“Not so much a ‘no pain, no gain’ culture anymore in coaching and training. It’s a lot of load monitoring and careful planning, but it also includes making adjustments on the fly.” — Michael Gallivan, ACSM.

In the 2020 Olympics, Naomi Osaka, a multiple grand slam winner, surprised the world when she said she didn’t want to participate in the most anticipated event in sport. From the outside looking in, everything looked okay. She appeared to be prepared and ready for athletic competition, and many just couldn’t understand why she would choose not to perform.

Even before the dust from the Naomi Osaka controversy had settled, four-time gold medalist Simeon Biles would shock the airwaves again. This time, by pulling out of the competition at a time when many said, “her team needed her most.”

The two instances would bring to the surface two discussions the athletic performance and coaching community has been avoiding for years—the balance between subjective wellness and objective measures of performance.

What Is Subjective Wellness?

Recent advances in human performance show that objective measures alone aren’t sufficient to evaluate and diagnose an athlete’s performance. This necessitates the need for the athlete’s own perspective of readiness, also known as subjective wellness. 

Subjective wellness is an athlete’s perception of how they feel. Perception is reality; they might not have a physical reason to underperform, but if they are mentally unfocused and encumbered by stress, mood or expect to perform badly, their performance will likely mirror those thoughts. All types of physical training induce strain on an athlete’s body. That said, there are healthy levels of strain that improve the athlete, as well as chronic unhealthy ones that are unproductive.

Coaches track an athlete’s objective and subjective performance as indicators of the strain on the athlete and whether they are over, optimum, or under training the athlete. A coach can then use this data to adjust load and workouts.

Determining Objective Wellbeing (Load and Threshold) Before Subjective Wellness Is Considered

Subjective wellness can be used to diagnose and fix problems in an athlete’s performance. However, this process is much more efficient if objective wellness (load and recovery) precedes subjective well-being. 

In layman terms, a coach or an athlete can use objective wellness to diagnose performance (find out the “if”) and subjective wellness to get to the root cause of the problem (the “why”). There is no one-size-fits-all approach for determining objective well-being. One of the most efficient ways is by determining the load as shown below:

1. Determine load (for example, you can test vertical jump twice a week.)

To develop an efficient objective measurement process, the schedule should have consistency. For example, the athlete should be tested at the same time each day of each week. This consistency helps to control for other factors such as hormonal levels and body weight that fluctuate throughout the day.

Once you find a preferable day of the week for internal load monitoring, you can then test for vertical jump and come up with a trajectory each week.

If the numbers over time are staying the same – Little or no change in numbers means the athlete’s performance is okay. Moreover, it shows consistency and that the athlete is comfortable with the level of strain during workouts and practice.

If their numbers are improving  – An improvement in numbers is great. It shows that the workouts are effective and that the athlete’s body is responding positively to the workouts. Coaches should take improvements as seriously as they handle deteriorations. The data on why an athlete is making improvements goes a long way in finding ways to further cement those habits.

If their numbers are getting worse – A worsening performance is a cause of concern for all parties. That said, load determination alone doesn’t give a clearer picture. For more insight, the coach should analyze the data from wearable devices.

Analysis of Strain Data from Wearable Devices

If the dashboard on a wearable fitness device reads high strain and low recovery scores, the coach should take a very calculated approach to the matter.

Trainers should consider steering clear of talking points that are complete, conclusive sentences like:

• “You’re not pushing yourself.”
• “Try harder.”
• “You can do better.”

A better alternative would be to ask open-ended questions from a subjective wellness perspective about what’s going on outside the workouts and practice. Topics one can touch on include sleeping patterns, eating patterns, and stress levels.

Where Subjective Wellness Comes In

Subjective wellness adds insight whenever the numbers don’t follow as expected. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the athlete is underperforming; it goes both ways. Context of the data is sometimes more important than the outcomes of the data alone.  Understanding where an athlete is within their performance helps complete the picture. 

Subjective wellness could also come in handy when there are significant improvements in performance. If this is the case, the coach can proceed to find what the athlete is doing differently (outside practice) and encourage it. A trainer should take into account how the athlete feels during load management, and adjust workouts based on stress, sleep and nutrition.

Stress 

An optimum amount of stress can help an athlete prepare, train, and perform at optimum levels. However, an unhealthy amount of stress can impact an athlete’s performance. That said, when determining load and workouts, a coach must have the stress of the athlete in mind.

Sleep

The amount, quality, and pattern of sleep have a significant effect on an athlete’s performance. A Stanford study shows that collegiate basketballers who were able to increase their sleep to 10 hours a night improved their shooting by 9%. That said, data on an athlete’s sleep comes in handy when determining both loads and training intensity. Even more crucial is when a coach is diagnosing fluctuations in performance.

Nutrition

Nutrition is another outside practice variable that has a huge vote on the performance of an athlete. That said, nutrition is a broad area. It covers everything from hydration, supplementation, portions, medications, and diet, all parameters that trainers should put under the spotlight. 

Of all external factors, the nutrition of an athlete is the most crucial for both long-term and short-term performance. Any issues that arise from improper nutrition should be identified and mitigated as quickly as possible.

2. Using wearables to monitor the metabolic rate and sprint times or other loads

Another effective approach to measuring objective well-being is leveraging data from wearables to monitor metabolic rates and sprint times continuously. Both techniques, using wearables and load determination, are crucial in monitoring objective wellness. In fact, they are equally effective, and it’s recommended that trainers use them simultaneously. 

Direct data has fewer external variables and hence allows coaches to err on the side of caution. You need both because someone may feel great despite being at a threshold or tapped out before reaching the expected limit. Both mismatched expectations must be addressed for healthy and sustained growth.

Benefits Beyond Physical Monitoring

The benefits of subjective well-being spill beyond physical monitoring and the development of better practices. Athlete subjective wellness monitoring helps make the life of an athlete better both in practice and outside the court.

Some of its benefits include:

1. Improved Motivation and Well-being

Show me a stressed athlete, and I’ll show you an underperformer. If an athlete is stressed and just going through the motions because the coach is pushing while ignoring the issues, it can lead to burnout.

However, if the coach takes the athlete’s stress and subjective well-being into account and assigns a recovery program, trust is built. The athlete feels genuine concern from the coach and is inclined to work harder for the coach in the future.

2. Self-Awareness

Humans value autonomy and the feeling of being in charge. Self-reporting raises awareness on the athlete’s part about how decisions outside of the gym can affect performance.

With self-reporting through subjective awareness, athletes can see for themselves the consequences of each action they take. An athlete can see for themselves that once they start to eat certain foods, they perform better or worse later. Similarly, if they’ve been sleeping poorly, they will notice that they can’t meet their performance expectations, further showing them that actions have consequences.

This gives them the incentive to address the actual sleep issues and concentrate on plausible causes such as caffeine intake.

3. Better Mental Health 

The mental health question in elite athletes started way before Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles came to the spotlight.

With thousands of fans, supporters, friends, and family, it’s hard for many to believe that athletes sometimes may suffer from depression, loneliness, and have deep-seated issues of their own. To make it worse, objective forms of measurement fail to identify mental health challenges athletes face.

An approach that focuses on mental health, such as subjective well-being, can help identify early signs of deterioration that may slip through the fingers of objective forms of measurement. As a result, athletes get the necessary treatment and counseling early and before it’s too late.

How to Track Subjective Wellness

As you’ve seen above, self-awareness and putting the athlete in the driver’s seat of the subjective wellness process come with several benefits. One of the best ways to track subjective wellness while at the same time offering the athlete both autonomy and self-awareness is using a wellness questionnaire for athletes.

CoachMePlus was founded with the dream of leveraging modern technology to help coaches and athletes achieve their fitness goals. For more information about objective and subjective measurement of athletes’ performance, contact us today, and our teams will be more than willing to help.

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What does an Athlete Management System do? 

Athlete Management Systems (AMS) are expanding to do more than ever before. But with all the features and integrations, it is important not to lose sight of why AMS systems can be an essential tool to any athletic or fitness organization. Athlete management systems allow coaching relationships to develop outside the traditional constraints of time and proximity. A good coach and athlete relationship is built on trust and understanding the personalized goals of the athlete. By using an AMS, coaches and athletes can develop strong relationships inside and outside of the training facility. 

