Why Coaches should Adapt Training for All Ability Levels: Customising Plans for Diverse Athlete Needs
This article examines how Tri Training Harder tailors training plans to accommodate athletes with diverse goals and experience levels. By offering flexible coaching strategies, Tri Training Harder ensures that each athlete receives personalised guidance, helping them reach their full potential. Through real-life examples, the article highlights how adapting training for individual needs plays a crucial role in athlete success.
A significant mistake that athletes make about training and training plans is that they are all the same. Recently, we were at an event and talking to two athletes, asking about training for a half marathon. One came from a swimming and mountain biking background, and the other had completed marathons before. Their starting points differed, even though they had both signed up for the event together. They asked if they could follow the same plan or how things would differ. Of course, they could follow a downloadable free plan, stick it to their fridge or follow it out of a book, and they would get better. Adding structure and some progression is an excellent first step in development. However, we can all work smarter than that, especially when our time is the biggest constraint.
At face value, a classic training plan might adjust training zones for each athlete. They could have the same training sessions lined up, but one person’s threshold would be at a speed different from the other in each sport. Our classic training plans would make that adjustment for them. You can set different zones and the different sports and athletes, and they will hit the sessions. Some distance-based sessions will take longer or shorter depending on their thresholds, but for the most part, the training will work. An hour easy will be an hour easy at either pace for the athlete. At least now, the training is more appropriate in intensity.
Again, though, we can improve the customisation through some of the newer AI-driven training plans, which will start adapting the training load for the individual based on environmental conditions, training history, and genetics. This would begin adjusting the training load and the amount of training in each sport. Many plans would have different permutations of sports (e.g. swimming 2-5 times per week). However, the sessions can now be tweaked more to match what the plan suggests is the best training load for the athlete in the week. This is a significant upgrade on just a free generic training programme!
The Coach as the plan?
If you assumed the coach was the training plan, you would think (incorrectly) that these adjustments to the training plan would replace the coach. These changes are helpful, but you can add more with the proper insight. If we look at these two athletes, they are unlikely to have the same weekly schedule, so an excellent coach could look at ways of maximising both recovery and training time throughout the week to maximise the time available. For example, recognising the impact of bigger working days or family occasions, building the effectiveness of gaps in a schedule to maximise the available training time as well as optimising the non-physiological training like skills, psychology, and nutrition, to name a few. Most plans fail the human touch regarding considerations around available time and flexibility around our lives. Perhaps the weekends are challenging to fit high-volume sessions in because of family or social activities. A great coach-led training programme will ensure that these sessions are not forced into the plan but are part of the athlete’s overall experience. A coach-led plan can construct a programme beyond linear load progression and focus on performance outcomes. Often these are harder to measure, and subtle to observe but have some of the most significant impact. Here are just some of the topics we find our coach-athlete conversations cover:
Optimising family time
Recovery and sleep
Health and fitness, not health or fitness
Work/life/training balance.
Managing recovery from illness
Managing training in and around holidays
How to improve technique and improve biomechanical efficiencies
How to train through and around significant emotional experiences: Marriage, deaths, miscarriages, pregnancy, menopause, redundancy etc.
Understanding the Athlete
At face value, seeing a difference between a runner and a swimmer, it is easy to build a programme for both where the swimmer does more swimming because they can and do a slow build in their running. Perhaps the runner does a higher volume running programme because that will make the biggest training impact on their running, but clearly, it will take longer to do swimming sessions, so they do less. However, this mistakingly only looks at one dimension of performance: training load. Understanding how the athletic history will impact the performance in those different sports can reduce the likelihood of injury and keep the athlete consistent in training.
The swimmer would have a very different training programme to help them develop their lower limb to avoid running injuries; the marathon runner would need to work on the technical aspects of cycling and swimming to get them to the run without working too hard. These small nuances are how the coach can make small but significant changes to an athlete’s training programme.
Customising a training plan or applying the theory in practice to the athlete is critical to successful athletic improvement. This flexible approach to coaching is only possible when a coach completely understands the athlete’s ability and all the science to help drive decisions. Every athlete will have unique needs physiologically, biomechanically, socially, and psychologically, which a coach can optimise to ensure they succeed in realising their potential and integrating the training into their day-to-day life.
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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Tri Training Harder are one of the leading Triathlon coaching providers in the UK, using our wealth of experience to unite scientific and technological research with already well-established and successful best practices, to create a formula for triathlon and endurance coaching that works.
The result is an honest, dynamic, yet simple new way of constructing an athlete’s training to allow them to reach their potential.
If you’re planning your next season, just starting out in the sport or are looking for extra guidance at the very top end of the field, we are here to help, and our coaches would be delighted to hear from you. You can contact us via the website, and one of the team will be in touch.