In this blog post, I share my thoughts on the use of a Yearly Training Plan (YTP) and the importance of critical thinking.

A YTP is a planning tool used to communicate an athlete’s competition calendar by highlighting key competition dates and specific phases of their training program leading up to each competition. The tool is meant to assist coaches in designing appropriate micro and meso training cycles within training phases that will best prepare the athlete for success throughout their competition year. Fundamentally the YTP is meant to be a project management tool but is the YTP (typically developed using a spreadsheet) really that useful of a tool?

As a professional engineer, a detailed and accurate project plan is essential for complex projects to be successful. In my previous career, I had the opportunity of leading many high-profile projects for the companies I worked for and every one of those projects required me to develop and manage a detailed and accurate project plan. Engineering projects have many moving parts and include several different disciplines including mechanical design engineering, mechanical drawings, electrical design engineering, electrical drawings, software development, etc.. Within these disciplines, there are many elements and oftentimes those elements were dependent on each other. I no longer have images of the project plans I used to develop but this image is a typical example of a dependency Ghantt chart often developed in complex engineering design projects.

As the name implies, a dependency Ghantt chart, typically developed using project planning software like MS Project, is a project plan where elements of the plan are dependent on each other. For example, the procurement of mechanical components could not start until the mechanical design engineering drawings are complete. If the date of the mechanical design engineering drawings takes ten days longer than estimated, the procurement is delayed by ten days and if other elements were dependent on procurement of parts, then those elements would be delayed by ten days as well. Delays like this happen all the time and it’s important for engineers to be able to assess the situation and make critical decisions to ensure the project continues to move forward and be successful. To assist with the constant, critical decision making process, a dependency Ghantt chart is used every day throughout the life of the project and is constantly being updated and communicated to the team.

By comparison, a YTP is typically made using a spreadsheet is easy to make if the user has average spreadsheet skills. The competition dates don’t typically move and none of the elements within the YTP have any dependencies with each other. For example, if an athlete decides not to participate in a particular competition, the result of that may just provide more time for the athlete to prepare for the next one. Training volume and intensity is meant to be included on the YTP but it really doesn’t need to be because an individual’s life circumstances can throw all of that out the window. One year I developed a YTP with one of my junior athletes leading up to a qualifying competition. I had the training program volumes and intensity locked in and everything was ready to go. The kid then became overwhelmed with the demands of school and I found myself having to assess the situation daily and adjust the training volume and intensity ad hoc since there were several days in a row where he couldn’t make it to the planned training sessions. Ultimately I was able to coach him through the process leading up to the qualifying event where he performed great and successfully qualified for Nationals. In the end, the plan and program I used to help him achieve that didn’t look anything like the initial YTP spreadsheet.

In an individual sport like weightlifting, individualized planning and programming is the norm and the reality is people’s lives are complex and dynamic. I found myself going off the YTP script more often than not simply because life tends to be far less predictable than working through an engineering project. There were also times where I decided I wouldn’t create a detailed YTP for athletes other than to identify which competitions were important to them and putting those dates on a calendar. Even without an YTP, I coached them successfully to competition PR’s. I certainly would never use a YTP to plan my own personal improvement plan (PIP) simply because it’s a static spreadsheet and there are many calendar programs available that integrate directly with my mobile device far better than a spreadsheet ever could. For my PIP for KIN597, I identified and planned several continuing education course for the remainder of this year and into 2025. I included those dates on the YTP I submitted but only because it was a requirement of the assignment. I haven’t looked at that YTP since.

As a business owner and coach who works with community level and high-level competitive athletes, I believe the ability to use critical thinking skills is far more important and useful than making nice YTP spreadsheets.

Critical thinking as defined by the NCCP is “analyzing the athlete’s performance to identify critical program decisions that have to be made and to interpret results of assessments to design or modify individualized plans”. More broadly, critical thinking is the process of actively analyzing, interpreting, evaluating, and processing information to make reasoned judgments and decisions. It involves questioning assumptions, recognizing biases, considering alternative perspectives, and using logic and evidence to draw conclusions. Critical thinking skills are essential to the success of an engineer and essential for coaches as well. Assessing an individual to determine their weakness (mental and/or physical) and deciding the most appropriate course of action in the present happens all the time and in my experience, never seems to align with any YTP. The examples I described above provide evidence where I used critical thinking in an engineering and coaching context.

So in conclusion using a spreadsheet YTP is a bit overrated and not that useful in my opinion, especially in the context of coaching people with unpredictable lives. Having said that I believe coaches ought to learn how to develop date-driven programs for their clients but using critical thinking, I wouldn’t use a YTP spreadsheet to do that as there are far better project management tools or strength & conditioning programming tools available online that I would use over a spreadsheet.