Note: CoachMePlus is designed as a Human Performance Software that goes beyond an Athlete Management System. To us, a “coach” can refer to a physical therapist, strength and conditioning coach, personal trainer, athletic trainer, military leadership, or other human performance monitoring roles.

The job of an AMS is to allow coaches to communicate and monitor their athletes and provide context to the data that is being collected. Expected functions include the ability to assign workouts in an app, pull in information from wearable devices, and monitor load and progress. These functions are only useful if they are combined to add transparency into the workload and lifestyle of the athlete. Tools like Subjective Wellness Questionnaires and Load Monitoring can be used to help make on-the-fly decisions about training and recovery though the use of alerts, dashboards and reports. 

Benefits of an Athlete Management System

Save Time 

Athlete management systems streamline every step of the coaching process. From testing and programming, to analyzing and adjusting plans. When building a workout plan for an athlete, regularly scheduled set and rep progressions can easily be made into a test for updating key performance indicators such as one-rep-maximum (1RM). 

This allows workouts that are based on 1RM to automatically update with the given information to help personalize the experience for the athlete. If the same program is assigned regularly, an athlete’s workouts scales as the athlete’s strength and ability scales. This also helps when assigning workouts to groups of people; the workout is tailored to their abilities, while keeping in line the group’s goals.

With an athlete management system there is less paperwork to process. There is no need for endless excel documents. This allows coaches to focus on the important parts of human performance improvement. (Gyms, clubs, and personal trainers specifically can Monetize Online Training Services with a system like this.)

Improve Communication

Good relationships are built on good communication. CoachMePlus offers in-app messaging to groups or to individuals. File sharing between coaches and athletes is very simple too. Store photos, videos, and other important content with the Athlete and Coach Library, the perfect repository for teams needing file sharing to be embedded and streamlined. With all this data flowing back and forth, you don’t need to worry about privacy challenges. CoachMePlus allows coaches to manage permissions for their organization and athletes so they can access a personalized experience on any mobile device.

Track

The need to import any human performance data set is a burden that every team needs to solve, and we designed a universal importer for teams of all sizes. Coaches can quickly upload different types of training or fitness related datasets with ease, which means they’ll have less time on the sideline recovering from training injuries so they can focus more heavily on coaching their athletes. 

Analyze

Engage athletes with live dashboards showing real-time performance information. Coaches can view real-time performance data and fitness levels, compliance, and training readiness. 

Training assessment – not just strength-based assessments, but also functional movement screening tools, sleep, mood, stress, and wellness questionnaires. With so much information out available to coaches, assessing how individuals have performed over time has never been easier.

Assess the quality of your training sessions through a variety of metrics, including heart rate, sets, reps, intensity, training load, and more. Track progression towards set goals to make sure your athletes are improving and ready for intense competition.

Who can benefit from having an Athlete Management System?

Gym Owners

AMS systems give people the ability to coach remotely or implement a hybrid in-person/online training program. CoachMePlus allows you to communicate with your members through their mobile devices and track their fitness progress. Both the members and gym owners benefit from the ease and transparency in workout programs. Trainers save time, increase retention rates, and provide accurate data about progress. Read More 

Strength and Conditioning Coaches

Human Performance Software helps coaches maximize the potential of the full team of athletes. Coaches can assign workouts based on position, or to each player individually. Professional sports teams like the Chicago Bulls, Nashville Predators and the Buffalo Bills have all benefited from Athlete Management Systems. Many high school and university coaches have used our software to manage individual and team growth. AMS systems provide coaching staff with transparency on progress and potential recovery or performance issues with players. Read more 

Physical Therapists

Therapists can help with many aspects of life including injury prevention, range of motion, rehabilitative care programming, recovery programming, ergonomics, and more. An athlete management system can be used for patients that may be experiencing pain or discomfort or rehabilitating after an injury. The body needs a balance between mobility and stability to avoid injury and physical therapists use athlete management systems to assess movements and improvement. 

Military

Monitoring warriors’ readiness is just as important during peacetime and training periods. Success relies on proper preparation, so it’s vital that commanders receive the information they need to make decisions about what is best suited for their own command. It’s crucial that evaluations be tailored to each unique command because different requirements can greatly affect performance metrics like strength or physical fitness levels when evaluating them against other units in a larger force structure. Evaluate your unit by taking into account all aspects such as skills learned throughout activities, injury rates from both combat-related injuries and noncombat related incidents, fatigue levels among troops who must balance both military and family roles simultaneously. Read More

Workplace Management / Industrial

The aging US workforce will require employers to implement programs that reduce the cost of musculoskeletal (MSK) injuries. Current options are inefficient and lack 1:1 coaching, which can lead to a high rate of failure in driving interventions at scale for MSK conditions such as low back pain, shoulder mobility or other overuse related injuries. More testing technology options have become available as wearables become more commonplace. Our platform provides a future-proof position as practitioners update hardwares and technology as it evolves.  As these factors change, it is crucial for providers who want to enter their practice field be up-to-date on recent innovations so they provide patients with improved care outcomes while also reducing costs associated with treating overuse and role-specific injury issues.

It is important to assess both objective and subjective measures when returning an athlete to full participation in their sport following an injury. Objective measures from tests give us data to determine limb symmetry, while subjective measures are primarily gathered by watching the athlete go through sport-specific movements, looking for hitches and abnormalities.

One should not rely solely on one kind of measure as each type has its limitations. Objective measures are executed in a controlled environment and only include basic movements. The ability to transfer those objective measures into a sport-specific workout/test that can be subjectively viewed by a knowledgeable sport-performance/medicine individual is just as important. An athlete can seem ready to return from an objective standpoint, but if they are not comfortable with certain movements or exercises in real-life application then we would be putting them at a disadvantage for a successful return to play.  

Objective Measures

Some objective measures we check before returning athletes to play are limb girth symmetry, range of motion, force plate data, one-leg hop testing, and single limb strength testing.  

Limb Girth & Range of Motion

The easiest, and probably most accurate, measures we can take is girth and range of motion.  Simply take the measurements of a body part (after swelling of an injury has dissipated) at multiple points of a limb and compare them bilaterally. Do the same through passive and active range of motions in each limb. This will uncover any deficits in muscle mass and range of motion that need to be addressed.

Force Plates

Force plates are a tool that can look at multiple data points like force, load (concentric/eccentric) and ground contact time when determining the readiness of an athlete to return to play. Utilizing a two-leg jump test and comparing the data between limbs equips us to analyze whether the athlete is favoring one side versus having symmetric results. We can then assess what kind of lifts/movements would help the athlete with any deficits moving forward. If there is a discrepancy between sides, the athlete must complete corrective exercises before they can progress to large-type lifts and exercises.

Hop & Strength Tests

Single leg hop and strength testing gives us measurable data to look at specific exercises to which we can again compare bilaterally. An athlete will perform reps to failure from a single-leg leg press on a Pro-Shuttle at 70-75% RM with the unaffected leg, and then repeat on the affected limb. 1-leg hop testing is done for time and distance, and with a lateral component, then it is compared bilaterally. Address limitations and deficits through exercise prescription and repeated trials.

As we run objective testing, we are looking for bilateral symmetry of at least 92-94% before we return an athlete to full participation. If an athlete produces results below the desired percentage, they will focus on improving these metrics before moving forward. Exercises will be specific to an athlete’s particular needs, whether that be increased strength, hypertrophy, range of motion, and/or jump distances.

Subjective Testing

Subjective checkpoints, though not measurable, can illuminate details about the athlete’s condition that objective data will not. Putting an athlete through a functional test or workout will give us an idea of how comfortable the athlete is with running, jumping, cutting, throwing, and sport-specific movements. For instance, is the athlete jumping as high off both legs? Are they taking more time cutting to one side versus the other? Are they driving their hips the same when sprinting?

A functional test can include but not be limited to straight-ahead running, side shuffle, change of speed, deceleration, single-leg bounding, and change of direction exercises to name a few. When the basic movements have been mastered, functional tests then shift to sport-specific drills or exercises (e.g. one-leg lay-up for a basketball player). Any hitches or abnormalities observed should be addressed with corrective exercises and/or therapeutic rehab techniques.  

Example: If you notice an athlete is not jumping as high off their left leg when performing skip jumps or lay-ups, single-leg jumps performed on a force plate will work to correct the abnormality and also provide feedback to the athlete.

