HCP #92 - Coaching High Performance Athletes HYROX365 Coaches Summit

“Availability is the best ability. If you're available constantly, always able to work, and that includes, you know, your quality days, your easy days. If you're available constantly, then you can stack good day on top of good day on top of good week, good months, good years, and over time, that's when you see the consistency really start to pay off.”

“One of the things that I always have to do is actually pull them back. Hey, let's pull back for a minute. You're running too fast right now, you're getting burned out, you're not able to hit a good day after a good day. So before we get hurt, be the brakes, not their breaking point.”

“Understand the difference and how they relate to correlation and causation. What is actually causing something to happen versus what just is happening at the same time as something else? If I program something or a week and the quality day of the next week, the athlete has a great fantastic day. Is it something that I did with the week before? Or is it something, did they get better sleep? Did they get better recovery?”

“You should know how a workout is going to affect them mentally and emotionally. Has anybody, and I'm going to speak from experience here, has anybody ever gone through a very hard, long workout and just afterwards you're emotionally drained and you just maybe cry a little bit? Like, your athletes will do that too. And if that happens, how do you get them from there into the next workout?”

“Be an expert in the rule book. You should know the rule book as better or as well as or better than the athletes themselves. You need to be able to tell them what they are and are not allowed to use. They're going to come to you and say, hey, can I bring this with me? Can I take this gel? Whatever it is, you need to be an expert in how the rule book is set up.”

“We don't test. What we do is we race, and the race is our test. We use that as a performance metric. If I want to run a test on somebody, especially one where I want to get really good data, usually you want to like take a day or two off in front of it, make sure the test is their best ability, and then they're going to have to recover from it, and it could be up to like five, six day process, and then you just lost a week of training.”

“We started out kind of as training partners, and it didn't go into coach and athlete until I had back surgery. And then after that, it was more like I was just watching her more, but she doesn't like me watching her work out. So we go from there, but then she started to hand it over and she would trust me with it. And that is a heavy load for me that like, look, I don't want to break her trust. She will ask me every single workout, why am I doing this? And I have to have a reason because if there's not a reason for something that I write in her program, it doesn't get done.”

“Sam Briggs mentioned this about when younger athletes were coming in to CrossFit. And I have the utmost respect for all the young athletes, but I remember her saying this is that they just don't know how bad it's supposed to hurt yet. They don't know. They haven't experienced it. They haven't hit it. And so when they do, they just think that's right. Whereas as we age and we get older, and we know how bad that hurts, sometimes we're like, okay, I'm gonna go almost up to that.”

“I program for their group, I always also follow, it is program for the best, scale for the rest. So I tell everybody on it that like, listen, this is a lot. When they are following it, I tell them, start out doing about 70% of each piece. That means that if I have in there a 60-minute run, go do 45 minutes, 42 minutes, whatever it is, the first week that you are on it. 70% of everything. If there is a four-round workout, do three rounds.”

“Because of how heavy and important the running is in this sport, we don't stop. Yes, if you stop running, you would get stronger faster, but just because you're running doesn't mean you can't keep getting stronger. When I go into a strength block, it usually involves more specific sets and more touches to any type of resistance than it does mean eliminating my running completely. That volume of it goes from maybe 60 miles, 55 miles a week, down to 45.”