is to program a relatively safe level of training. Then, in situ, adjust parameters upwards on a day-to-day basis. The justification for this approach is that it is better to see how the athlete performs rather than to blindly set difficult or damaging performance targets.
Typically, however, I find myself agreeing to or even encouraging athletes to exceed programmed training parameters on a daily basis. Among the more experienced athletes that I coach, there is perhaps a tacit understanding that programmed targets are just “first base”, not the ultimate target. Athletes can expect to add extra sets or go beyond intensity targets, sometimes significantly.
So is there anything wrong? I don’t really know! Perhaps I should be a little less risk-averse and toughen program targets, throw down the gauntlet” so to speak.
Well, in some ways I did just this with the most recent program. I arbitrarily increased the number of sets per exercise to 12 sets but stated that additional 3 sets were NOT mandatory. Although there were a few concerns over the extra time needed to complete the workout, athletes did what athletes tend to do, that is try to follow the program. Although it is just a piece of paper, the coach’s training program tends to be sacrosanct. Even though the extra three sets per exercise was optional, many athletes expressed feelings of compulsion to complete all sets. In one case, the athlete admitted to feeling “a bit deflated and dissatisfied” if all sets were not completed. For several athletes, the additional workload was just another target to be surpassed. Yet in another case, when the training volume was purposefully reduced, the athlete asked if it was alright to put the missing sets back.
This all leads me to think more about that safety line! Well, let’s see how it goes if the programmed intensity target is raised (athletes be warned!). However, I shall still be monitoring for wellness.