Putting an athlete through controlled and repeated functional tests/workouts will allow them to: 

1. Work on movements/techniques they are struggling to perform, and 
2. Gain the necessary confidence in performing those movements needed to play their sport.

Discussion

When returning an athlete to their sport, it is important to look at both objective and subjective measures of their performance with specific exercises before determining their readiness for full participation. This should be done on a continual and regular basis to make sure athletes are making progress to a successful return to sport.  If you smoke a brisket for 8 hours, are you going to light the fire, walk away and assume the temperature is going to remain constant for that long? No. Timely tests and checkpoints must be achieved before an athlete is to progress to their next goal. To continually add exercises or drills before hitting their marks can put that athlete, not only at a disadvantage, but at risk for further injury. 

Creating a functional workout based on the deficits/limitations uncovered through objective measures will help return the athlete to play in a safer environment, and allow the athlete to gain confidence during their progression. For example, if you notice an athlete coming back from an ACL reconstruction is collapsing their knee into a varus position during a single-leg press (objective test), a functional workout should include a controlled eccentric load forcing the athlete to control their knee flexion (shallow 1-leg depth jump).

Only after the objective goals and subjective checkpoints are met are we confident that our athletes are ready to return to play.

Recovery is a major factor in sports performance and everyday life. Outside of sleep and rest, nutrition plays a pivotal role in recovery for athletes and fitness enthusiasts. Supplements are a big question mark for many coaches and trainers, as the science is always growing and the administrative burdens are problematic for professionals.

In this Academy Guide, we cover the key supplements that nutrition science research shows have potential for the repair and regeneration of the body. In addition to science, the outline will cover up-to-date information on purity and other considerations important to supplements, such as budgeting. Education is the first step for all applications in sports and training, but taking action requires far more than just knowledge. This guide covers compliance and logistical information that enables the reader to make better choices and smarter investments in nutrition.

Strategic Benefits of Supplements

Supplements are measured allotments of nutrition, whether a micronutrient or macronutrient. Some supplements are hard to distinguish from conventional foods, but due to their application are considered functional foods when applied in sports. Supplements are a convenient way to ensure nutrition is supported. The entire industry has expanded to include new options for enhancing athlete potential.

Dietary supplements are exactly what they sound like: a complementary part of a sound diet and not a replacement for poor nutritional practices. What makes supplements popular and effective is that they are practical for many reasons, such as the potency of some vitamins or nutrients that can’t be easily acquired in typical diets. An example of this is vitamin D, a hormone that supports an array of bodily functions beyond bone health. Creatine administration is another example of the practical value of supplements, as the intake of natural sources isn’t realistic no matter how dedicated an athlete is to their diet.

Supplements may be ethically required in some settings, as anemia and other health risks are prone to affect more than just performance with athletes. Quality of life, not just athletic potential, is part of the responsibilities of support staff. Athlete care for traumatic brain injuries (TBI), as well as general well-being, should be considered when supplements are discussed in practice.

Purity and Efficacy with Supplements

Several organizations exist that improve the quality and purity of products for sport, and they are NSF, Informed-Sport, and Informed-Choice. While they are excellent for regulating the purity in elite sport, not all products are tested and this is why contamination may still result in an athlete testing positive for banned substances. It is imperative that coaches and professionals be fully aware of the current status of every order or recommendation before implementing a supplement program. In addition to the purity of the product, the handling and safety should be examined by reviewing the national body that monitors the health and safety of the product.

While purity is important, the products may not have a scientifically sound benefit or the formulation may have little efficacy because of the dose or recommended method of administration. Having a pure supplement is not an assurance that the application or formula is effective. Many products have proprietary formulas that don’t list active ingredient dosages, so using supplements that list what is actually included in the product is essential.

The nutrition facts on a supplement label are also estimated because uptake, not intake, is what determines the efficacy of a product. With nutrients that sometimes compete with one another, even vitamins and minerals that are consumed may not end up improving the nutritional status of athletes. Functional foods are not considered supplements, but label claims are very important and sometimes a certificate of analysis is available for the potency of nutrients contained in the package.

“Dietary supplements are exactly what they sound like: a complementary part of a sound diet and not a replacement for poor nutritional practices.”Click to Tweet

Promising Recovery and Regeneration Supplements

Defining a supplement today is difficult, as many foods are fortified. Even basic food products are sometimes considered functional foods because a simple manufacturing or preparation process is involved with the product. Most commonly, a supplement is an artificial product that is a powder or pill, but foods that resemble household groceries or beverages are now considered part of the family of supplements.

Vitamin D

This vitamin is actually a hormone that has other roles outside of bone health. Based on screening data in the NFL, athletes with low levels of vitamin D have higher rates of injuries to their muscles. Genetics, environmental conditions, lifestyle, and nutritional pattern all determine an optimal dose for vitamin D, as sunlight and ethnicity play a role with vitamin D levels in the body.

Protein Powders

Protein in powdered form is convenient for those who have growth needs or are pressed for time. Technically, protein powders are macronutrients, but some types of protein, such as whey protein, have other potential health benefits. The market for protein is understandably high as muscle repair is a common theme with supplements, but technically, powders are used for their versatility and practical benefits.

Creatine

Seen as a muscle enhancer, creatine monohydrate is mainly used for speed and power events. With health benefits to the brain, there is high interest today in creatine for treating and preventing concussions. Creatine is inexpensive and safe, and it helps with both muscle growth and the ability to produce more output during high-intensity exercise. Hypertrophy, for athletes with specific size requirements or anyone needing to accelerate growth (such as athletes navigating atrophy after surgery), can benefit from creatine supplementation.

Omega-3

Much of the resurgence of healthy fats stems from concussion research, and omega-3 supplements are currently recommended. Fish oil is a rich source of omega-3s, but other options besides marine sources are also effective in improving blood profiles.

Probiotics

While technically not researched for muscle repair directly, restoration of the microbiome of the human body is an emerging area that nutrition and sport science are investigating. The common challenges with sport, specifically illness and gut health, may be improved with specific probiotic strains. Until research is conclusive, the impact of probiotics seems to be positive, with more irrefutable information coming in the near future.

Tart Cherry Extract

Muscle soreness is a common challenge with elite athletes and those that train heavy. Current research on subjective indicators of non-clinical pain shows that tart cherry extract in juice or supplement form can alleviate the discomfort of intense training and competition. In addition to subjective indicators of soreness, sleep and cognitive function, improvement looks promising with athletes and the general population.

Questionnaires can streamline this information gathering process. Other “supplements” such as energy bars, functional sports beverages, protein products, and nutrient-dense food products are gray areas with supplements. Stimulants and other muscle enhancers are available, but caffeine is often consumed in coffee and considered a functional food. Due to the labelling, the previously listed products are technically considered foods and not supplements, but are typically constructed and packaged for convenience and positioned as a measured nutritional option for sport or health.

“Hypertrophy, for athletes with specific size requirements or anyone needing to accelerate growth (such as athletes navigating atrophy after surgery), can benefit from creatine supplementation.”Click to Tweet

Budgeting for Supplements and Functional Foods

Supplements and functional foods are consumables, so they must be replenished and budgeted for carefully. Cost and compliance are two areas that determine the success of a supplementation program, and compromises must be made. In addition to the budgeting of the supplements, the time investment to ensure that athletes understand the pitfalls of using lesser quality or unknown brands is important because of the risks of contamination. Therefore, a budgeting plan needs to account for time and the human resources necessary to properly administer it.

Creating an Action Plan with Supplements

Administering a supplement plan requires organization, a budget, and, more importantly, a way to evaluate a cause and effect relationship with the intervention. Athlete nutrition isn’t easy to quantify, but simple measures such as body composition, biomarker status, internal physiological monitoring, and performance testing all help evaluate how sports nutrition and supplements are working. Using an athlete management system with the latest sports nutrition practices is a clear advantage for teams, and a viable solution to help the regular population of trainees as well.

When designing an action plan, the priorities should be on what is the most realistic and the most impactful, such as simple changes that are easy to execute tactically and can be evaluated later for compliance. Comprehensive nutritional interventions such as diet plans, meal preparation, and other approaches are far more demanding than supplements, but they are likely to be more successful when small behavior modifications are made. The use of supplements as a springboard to more holistic and complete sports nutrition applications is an effective strategy in making change for the better.

