In my daily coaching practice, I try to apply a coaching style the enhances implicit learning to the athletes.

Some of the challenges I encounter are that often athletes are used to be explicit coached either from their previous coach’s parents or other people of influence. It is a lot easier to have everything explained along the way rather than finding it out themselves.

I also find that when parents are involved they want to see the coach to do a more explicit approach since this is what they expect from a traditional coach and feel if they pay for the service that’s what they should get from the practice.

Over the last season I have experimented with a new approach to one of the workouts where I went to the extreme of implicit learning and let the athletes do a free play workout. Every Sunday I would let them just do whatever they wanted as long as they got at least 45 minutes of pushing the race chair in. The athletes really liked it at first and they embraced the freedom of doing whatever they came up on the day. However, after about 2 months the workouts became less focused and all the athletes did was a 45-minute jog. After about 4 months some of the athletes did not even show up anymore since it was not seen as a valuable practice session to them.

This was very frustrating to me to watch and made me realize that they might have not been ready to be so free to decide and got lost with not having any direction or meaning to the practice although I explained to them that it was meant to be a fun workout.

I do wonder how to give minimal direction for the program but still keep them challenged so they think there is purpose to the practice or if I just have to rethink the whole program and restate our goals?

I will explore the free play practice in a different setting and maybe have the athletes write out a program that they will stick to rather than just show up and do whatever they feel on the day since they are so used to have a program for all the other workouts.

Does monitoring athletes really improve performance?

Data collection and making evidence based decisions for training programing is common practice amongst high performance coaches and more technologies are available than ever to help collect and better understand the data.

Does all the data collection really help our athletes to improve their performance though? To fully understand and making a statement out of it I have dig a little further into this as I’m planning to do a class project on monitoring my athletes using different types of software platforms.

An article review written by Shona L. Halson published in Sports Med in 2014 talks about all the different variables that can be used to monitor training load and subsequent fatigue. In the conclusion section she is mentioning that despite the emerging technologies a single definite tool that is accurate and reliable is not available. The nature of monitoring is very different from one sport to the other which is due to the differences not only in the demands of the sport but also in the individual difference in individual physiological adaptions and responses to exercise. If an accurate and easy to interpret feedback is provided to the athletes and coaches, monitoring can result in enhanced knowledge of training responses and provide further communication between support staff, athletes and coaches and ultimately enhance and athlete’s performance.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs40279-014-0253-z.pdf

Having read the article by Shona L. Halson I got inspired to increase the data collection within my own program and will implement some of the newest monitoring Technologies. I have discussed some of the parameters this with my Practicum Mentor and we came to the conclusion that it will be imperial to have the buy in form the athletes and they will have to be part of the whole process and understand that it will benefit them. The aim is to use the monitoring as a source of motivation for the athletes to become more accountable but also get more feedback on their current performance. Since a lot of the platform relay on self reporting on things such as sleep and nutrition integrity from the athletes will be important. Using the monitoring tools as a form of communication starters in the daily training environment will be key in my approach of using the technology and applying the science to the art of coaching.