Understanding Cause and Effect in Endurance Sport
Understanding Cause and Effect
People are generally better at identifying that social media highlights people’s best lives and often are able to understand that most of what they see online is what people are choosing to filter out to the public. However, how good are they at recognising the consequences of actions? How good are people’s memories? Coach Philip explores this in this latest article.
Athletes are very good at sharing their good times both on social media and in stories. This creates a positive reinforcement of their ability, which we celebrate as a coach. Athletes should be encouraged to celebrate their successes! However, the filter of “too much of a good thing” often creates an environment that athletes see through rose-tinted lenses. Sessions are usually fantastic; the best athletes train in the sun seemingly all year round, and they are toned, tanned and total machines – completing insane feats of endurance on a regular basis.
Equally, we are improving at seeing a positive change, with athletes also acknowledging their bad days. Be this be discussing injuries, feeling tired, overwhelmed or having poor mental health. This is a fantastic change that we are really happy to see, especially with some very high-profile athletes in many different sports. However, the next step that we would love to see change is the connection between the highs and the lows. This is especially true when athletes have an injury that is classified as an insidious onset injury; or an over-use (under-recovery) injury. There is often a clear connection between an athlete’s highs that are the cause of the subsequent injury. This connection is obvious to a coach. When an athlete starts talking about executing significant training volumes or a high frequency of racing and the niggles begin to appear a month or two later. They have not balanced their training with recovery. This links up to roughly the time that training adaptions occur (or don’t).
This can be very dangerous to the sport because the social pressure is to do more, shout about it, and then celebrate before also sharing the hard days, but missing the key components that would facilitate learning and evolution! That that you need balance, and it is all connected.
One topic that often leads to serious misinformation and social pressures is the return to sports postpartum. There is increasingly improved education about how to do it, and the summary looks at many years. This will only get better! However, sportswomen are often celebrated when they rush back. Part of this may be external pressure to return to their sport (e.g., sponsorship teams, etc.), and part may be self-imposed. However, the experts are quite clear about the milestones needing to be jumped through for a long-term safe return to sport. Again, boney injuries, prolapses and incontinence are either not discussed, classified as unfortunate, or part of being a sportswoman. However, the other more obvious connection is that they returned to sport without the appropriate prehab, strength and clearance.
The disappointing part is that an athlete’s first declaration of their return to run only a handful of weeks post-baby or some significant achievement is heralded as almost the normality in sport. The pressure on other women to subsequently adhere to that time pressure is often very unrealistic, not based on any other evidence, and the potential downsides of doing it too soon aren’t connected. People recall the post that talks about getting back quickly, not the one later, about issues which are almost certainly related to these issues. We have seen many in the past year from high-profile athletes, which is a shame in two ways: firstly, that athlete has been let down, and secondly, they have contributed to the cause of the problem!
We have also to recognise that movement is medicine. Most athletes won’t have the professional support of coaching, physios and other experts to manage their training load. The boring or evidence-based approach often doesn’t impose the shock and awe that other headline stories do in the media and social media. This means that many athletes are presented with ill-informed, uneducated and often dangerous advice that is unregulated or called out for what it is.
Exercise science at its basic level is straightforward – load has to be managed, training load must be balanced with recovery, and though you can optimise training, you can rarely speed up the rate that a body tissue can adapt; there is a long time between interventions and their eventual impact. Therefore you have to recognise that training done today will come to fruition maybe 1-2 months later. This can be positive when managed appropriately with the right dose of training and recovery or negative if you do too much too soon, or without the right amount of recovery. However, that connection must be recognised by athletes if they are really keen to progress with a consistent application of training.
Philip is the founder of Tri Training Harder LLP. He’s a British Triathlon Level 3 coach, and has been coaching for over a decade and is involved with mentoring and developing other coaches.
Philip has have coached athletes to European and World AG wins, elite racing, many Kona qualifications, IRONMAN podiums and AG wins.
Alongside the conventional development through many CPD courses, he has also been fortunate enough to work alongside experts in the fields of Physiotherapy, Strength and Conditioning, Nutrition, Psychology, Biomechanics, Sports Medicine. Putting this knowledge into practice he has worked with thousands of athletes to various degrees, from training camps in Portugal and around Europe, clinics in the UK and online coaching.
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