“Athlete nutrition isn’t easy to quantify, but simple measures such as body composition, biomarker status, internal physiological monitoring, and performance testing all help evaluate how sports nutrition and supplements are working.“

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CoachMePlus is a comprehensive solution for any training environment, ranging from scholastic level to pros, and including both military and private facilities.

Teamwork is an essential part of successful organizations, and effective groups collaborate better with a combination of the right tools and the best training. In this Academy Guide, we review general principles of collaboration for teams and private facilities, while previewing instrumental tools such as schedulers and questionnaires. Also featured in this article are workplace initiatives that are current and effective with groups of all sizes.

The goal of this guide is to properly merge the functions of scheduling software and athlete questionnaires. When the support staff is efficient and engaged in a successful process, athletes benefit by receiving better care and more precise training. Here are six steps to improving teamwork and collaboration in a sport or fitness environment, in order of priority.

Step 1: Improve Communication as a Best Practice

An obvious, but poorly executed, part of teamwork is communication. When communication breaks down, so does the trust and health of the workplace. The most common error with communication is a lack of transparency, where groups or individuals feel excluded and kept in the dark when it comes to decisions. Satisfaction occurs when a fair decision-making process is clear and open, even if the final verdict is disappointing. The best way to improve transparency is by increasing the accessibility of the information pertinent to the situation. When athlete support staff or fitness professionals are able to access the right information, such as wellness data or past training logs, cohesion improves.

In addition to improving communication, it’s important to record and document all group or individual discussions for reference. Simple communication bottlenecks often occur from incongruent recollections of what was agreed on or what was discussed, so notes and summaries are vital for reducing internal conflicts and confusion later.

In sport and fitness, those with the most knowledge of a specialty are not always the final decision-makers. Sometimes, it’s the client or athlete who ultimately decides what they do, while other times it’s management and head coaches who make the final decision. Therefore, it’s important to learn from decision-makers how they make their minds up on relevant issues so that expertise can be properly utilized. Communication needs common language modifications and education on medical and performance concerns to be effective.

Step 2: Establish a Hierarchy and Internal Accountability

The difficulty with teamwork is creating a leadership or hierarchy within the group. When groups are given level power on decision-making, a struggle can occur to render a decision without excessive compromise. Therefore, proper management requires a clear hierarchy of who reports to who. While, technically, everyone is working together, roles must have levels of responsibility in order to prevent a slowdown in support and change. Large organizations can work quickly and be “agile” when they are able to make decisions fast because a process is in place. Dashboards can accelerate collaboration, and most of the bottlenecks in speed come from collecting data or navigating through red tape.

Without separate accountability, teams are susceptible to division and working in silos. Accountability is important to ensure that a team isn’t hindered by one person, and it also helps motivate those who can see the results of their hard work. The philosophy of praising in public and reprimanding in private is a classic example of people management. In order to keep a workplace and support staff positive, constructive criticism should be an open process where past performance and decision-making are guided by the right documentation. Overall, no company or team organizational structure is perfect. It’s inevitable that internal conflicts will arise, decisions will be wrong, and accountability will not be enforced.

Step 3: Schedule and Plan Seasons and Training Periods

Group planning encourages teamwork, as everyone is usually given the same opportunities to voice their needs and concerns before a season begins. When all available resources are distributed openly, the outcome usually reduces friction or a toxic workplace later. Besides a disagreement due to differences in philosophy or expertise, a common problem with scheduling is workload. The quantity and quality of responsibility is often a problem with teams when workload is assigned in one direction.

Adjustments are to be expected with even the most thorough and best laid plans. The coexistence of monitoring and planning helps shape the next planning phase, and wellness questionnaires are excellent ways to see if plans are on the right track even when the results don’t appear to be working. A common error is to lose patience with a plan and make adjustments prematurely. The use of additional references and information ensures that a quality plan is followed, and wellness questionnaires enhance plans so they are refined with the right supporting data.

Post reviews of plans are an honest reflection on what was agreed on, what was followed, and what worked. What failed to work or what happened that was unexpected are both learning opportunities, but when winning matters, the process usually isn’t repeated unless confidence in the process is reinforced with small successes or improvement. Each season or time period that is reviewed is a perfect starting point for the next planning phase, as it allows those in leadership positions to know what possible problems and challenges can arise.

Step 4: Solicit Athlete and Client Feedback

Training is a repeated process that requires feedback directly from the athlete or client. Typically, verbal exchanges are used as the primary form of collecting information, but implementing communication and subjective questionnaires before the athlete or client comes in is far superior. Coaching is a time when additional questions can be asked, and adjustments can be made if necessary. Athletes who communicate their needs or responses to training are often more engaged when a coach or trainer asks. Even if changes or adjustments to the training are not made, those who give information are likely to be more confident that the plan was well-designed due to the feedback given.

Another opportunity for feedback and monitoring occurs separate from the training session. Much of the recovery enablers are sleep and nutrition, and those influencers are mainly found outside of the training complex or gym. Technology adds another layer of information that is certainly important, but without communication directly from the athlete or client, it usually is an incomplete picture. Having a wellness questionnaire and additional logging areas where a client can openly communicate their thoughts fosters a healthy communication path, and ensures that the subjective feedback has enough context to make sound conclusions.

Step 5: Create Roles and Specialized Knowledge Management

An ideal sport and fitness organization has enough overlap in team member expertise to communicate with one another, but also sufficient differences in expertise to encompass a wide range of skills. A multidisciplinary team will likely have some members who may not respect or accept different perspectives; this is a common challenge nearly every team will face. Roles are not just expertise domains—at times they are also connected to hierarchies and have contradictory goals. For example, a medical opinion can conflict with a performance need. Conversely, a performance goal may put athletes at an increased health risk down the road, such as playing injured or training through an injury. Therefore, a strong philosophy and ethical approach must be created in advance to reduce role conflict.

Maximizing expertise requires a combination of trust and access to internal and external specialists. A common issue with Athlete Management Systems is that they are completely internal, creating barriers and severing communication. Balancing width and depth of knowledge is essential, especially with smaller organizations or teams. Sometimes small clubs expect a sports medicine professional to handle training and nutrition, while larger organizations often just add depth instead of a well-rounded group of experts.

Step 6: Support the Work Environment, Culture, and Evaluations

The overall work environment and culture can range from highly unified to potentially toxic. Usually the core issues in an unhealthy work environment are workload, poor morale, and uninspired work. Solutions to common work impairments are allowances for creativity and goal setting. Inspired work usually means challenges that are rewarding, and while compensation and achievement are important, successful teams work well when members find what they do rewarding and they are recognized for it.

Culture is a big buzzword today, as a change or improvement to culture is often expected when leadership changes. Often past success is expected to be injected instantly into poorly performing workplaces, colleges, or teams when a leadership role is filled. Some organizations invest in culture development initiatives, such as outside experts, hoping to improve team function and success with outside training.

When domain expertise is not respected and decisions are made beyond one’s skill set, conflict grows beyond internal friction. This can ruin team unity and communication. A common complaint with teams occurs when an outside professional who is not a specialist in the area makes a decision that is not in the domain of their expertise. Therefore, it is necessary to clearly identify roles and boundaries to establish effectiveness in group settings.

Additional Recommendations with Teamwork

Putting everything together to create an effective and efficient team isn’t easy, and it will take iterations over time to maximize a talented staff. It is recommended that those supporting athletes and clients balance soft skills with education and enhanced expertise. Team-building exercises and other admirable attempts to foster cohesion in groups usually backfire, as outside observers are sometimes not appropriate. On the other hand, it may prove beneficial to bring in an auditing expert at times to remove bias and provide a fresh perspective on the health of the group’s dynamics. Finally, it does make sense to celebrate when possible, such as rewarding and recognizing when success, no matter how small, is achieved.

CoachMePlus is a comprehensive solution for any training environment, ranging from scholastic level to pros, and including both military and private facilities.

Defining Dehydration and Measuring Hydration

The optimal hydration state is a difficult designation, as the scientific literature debates what is normal in health and wellness, and what is potentially problematic in sport. Technically, hydration refers to the water content of a human, but due to its overlap with nutritional needs, electrolytes and sometimes carbohydrates are included. Currently, a wide range of measures of determining hydration are available, but there is no consensus as to which measurements are ideal for athletes. Analog ratings of urine color and thirst, body mass, measures of urine concentration, and blood do provide value, but the identification of an optimal hydration state (euhydration) is far from perfect. In addition to water loss from exercise, sweat rate and composition play a part in fluid intake strategies because daily electrolyte maintenance is important.

