Are Coaches Sacrificing Health for Performance?
In this article, Coach Philip explores some trends we are starting to see with new athletes who have been previously coached by others. Though athletes often start working with coaches for performance, we are also responsible for ensuring that athletes are healthy and safe. This article looks at some examples and highlights some things that athletes and coaches can do to enable a better approach to athlete welfare.
Reflecting over the past few years of new athlete sign-ups, we are seeing a worrying trend among athletes who have worked with other coaches before working with one of our coaching teams. We seem to be finding more athletes normalising unhealthy training approaches to focus on performance.
Before we explore this further, we are not saying that all coaches other than TTH ones are putting performance before health. In fact, this is best highlighted in our post in 2020 talking about COVID: there are plenty of great coaches out there. However, we see that some athletes arrive at our door and do not have the platform to work off because of the training decisions made before working with us. This means our first role is to nurture their health and correct previous “best” practices before we can start working on their performance and making progress. This can be frustrating for athletes and is unnecessary.
Equally, to remove what sounds like blame on other coaching entities (it isn’t meant to be!), we see a small turnover of athletes who don’t want to buy into the concept that health enables performance and move on from working with us swiftly after being shown that they have their approach the wrong way round.
This article aims to act as a red flag, highlighting this problem rather than identifying the cause or actors involved. It is almost certainly too complex to simply point fingers at one person or establishment! Hopefully, as a result, this becomes a talking point in more of a positive light, and change begins to take place. We have highlighted some interesting case studies or stories to highlight some of our points and aimed to keep these stories anonymous.
One athlete started working with us but left quickly after being offered cheaper coaching rates (essentially a sponsorship opportunity) to work with another coach and their team. After a brief handover between TTH and the new coach, where it was highlighted several times that the athlete was displaying symptoms of REDS, we were concerned about their approach to running, fuelling and stability and, as a result, had reduced the running volume and would suggest they are careful with the athlete’s running; we couldn’t believe that on social media a few weeks later we watched the coach and this new team brag about the athlete winning a few running events and being a great new addition to the race team before about a month or so after that subsequently ending up in a boot and not completing the season. This was an avoidable outcome for the athlete and needed the coach to put the athlete ahead of their publicity.
There was an athlete who had been working with another coach who, when we asked about their fuelling approach for big ride days, told us their previous coach had a blanket approach and that taking fuel on rides was for the weak. They would actively deter people from taking fuel or fluids in longer rides. Other athletes arrive with repeated injuries or niggles with advice from their previous coach to push on unless it is slowing them down.
Sometimes, it is less about practices that harm the athlete, but instead, there are examples where analysis misses the mark, meaning an athlete plateaus unnecessarily. Technical cues or points were made to athletes without the coach understanding why they saw the movement they saw, so the athlete was never taking a moment to improve by working on the cause, just the effect, prolonging the time to get faster.
We are also seeing fewer coaches challenge or instead being able to challenge unsafe thoughts around exercise and the negative side of training obsession or chasing fads. The ability to take the context of an athlete and apply the proper intervention in the right way at the right time is a hard one. Often, the boring stuff makes the most significant difference, but it isn’t the part that athletes or coaches dwell on to bring in new clients or promote themselves. Instead, coaches seem to be working with athletes to sharpen the point of the spear without realising the spearhead isn’t attached to the spear; it won’t fly very far.
All these examples paint a relatively bleak picture of the coaching and training industry.
The truth is there are excellent coaches and practices out there; we are fortunate that our reputation means that we get athletes coming to us for the right reasons, and we have the confidence through our coaching experience to do the right things for the athlete always rather than feel we need to keep numbers up or bow to social pressures.
However, that doesn’t mean this trend doesn’t sadden us. Coaching is an unregulated profession. The barrier to becoming a coach is relatively low, and the ability to become one who charges money is often about the same height! Therefore, there will always be a mix of professionals and cowboys, and we cannot change that - we just hope that it doesn’t mean that athletes have to suffer as part of a coach’s learning curve but instead can maximise the time in the sport.
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 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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