Is It All About Running? Adelaide Running Coach
A recent study in Sports Medicine interviewed 106 professional coaches, 30% of whom had 15+ years experience, and 30% who were performing on an international level. The interviews sought to determine the most influential factors in relation to athlete training adaptations.
It may come as a surprise but of the 5 factors deemed ‘absolutely essential’ to performance gains, 4 were non-physical factors with physical training ie. mileage, structure, genetics etc. ranking 5th on the list. The order of importance was as follows;
The coach-athlete relationship
The athlete’s belief in their training plan
Life stress ie. work, family, exams etc.
Emotional and/or psychological stress
Physical training
As both a coach and athlete, I find this study incredibly informative as it clearly highlights a number of vitally important considerations.
RUNNERS
You can’t hope to maximise your performance potential if your training exists in an sub-optimal emotional and psychological environment. Training creates its own unique set of physical, hormonal, and mental stresses and if you simply try to keep hammering more training nails on top of other stresses that are themselves a struggle to get on top of, you’re quickly going to build a house of burnout. Training will suffer, likely leading to more stress, and if you only look at the physical training as the problem, you’re missing the major pieces of the performance and health puzzle. More than just a nice bumper sticker, “how you eat, sleep, think, train, and relax”, all play a vital role in determining what kind of conditions your running is able to operate within.
Truly great training is so much more than miles, vert, and ‘the next best workout’; it’s a complex dance of multiple factors that must all be considered if you hope to achieve long-term running enjoyment and/or performance improvements.
COACHES
Tthe findings clearly inform our responsibility to take advice and principles from controlled studies where training interventions and subsequent adaptations are considered to be closely related BUT prioritise marrying those principles with an approach that blends our athlete’s unique psychological, social, and physiological health factors. In this way, we will always be considering best training practices within the context of an athlete’s unique makeup and day-to-day life.
No two athletes will respond exactly the same way to a particular workout or extended training protocol, just as two athletes could share similar race day performances despite vastly different training approaches.
Nurturing an honest, trusting relationship with your athletes is essential to improving their training adherence, belief, and empowerment, and by adjusting the demands when life requires, even the most difficult stages of life can still see training take place.
Anyadike-Danes, K., Donath, L. & Kiely, J. Coaches’ Perceptions of Factors Driving Training Adaptation: An International Survey. Sports Med (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-023-01894-1