Body mass is likely the most practical assessment of water loss during intense training and competition. Due to the need to weigh the athlete nude, privacy issues come into play, but you can make modifications to the weigh-in and weigh-out protocols to ensure athletes are comfortable and the data is accurate. The use of body mass changes or thresholds is also common in the scientific research, so adopting a similar approach is practical for monitoring and supporting athletes. Athletes can towel dry and use identical underwear to provide a reliable body mass change, as the absolute numbers are not as important as the actual change in the entire weight of the player monitored. Connecting weight tracking with hydration metrics streamlines the monitoring process.

“Individual sweat composition profiles require custom support training for both health and recovery.”CLICK TO TWEET

Sweat Profiles and Environmental Conditions

Every athlete has a unique physiology, sweat rate, and sweat composition. In addition to the athlete’s pattern of sweating, environmental conditions and attire will contribute to dehydration. An athlete competing outdoors, such as in soccer, has a higher probability of dehydration than in indoor sports that are intermittent, such as basketball. Therefore, it’s important to monitor and prepare for environmental conditions, as those variables determine drinking rates. It’s necessary to know that cumulative sweat loss is not the same as sweat rate. Using independent measurements to plan and log environmental conditions live is essential for both the accuracy of the data and the legal requirements of protecting an athlete.

“Hydration plays an important role in athlete performance and well-being, but it can’t be isolated into oversimplified suggestions such as how much water to drink based on athlete weight only.”CLICK TO TWEET

Sweat composition, which is mainly sodium loss, is a factor with intense training. While the research is unclear as to the severity of sodium imbalance, athletes should not be exposed to chronic training with an electrolyte imbalance. Other minerals such as calcium, magnesium, and potassium are more stable in the body, but should be replenished with dietary interventions. Generally, most athletes can consume enough electrolytes from typical diets, but athletes are at risk when low sodium intake occurs, as fruits and vegetables are poor options. Thus, registered dieticians familiar with athlete training should be heavily involved.

Humidity and altitude are factors that you should monitor and make adjustments for. Dry heat can be an issue because athletes tend not to notice sweating, so all environmental conditions should be viewed as risk factors to poor hydration. Cold environments are deceptive, as the athlete will usually drink less subconsciously and their attire may increase their body temperature beyond expectations. Cold conditions usually reduce the risk of overheating, but you should monitor athletes regardless of risk as all conditions play a role in hydration.

Maintaining Hydration During Competition and Training

Fluid intake depends on the athlete’s size, work rate, and environmental conditions. A large NFL athlete such as a lineman in Florida during the pre-season will have an entirely different strategy than a professional baseball player during a championship game in Ohio in October. Changing and modifying drinking strategies is necessary to reduce the small risk of hyponatremia, as overdrinking can occur when an athlete is encouraged to drink too much based on unnecessary hydration strategies. This can happen when an athlete chronically drinks only water and their electrolyte consumption is low, and is more common with athletes who have strict diets that are low in sodium.

1. Support staff should encourage the eating of foods, such as fruits and vegetables, that have high water content. While fluids are an obvious solution, athletes need to see how an entire diet facilitates hydration.

2. All staff should be educated and involved in the hydration process. Do not reduce hydration to the athlete’s responsibility or an athletic training requirement.

3. Athlete education is a priority, but compliance should be monitored with hydration testing or evaluation on either a daily basis or during periods of time that are high risk.

4. The thirst mechanism is unreliable, but you should encourage athletes to drink to their liking and not restrict them unless a real risk of hyperhydration exists. The probability of an athlete consuming more water than they lose during intense training is low, but monitoring is suggested.

5. Beverages, whether specific to sport or modified for athletes, should be palatable and encourage drinking. In addition to hydration, it may be necessary to provide carbohydrates if the training or competitive periods are longer than an hour.

6. Coaches should be instructed to plan time periods for hydration breaks and rest. Continual training without water is a technique currently being experimented with, but in team sports it’s recommended that breaks are purposely scheduled.

7. Athletes should have access to properly cleaned and sanitized water bottles if used, as the risk of illnesses such as mononucleosis or the common cold increases when resources are inadequate.

These strategies are designed to facilitate fluid intake, but are far from perfect because athletes cannot always drink on command and they often spend a lot of their time away from the facility or arena.

Cramping and the Influence of Neuromuscular Fatigue

Exercise-associated muscle cramps (EAMC) are not necessarily hydration errors, but more often symptoms of athletes being overloaded from fatigue or exertion. While hydration may interact with fatigue and cramping indirectly, the cramping is not from electrolyte imbalance or lower blood viscosity. Based on the scientific literature, cramping is connected to athlete fatigue and remedies such as sports drinks and other options are simply unproven. Researchers have narrowed the cause of cramping to three variables: neuromuscular control, dehydration, and electrolyte depletion. Clearly, the research is not yet conclusive, but generally the risks of cramping stem from high intensity and fatigue of the neuromuscular system.

Intervention studies demonstrated that static stretching improves muscle function and return to play, thus calling the dehydration or electrolyte depletion theories into question. What remains a mystery is how all of the environmental and perceptual factors interact with hydration and cramping rates. Down the road, more research on the role of hydration with the recovery of both local and perceptual fatigue is needed. New science may help support staff understand what protocols elicit the best responses to both preventative measures to dehydration and what facilitates recovery of athletes.

Monitoring Hydration and Recovery

Repeated measurements done at a high frequency transform testing into optimal monitoring. Monitoring hydration is still relevant, even with the new research on exercise-associated muscle cramps and conflicting data on athlete health and performance. It is known that athletes who are dehydrated in team sport tend to have poor subjective responses to training loads and power drops based on the magnitude of dehydration. Endurance-based sports tend to fare differently, mainly because athlete body mass decreases as hydration levels decrease, cancelling out power losses. Therefore, even if the trade-off is advantageous in extended duration events, support staff guiding athletes who require repeated anaerobic work should reconsider the favorable shift in the power-to-weight ratio and maintain hydration.

“Monitoring player weight is a straightforward and effective way to prescribe the interventions post training or post competition”CLICK TO TWEET

Current and Future Recommendations

Recommending proper guidelines for hydration is a scientific, political, and legal challenge. Due to the lag time between current research and legal requirements in sport, it’s important to be aware of the risks associated with not adhering to best practices in sports medicine. Each league, as well as each country, should have proper recommendations for hydration before, during, and after training or competition. Adhering to those guidelines ensures athletes are safe, performance is optimized, and recovery is facilitated.

In addition to hydration, overall fatigue monitoring and cardiac screening are recommended to protect athletes from possible risk due to a vascular or electrically caused event. Other pathological factors contribute to risk, such as sickle cell anemia, pulmonary diseases, and diabetes. Hydration plays an important role in athlete performance and well-being, but it can’t be isolated into oversimplified suggestions such as how much water to drink based on athlete weight only. Pragmatic solutions are excellent ways to ensure athletes are protected from unnecessary risks in sport.

CoachMePlus is a comprehensive solution for any training environment, ranging from scholastic level to pros, and including both military and private facilities.

Training and competing in hot conditions, including passive methods, is a growing interest with support staff, team coaching, and the public as a whole. The thermoregulatory strain of heat places athletes at risk, but it also provides a potential role in improving adaptation to training. In addition to recommendations and guidelines for training and competing in the heat, this Academy Guide will outline new cooling strategies and monitoring techniques. The magnitude of heat risk is growing, mainly due to higher work rates and rising temperatures outdoors. A combination of awareness, education, planning, and action is essential for reducing heat illness and improving the outcomes of training and competition.

Heat Acclimatization Strategies for Training and Competing

Preparing for competition in the heat requires adjustments during training and competition, if possible. Due to the nature of international and domestic travel, some teams and athletes do not have the luxury of acclimatizing to the environmental conditions with enough exposure time. Optimal acclimation requires incremental exposure based on environmental conditions and the fitness level of the athlete; thus, some athletes may not be able to adapt and must instead focus on coping and recovery strategies. With several sports participating in events with radically different climates such as tennis and American football, competing against individuals or teams who are acclimated to heat does pose a disadvantage.

