As coaches, we spend a lot of time caring about our athletes and our staff. At every practice, I ask my athletes and staff on how they are feeling and they give me an estimate on their current physical and mental state. In order to improve this process further I have looked into several monitoring systems to make it easy to collect data and get feedback from the athletes not only when I see them in practice but also on the days I don’t see them and use it as a conversation opener. I came across Logit.ai and decided to test the App on myself before I would implement it with my athletes. Logit is a free App and it goes through a series of questions that are send out by email on a regular basis. Logit was developed by a former high-performance swimmer who realized that a lot of athletes are burning out from overtraining and that this could be prevented by logging not only their practice sessions in quantitative numbers but also track how the athlete is handling the workout mentally and how other aspects of life can affect the overall stress load that is placed on the athletes.
I decided to test the App on myself for about 3 months before I would roll it out to my athletes and staff. When I first started I discovered that this is actually the first time I’m reflecting on my own health and wellness and although the questions are very simple I started to think a lot more about my physical and mental state. I started to see some patterns and made adjustments to the days after my scores were low. It made me realize how much I enjoy being a coach and in order to have happiness I need the regular involvement with my training group. The most important thing though is that the App forces me to take 1 minute out of my day to reflect on how I feel. The questions are different in every survey and I have to pay attention on what I answer. This process is motivating me to try and improve on my scores but even more important try to not let my scores fall down to low. It’s motivating to get instant feedback about my health and wellness being in excellent shape and somehow sets me up well for the day.
An article in medical news today stated that seven in ten people in the US track some sort of health marker. The most common is weight followed by exercise and sleep patterns. The article states that instant feedback is a great motivator. Seeing numbers improve instantly is motivating to people and will keep them trying to get better. It was suggested that the monitoring tools should be used to raise awareness in one’s life and highlight the changes needed to make a significant difference. When deciding on what to monitor following recommendations were made.
- Tracking your health and wellness should be easy and fun.
- Setting realistic and achievable goals when using monitoring tools.
- Celebrate your success and reset your goals and targets.
- Focus on the things that make the biggest impact in your life.
- Be prepared to experiment with new activities and habits.
- Identify patterns that will help you improve on your scores.
Over this month I will encourage my athletes to sign up for Logit and will see how they respond to it. To me it has made a big difference in my wellness and I will keep on scoring my physical and mental state to make sure I reflect on my own wellbeing. “Because a happy coach is a good coach”!
Ueli thanks for the blog. Daily monitoring is becoming a huge component of HP sport and the athlete’s training program. One part of my job is assessing PSO for our provincial enhanced excellence funding. Each year we have review meetings. One of our deliverable for these organizations is asking for the number of targeted athleytes who are supported by an individualized or general YTP. The sports have a choice to identify whether these YTPs are more club/personal coach led or PSO led. While we do ask for a YTP it is tough to gauge the quality of the plan across the different sports. One thing however that separates the quality of planning is whether the coach is using any type of monitoring. The conversation with sports is usually in two areas, 1. Is the YTP a static plan that is merely done to satisfy provincial deliverables, or 2. Is it a dynamic plan that is geared toward the each individual athlete. My point here is that any type of monitoring starts to shift the planning from static to dynamic. The big question with all monitoring is what you do with the data. The most dynamic YTPs that I see, coaches are able to embed the monitoring directly into the plan (i.e. Training load, RPE or Daily mental states) and to make adjustments on a daily and weekly basis. The challenge for the coach is handling the data in a efficient and effective way.. I have often expressed to coaches that the athletes perhaps need to take more responsibility over how the data may be used. Therefore could the athlete have a stake in updating the YTP? Anyway it is always a conundrum, the more information we seek, the more time needed to effectively utilize the information. What strategies do you have for using the data you will be collecting on your athletes?
Hi Dave,
Thanks for you reply. I totally agree with you on the monitoring and using data to make planning decisions. The challenge is on how to most effectively use the date and incorporate within my coaching. I have been using 2 different system and one is administered through our Sport Centre. I get a report every 2 weeks. The athlete do not see what come out on those reports and I decide on how much I want to follow up on the reports and adjust the training plan. With the Logit app the athletes get instant feedback on their wellness score. It will be interesting to see on how this is going to affect their daily motivation of getting more sleep and having healthier eating habits. It’s a bit of a learning curve at the moment for me but I believe the more control I can give to the athlete and take self initiative on their personal wellness the better they will be as an athlete and it will cary over to after their career in sports.
Great article Ueli! I like the fact that even if we are passionate coaches, we still has to take care of our mental state to make sure we are happy in our daily environment. Did you had a good response with your athletes using the App?
I was also wondering if you had a specific moment that you assess your mental state? Did you try it in the morning to start the day, or after your work ?
It’s important to look not only for athletes mental health but also their coaches since it will have a direct impact on their performance. It’s a subject that it’s not really discuss, and monitoring your daily state can be a good step forward to develop awareness on it.
DL
Hi Dominique,
Thanks for your comment. You raise a very interesting point with the timing of when athletes get the questionnaire. At the moment I have them fill out 2 survey one is getting in at 9am in the morning every second day and the other is coming in at 9pm every second day. I did not get the chance to compare the 2 out comes with each others and of course the questions are slightly different but it will be interesting to see if there is a difference if people fill out the survey in the morning or the evening.
Fantastic post Ueli ! Daily monitoring is one of the tools we need to improve in Sailing so I was very interested to hear your own positive test of Logit AI , I will defincately check out the app. I am curious whether you think there is a negative effect of encouraging more screen time, especially in young people that are spending statistically more and more minutes on their devices each year? Statistics on just how much time Canadian teenagers are spending on their screens seems variable, but seem to indicate the average is 2-3 hours per day and growing. I realize that it is just a small amount of time each day to update a monitoring app, but it does somehow seem counter intuitive to sport to encourage more time working on devices.
Hi Kevin,
Thanks for your comment. I do agree with you….. screen time is a problem especially with the younger athletes who don’t have a handle on social media consumption. However I think we as coaches can help them to develop some good screen habits. For example I have the rule that once practice starts there is no more cell phones out and there are stowed away in the bag for the full practice. When we are at training camps we have a “no cell phone” rule for our meals and it really makes a huge difference in how they interact. One thing I have now been experiencing with the Monitoring app is although it does come to their devices they still do not fill out on a regular basis and the 1 minute it would take them to fill out the survey seems to be to much although we are delivering it through their devices. More and more I’m coming to the conclusion that the best way of monitoring is by face to face contact. Observing the athletes in warm and talking to them and looking into their eyes and read their body posture etc. If we could figure out some sort of app the could capture their “training readiness” without them having to be on a screen and reporting every day I think that would be much more ideal. I will be doing some more research on the parameter that could be measured to predict readiness. One of my coaching colleagues has his athlete send him a text message every day before practice with a number from 1 to 10 to tell him how ready they are for practice. If there are red flags he know who to address a bit more before practice and really check in with them.
Ueli, what you are talking about is the “exo-athlete-analytics” shirt. It hasn’t been developed yet! (although I have heard of a company that has a similar product on the market https://www.hexoskin.com) Anyway the concept would be a shirt that the athlete wears, they walk through a transceiver which collect all GMP data in seconds. It would be a pretty cool to have this type of technology. I am not sure whether the Hexoskin has been fully validated otherwise I am sure it would be a bit more mainstream in HP sport. I will need to ask Trent Stellingwerff his opinion. As for your solution, a simple 10 point readiness scale might be all you need.
Great comments from every one.