Primarily, three target areas exist with heat acclimation. Adaptation, baseline profiling, and competition preparation are the main goals of heat training. Each phase takes a few weeks to receive physiological benefits, and specific timing to properly periodize. For example, if the goals are to peak for a specific game or competition in the heat, prior acclimation that season is helpful, but allowing for one to two weeks of exposure can potentially improve the success rate. If the athlete or team requires future acclimatization and a baseline, a full two weeks is necessary. With just a few training sessions, immediate benefits like physiological boosts to adaptations can be seen in a matter of days. However, adaptations are more likely to be sufficient after two weeks.

A reversal of the adaptations, similar to detraining, can occur in one to two weeks. Short-term benefits may last up to a month before they are completely lost. Depending on the conditions and training methods, athletes can maintain the adaptations slightly longer, but only for added days rather than additional weeks.

Hydration Adjustments to Exercise in the Heat

Proper hydration is a vital component of managing heat strain for athletes. Focus on individual hydration tactics to improve athlete safety and performance. A more comprehensive guide to athlete hydration explains the numerous factors that determine the success and failure of simple hydration, such as monitoring athletes and knowing their sweat profile (sodium loss) prior to developing an intervention plan. When making adjustments to hydration in the heat, factors that are influential on outcomes are the acclimatization, the sport itself, and the athlete’s hydration strategy. If an athlete is unable to train in the heat to adapt to the environmental conditions, the hydration strategies will likely need to be modified.

USG visualizations can give insights into the hydration balance in athletes during an intensive training season. General hydration guidelines should be followed, such as the typical need to improve liquid intake before, during, and after events in the heat. The severity of the impact from a decrease in performance due to hydration levels tends to be more exaggerated, but when body core temperature rises and hydration falls, health risk increases and poor performance will likely occur, even if much of the influence is psychological.

Recommendations for Cooling Athletes

The reduction of body temperature to sustain performance can be addressed by several means, including total or partial cold water immersion, cold vests, ingestion of near frozen liquids, and conventional cutbacks in work rate and exposure time. When attempting to improve an athlete’s capacity to handle heat, the process is similar to training in altitude and requires days to acclimatize. When trying to recover from heat, it’s a matter of reducing physical strain and the ability to rebound to the next session.

Cold water immersion (CWI) is thought to be a recovery method, but most of the research supports the use of CWI for lowering body temperature in order to facilitate a return to homeostasis. The use of cold tubs and other methods is likely appropriate for tournaments and multiple training session demands. Other external applications are cooling vests and cooling apparel that reduce core temperature and are popular with athletes due to their effectiveness and practical benefits.

Internal applications, such as low-temperature beverage ingestion, have been thoroughly researched in sport science as nominal solutions to maintaining thermoregulation. Some small benefits do occur if cold liquids are consumed before activity, but the effects are mild. Ice-slurry ingestion, or drinking beverages that are nearly frozen, addresses thermoregulation effectively from internal cooling of the core. Beverages can be customized by sports nutritionists and are best used before training or competition. Coaches utilize hydration toolkits to streamline the hydration process for their athletes.

CoachMePlus is a comprehensive solution for any training environment, ranging from scholastic level to pros, and including both military and private facilities

Coaches can expect to be exposed to the core needs of safely and effectively managing athlete development in an organized manner. In order to prepare athletes for the future, coaches must have a working knowledge of what is necessary to reduce burnout and poor participation. Finally, coaches should be able to understand relevant terminology with the latest methods in monitoring youth athletes from adolescent to young adult.

Similarities and Differences with Physical Education

LTAD factors into all areas that interact with the growing athlete, especially the need for quality physical education. Developing athletes systemically is not an extension of physical education, nor a replacement for it. In simple terms, LTAD is planning for the sporting future by training with appropriate methods based on the child’s needs. Physical education does overlap with LTAD because the fundamental movement skills learned from formal scholastic work benefit the growing athlete, but are incidental. Academic curriculums often take precedence over physical literacy, especially today when technology and languages are replacing arts and P.E. In response to the lack of P.E., private sector programs are complementing athlete development and general physical literacy.

Physical education is not the only resource for childhood growth, as general unorganized or “free” play is a base foundation for development as well. A well-rounded child is expected to not only grow from physical literacy at school, but also at home. Therefore, LTAD is highly dependent on both physical education and general childhood development from play. The recess periods and non-school experiences an athlete will encounter are just as important as formal training years later. It can be argued that LTAD’s role is to connect the fundamental childhood P.E. and build on those skills as the athlete matures.

“With a very strong grasp of movement competency early, an athlete is more likely to succeed as an elite athlete.”CLICK TO TWEET

Challenges and Needs with Specialization

A difficult balance between the specific requirements of individual sports and athletic development is knowing how much specialization is ideal in the long run. In the past, playing more sports improved athleticism and performance, but with travel teams and early specialization, those following the best long-term plan found it difficult to stay competitive. Today, the juggle of knowing what is beneficial long-term and managing the immediate needs of competition are the reasons LTAD is struggling to keep pace with the pressure to win.

Another gap occurs in parent education, where most of the decision-making occurs in sport participation and training. In order to make the changes necessary for youth athletes, the process starts with parent education and possibly ends with policies. Example changes have been visible with youth baseball leagues and the creation of pitching limits, but more is necessary to make a difference in all sports.

Specific sport skills do require time and dedication. It’s wishful thinking that an athlete will be a great golfer without putting in the necessary work for the sport, but most of the errors come from assuming the opposite is true. Early specialization is a problem not because an athlete spends too little time in one sport, but because they don’t spend enough time preparing for sport. Most sport coaches appreciate well-rounded athletes, but it’s better to be generally prepared than play another sport that’s simply the same sport in a different form. Athletes should try various sports and activities early, and not cease participation until college. Some sports are unique and require slightly more specialization, but even those sports benefit from either a break or an adjunct activity.

Jeremy Frisch@JeremyFrisch

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Motor Skill Acquisition Demands

Most LTAD plans focus on the general competencies of running, jumping, throwing, and other primary movement needs. A foundation of solid movement skills improves the potential of athletes in the future. Improving coordination requires exposure to enriching curriculums that are complex enough to challenge the athlete but not frustrate them. Coaches working with young athletes should plan and rank their capabilities to perform outside of the confines of the specific sport and concern themselves with general athleticism. General athleticism can be defined as the root capacity to move and perform outside the confines of specific rules or knowledge of the game. As an athlete matures, knowledge of the game’s strategies and tactics is expected, as is their physical skill set in their respective sport. Tracking youth athletes for general athleticism and strength is essential and can be accelerated using proper testing and tracking tools.

“Youth sports should focus on teaching, not competing or even training.”CLICK TO TWEET

Factoring Biological, Chronological, Technical, and Training Age

Coaches who work with young athletes will face up to four separate “ages” of an athlete that need to be accounted for. The first age is simply the actual chronological age of the athlete in years and days. With one year accounting for a larger percentage of time for children, it’s important to include the actual partial time to the age when working with youth athletes. Biological age is how mature they are physically, as athletes with the same chronological age can be totally different when it comes to physical attributes. Technical and training ages are not synonymous, as an athlete playing baseball for years who has never formally weight trained may be technically proficient, but with regard to training age, they are a true neophyte. Coaches should be educated on the best ways to manage not only the four ages of an athlete, but the emotional and academic elements as well. Team Access Point allows coaches easy access to navigate through entire teams of youth athlete data.

The most common issue facing modern sport is identifying the different ages in an objective manner and knowing when it’s appropriate to hold an athlete back or elevate them to higher levels. Sometimes an athlete is talented and opportunities to compete are available to them, but due to the physical nature of sports advancement, it may be risky. Thus, a precise focus on knowing where an athlete is with their four ages and having experience managing those ages is instrumental for the continual improvement and support of the well-being of young competitors.

Monitoring Maturation in Youth Sport

Coaches are looking at better ways to track the growth of athletes, starting with their chronological age, and moving toward meaningful metrics like peak height velocity (PHV) and peak weight velocity (PWV). Simple ways to monitor special changes with youth athletes are popular for many reasons—the most notable is that the data required is easy to collect and accessible for coaches.

Qualitative data, such as ranking the proficiency of an athlete’s sporting ability, is still accepted and standard in the coaching community, but with the advent of video and tracking technologies, athletes now expect more quantitative or highly detailed information. Unfortunately, much of the information won’t directly help the athlete realize the joy and other non-performance benefits of sport. Athletes’ emotional connection to sport and self-confidence should be considered before sharing any data that ranks or evaluates their abilities.

Talent identification is a difficult but necessary component of athlete development. Without the necessary assessments, coaches will be limited in decision-making with training and teaching. The use of methods that identify talent are not just about ranking ability in some sport, but observing all general abilities of athleticism that would later be more suited for a different sport if the athlete is interested. Athletes may find early success with sports and later discover that they enjoy a sport they are less suited for, creating a problem for those wishing to have the athlete excel, such as parents and coaches. Alternatively, an athlete may like the success and challenges of a sport they don’t enjoy as much. Coaches should be aware of the psychological factors of sport and work with a professional sport psychologist when possible.

Developing Athletes for the Future

Athletes who are just entering elementary school now will be entering college in the 2030s, and coaches should design training to match both the needs of sports then and the needs of athletes now. Not all athletes will mature to become professionals or even collegiate athletes, but all can benefit when a plan is patient and factors in their well-being.

“In order to build the athlete of the future, you must not only know the direction in which the sport is evolving, but also where the pitfalls may be with such changes.”

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Constructing training that improves performance and monitors recovery while reducing unnecessary competition is a challenge today. Without adjusting training load and competitive schedules, the risk of injury and athletes walking away from sport is too high. In order to build the athlete of the future, you must not only know the direction in which the sport is evolving, but also where the pitfalls may be with such changes. Developing athletes are not fragile, but they need protection from overtraining and too much competition now more than ever.

CoachMePlus is a comprehensive solution for any training environment, ranging from scholastic level to pros, and including both military and private facilities.

The growth of strength and conditioning software can be seen with the increased usage of both personal smart devices with athletes and tablets in the weight room. Sports teams and fitness professionals are investing in strength and conditioning software for multiple reasons, mainly to improve time efficiency and communication with their athletes. Fitness professionals are using the same software to help improve the results of correspondence training or private live training. Legacy solutions, specifically spreadsheet or shared document software, have benefits, but they are not as effective as full packages.

In this Academy Guide, we cover the key benefits of using strength and conditioning software in detail. In addition to its advantages, we present essential principles that make the software even more powerful if utilized correctly and consistently. Strength and conditioning software is no longer a luxury—today it’s instrumental in keeping athletes and clients supported properly. Check out the tools available to Strength and Conditioning Coaches here.  

Training Design Principles: New and Old

Strength and conditioning software enhances training principles and program design. The right software enables coaches to go beyond what they can do with whiteboards to enter a world where training has less errors and guesswork. You don’t need to measure every rep in training, but every workout is an opportunity to assess and learn.

Classic principles of periodization, such as sequential planning and guidelines, have been questioned in the research of late. There is some evidence that early concepts are effective. Noted researchers and practitioners have also explained the difference between programming and operating, as they are not interchangeable. Progressive overload, density, intensity, rest, volume, and other variables are timeless, but they are more effective when modern principles are integrated. Thanks to new research and software, here are concepts that have evolved over the last few decades.

Planning

Structuring an athlete development process beforehand, including what needs to be done to prepare, when it needs to be done, how it should be done, and who will do it.

Monitoring and Testing

The repeated measurement of readiness, recovery, and ability represents testing and monitoring. The main differences with monitoring is that testing is a direct measure, whereas monitoring is usually the response or pattern of responses to training and competition.

Modeling

When planning and monitoring are combined, it forms the foundation of modeling. A true model adds in key factors to creating a successful plan, and that is the heart of the approach.

Personalizing

Customizing the effective components of a program based on the individual’s capability and preferences.

Automating

Utilizing software programs or processes that bypass or reduce human intervention, usually in rote tasks that are considered important but repetitive. Coaches who repeatedly use formulas or “monkey work” rely on automation to save time, reduce errors, and speed up the training process.

The addition of software enhances classic training principles and adds new opportunities to improve the training process. New and old concepts don’t conflict—they are actually mutually beneficial—and modern training programs can help athletes and clients achieve more if properly used.

Planning Training and Competition

Training sessions must carefully interact with competitions and must synchronize with the available time. The conventional approach of mapping out all competitions and then assessing time resources and travel demands is step one. The next step is practice and training, and most programs work backwards if possible. In many situations, coaches are faced with time frames that do not allow for adequate preparation for the season, so a modified plan of slow integration into full training is usually employed. Many professionals call this blending of what is ideal with what is actually available “the art of coaching.” It helps a coach tremendously to monitor the training load and use the right algorithms to guide them on how much they can do to increase fitness from practice and strength from outside training.

Coaches usually focus on planned rest and recovery periods, ranging from a light practice to prescribed days off. Usually, coaches reduce planned rest time periods to the minimum, hoping to use them sparingly later when forced to make changes. Active recovery and low intensity days provide enough work to keep capacity up and facilitate regeneration for the next hard session. Overall, the use of the Acute Chronic Work Ratio (ACWR) adds a degree of refinement to intuitive planning, but coaches should employ other monitoring techniques before the season begins. A rough outline of training planned in advance reduces unnecessary surprises with regard to spikes in load or under preparing the athlete.

Benchmarking progress with outside sport training beyond practices involves periodic testing, or the use of sophisticated algorithms if a program uses player tracking technology. If a program does not use technology to monitor practice and needs to observe changes through the course of a season, field tests are usually administered. End-of-year evaluations are often debriefing sessions with athletes or clients, but they are also occasions to engage them on opportunities for next year with the right data presented in a digestible form and with a professional manner.

Monitoring and Modeling Features

Input from the athlete directly, whether subjective or objective data, is a valuable feature of strength and conditioning software. Along with the power of automation, collecting measurements and making adjustments to training and medical support for athletes or fitness clients is extremely powerful. A great plan reduces the need for change, as agile plans are adaptable and flexible. Still, monitoring and the anticipation of possible adjustments that are common in training and exercise are needed.

A strong argument for monitoring can be made during the season, where the aches and pains of heavy competition make forecasting what can be done in training very difficult. Modeling creates a plan that is liquid and very adaptable; a planned set of workouts without monitoring is guesswork. Classic periodization models are not modeling, they are representations of what sequences may work better than linear models.

Modeling performance or even fitness improves future planning and helps with understanding the pitfalls of past planning. For training to succeed, coaches should use modeling to create an efficient feedback approach to their training, and capitalize on monitoring to ensure the planning is working. Modeling methods can range from very advanced approaches with teams of data scientists collaborating to a coach who is experienced enough to know that a season is going to have bumps along the way. Modeling doesn’t need to be very complicated, just as complex as necessary.

Personalization and Individualization

Two big bottlenecks to human performance are access to coaching, and access to planning or constructing individualized training. Tradeoffs exist between coaching groups that train athletes similarly and those that train with highly individualized workouts. Athletes who train together become competitive and easier to manage, but lack the personalized design qualities that may be necessary to improve outcomes. A combination and set of compromises are necessary to get the greatest results in real-world environments. Therefore, coaches should consider a balance between the group dynamics of team training and the occasional, but necessary, need for individualization.

Profiling athletes has three primary benefits, and the strongest is knowing how the athlete compares with norms and their peers. Individualization is great, but administering it to a large team or groups of teams is very time-consuming. Monitoring, while not commonly thought about, individualizes a program without much work.

Athletes with contraindicated medical problems or complicated injuries tend to drain time resources away from healthy athletes; thus, the value of software that is efficient and powerful. An athlete or client who requires extra personal attention is better supported by online software that can communicate more information back and forth. Quality communication and faster programming of return-to-play workouts, along with regular training, occur when more information is available. One-on-one settings that can deliver very personalized training sometimes are not able to deliver it because there’s not adequate infrastructure. Using online strength and conditioning software doesn’t just improve the speed of writing a workout, it exponentially improves the amount of customization of the training.

Maximizing Opportunities in Automation

The strength of software is its ability to either scale or automate the process. Coaches must value the automation benefits, as they reduce errors and save an enormous amount of time. Calculations that are used constantly should be a feature in strength and conditioning software. There is an increased need to automate any repeated process when a coach continuously relies on the same algorithms or simple formulas. Scaling is when a training process is expanded, and the most common example is when workouts are copied or repeated. The majority of coaches will refine a training program over time, and in doing so, previous workouts can be used again with modifications. Building a library of exercises and routines in advance enables coaches to save radical amounts of time later.

Connectivity of data is another example of automation that is favored by coaches, especially with dashboards. If monitoring is done at a high frequency, the data captured can be shared and repurposed in a visual form. The use of dashboards improves decision-making by automating the representation of athlete readiness or training status. Dashboards save time and increase the accuracy of decision-making by transforming the data into a comparison.

Overall, the goal of automation is to free coaches from rote jobs so they can focus more on the person-to-person interaction that they need. Using software reduces the burdens that consume time and impair connections between the professional and end user, be it athlete or fitness client. The more that information can be passively collected, sorted, filtered, calculated, and then analyzed, the better outcomes will be in athlete performance and client goals.

Migrating to a Full Online Solution

The choice to utilize online software is not a hard one—the difficulty is making the time and commitment to migrate entire departments or organizations over. The reality is that coaches don’t need to convert over to online software all in one leap, but can start with small steps such as monitoring first or uploading testing data into an Athlete Management System (AMS) such as CoachMePlus. It doesn’t take weeks for the upgrade to show value; from day one, the amount of time and energy saved is clearly evident in the speed of communication, reduction in coaching errors, and user experience of the athletes. The sooner you migrate to an online platform, the sooner you can tap into all of the advantages that coaching software provides.

CoachMePlus is a comprehensive solution for any training environment, ranging from scholastic level to pros, and including both military and private facilities.

Online strength and conditioning software leverage all of the timeless principles of strength training while adding an array of benefits for coaches. Today, the adoption of online training apps is still slow, with only a fraction of coaches using designated strength software to design training. Within this Academy Guide, the five essential advantages of specific training software are outlined in full detail, including relevant examples of the software’s benefits. The purpose of this article is very straightforward: Coaches can improve their results and save valuable time by migrating from spreadsheet software to actual training software. Coaches have found success while using applications not designed for writing training programs, but there are too many advantages with a modern platform to just keep using general software.

Cloud Collaboration

We can argue over software’s most important quality, but ethically, we need to first recognize the advantage of being able to collaborate with other coaches, and with the athletes themselves. Web cloud applications are perfect tools for coaches who demand group collaboration or transparency with medical and team staff. In addition to designing workouts, subjective questionnaires and other athlete inputs such as workout data are a collaborative effort, even if the training was designed by a coach. Online software enables coaches to design and push workouts anywhere in the world and see real-time training updates even when the athletes are remote. Correspondence training can be done with conventional approaches, but the speed of adjusting and communicating with cloud tools improves the quality of the training.

Collaboration is also a perfect teaching opportunity for mentored coaches. With online software, experienced coaches can help guide younger coaches in their training programs. If necessary, a head coach can intervene with an assistant by making the actual changes themselves or recommending changes through annotated notes or suggestions. Online software has many advantages, but working with other coaches and athletes is the prime benefit that must be utilized in modern strength and conditioning.

Powerful Automation

Automation improves accuracy and saves hours for coaches. One of the bottlenecks for coaches is writing workouts, as it’s time-consuming and usually very inefficient. Automation solves the need of repeating a process that may otherwise take away from other more important coaching duties. Relying on general templates from past years is convenient, but missing out on individualizing training is unacceptable and adjusting to unexpected events such as illness or a change in circumstances is necessary today. Coaches who want to provide the best training possible should reconsider how they use automation with their training programs.

Common uses for automation range anywhere from repurposing small training units with sets and reps to fully automating workouts using logic codes similar to formulas. Calculations, such as load percentages or volume estimates of work, are easily performed with the right software. Coaches can also improve communication with pre-constructed reminders and message recommendations for athletes via direct notification or by texting directly. Other approaches to automation are a combination of manual input and additional software analysis, such as wellness questionnaires and subjective ratings of effort. If the process is carefully implemented, error reduction and detection will improve, lowering the risk of injury and overtraining.

The complexity of training a large number of athletes is a major undertaking for a strength and conditioning coach. Beyond training, monitoring and return-to-play rehabilitation responsibilities are time drains that increase burnout and decrease access to personal life balance and continuing education. As the training process gathers increasing amounts of information and the role expands, strength and conditioning coaches must consider the value of automation that improves their job quality. Automation doesn’t necessarily mean artificial intelligence, so coaches can automate their training with their own methods and philosophies and not worry that the process is sterile or lacking in-the-trenches experience.

Efficient Personalization

Tailoring workouts for each athlete takes time. The energy of group training is extremely valuable for group training, but each athlete deserves and can benefit from personalized or individualized training programs. Unfortunately, creating each individual workout is very time-consuming, and coaches find themselves in a very difficult dilemma: Do they individualize a training program more or do they attend to other matters such as administrative duties or outside learning? Online strength and conditioning software is very effective in scaling workouts by copying a template or set of routines, and personalizing training is light years faster with the right tools.

The necessary amount of workout personalization or customization is based upon the needs of the athlete and the available resources of the program. It doesn’t make sense to tailor workouts too much if the coach is unable to administer to the differences between athletes effectively. A very clear example is different exercises used in training at concurrent times, when a coach needs to be in two places at once. Also, coaches may want to take advantage of team chemistry by training athletes similarly for competition or support, as athletes who train together tend to grow their commitment to one another when they experience the same trials and tribulations.

Device Integration

Coaches are increasing their use of sports technology to train and test athletes. Enormous amounts of data are pouring into athlete management systems, eventually leading to decision-making for training in the weight room. Using a strength and conditioning software product without device integration leads to a high amount of time lost to importing and editing on separate products. Leveraging hardware improves the accuracy and precision of training and testing data, and automation from an API radically alters the time invested in sorting and analyzing the information collected. Without a universal importer, coaches will have to spend too much time on the manual editing of files.

Device integration is more than just having data conveniently imported into the software—integration is also understanding the data file formats and units of measurement. A list of metrics without the right formatting is a serious liability to athletes, as it may guide a practitioner in the wrong direction. A software solution must be familiar with the relative sport science of hardware data and be on top of firmware changes that may render data incompatible. A report using an old hardware version could cause calculations to produce errors and inaccuracies, so professionals need to be familiar with creating conversion formulas or know how to interpret data sets that use different devices. Sport technology is expanding and becoming more accessible, and managing the data requires a robust platform and content maintenance by the providers of the software.

Rapid Documentation

The last advantage of a complete strength and conditioning software program is its reporting and record-keeping. While similar, the major difference between a record and a report is how the data is stored and presented. Reports are usually designed for external eyes, meaning those who may not be familiar with the data collected. Records are primarily just raw information organized properly in an archive that is easily accessible to qualified internal staff. The value of documentation is higher now than ever before, as politics and legal oversight both increase in sport. Referencing and accessing information, be it data or written notes, is standard today.

The best practices for creating a report include brevity and clarity for pertinent data. The most requested characteristics of a report are: fit it on one page, include necessary details that are relative to the summary, and obey the principles of proper data visualization. A report should be an honest act of information sharing, and bias and excessive filtering only impair the process of making the right decisions later. Thus, a report should share the outcome and possible causes that influence the results, not just be a summary without context. Reports should be clear and simple enough that staff in different departments and with all levels of expertise can easily draw conclusions. Software, if developed properly, enables coaches and medical staff to quickly generate a proper depiction of an event or period of time.

Records, or stored information from staff and athletes, can have analysis and summaries if needed. Having organized raw data accessible is also important, because filtered or missing information can mislead the professional. In addition to raw data, information should be backed up in different formats and have encryption if necessary. Finally, protection and security should be seen as a priority. Sensitive information and athlete privacy require etiquette beyond just password production. Everyone using the software should have an acceptable use policy or similar, as security goes beyond hacking—it’s about having a plan for what to do if a breach occurs.

Build on Tradition by Using the Future

The inclusion of software should not be seen as a burden; it should be seen as a solution to the demands of the profession. Modern software doesn’t replace the principles of training, it empowers the practice and reduces time and error when designing workouts. Coaches will find themselves at a crossroads and must convert or lose out on the potential benefits of collaboration, automation, personalization, integration, and documentation. Using software isn’t a restriction like it was in the past, and now workouts can be designed and adjusted faster than ever. Coaches will liberate themselves from unnecessary rote work and improve their training outcomes when they harness the advances of technology.

CoachMePlus is a comprehensive solution for any training environment, ranging from scholastic level to pros, and including both military and private facilities.