I'm excited to bring you the third episode of our "Coaches Ask a Sport Psychologist" series. Today, we're tackling a question that many coaches and athletes grapple with:

"How should coaches handle low training motivation when the expected physical race performance doesn't happen?"

In this episode, I delve into the challenges that arise when an athlete's competition performance doesn't align with their training expectations. We explore both the physical and psychological impacts of such experiences. I discuss the importance of practicing acceptance of strong emotions and using empirical methods to address unexpected outcomes.

Join me as I share strategies for helping athletes navigate these setbacks, turning them into opportunities for growth and improvement.

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Edited Video Transcript:

The question asked today is: "How should coaches handle low training motivation when the expected physical race performance doesn't happen?"

I think the background scenario to this is an athlete—a competitor, a performer—is approaching an event. They've done a lot of training, and the coach has quantified their ability to perform. Maybe even during practice and training, they've achieved the performance that's required. So they're going into the event with specific expectations. But then, for whatever reason, during the event, the performance doesn't happen. It was less—for some reason, it was less. So how do we handle that?

Not only that, but also the psychological effects of that experience for the athlete.

There are two aspects here: the physical performance aspect and the psychological knock-on effects of having an unexpectedly poor performance.

On the psychological side—practicing acceptance of strong feelings:

We, as athletes—even as coaches—we don't sign up for a competition expecting a poor performance. We might sign up for competitions expecting to use them as a workout, a learning situation, or a training scenario, not necessarily expecting to be on the podium or to have an outstanding performance. But we never sign up to measure ourselves against others thinking, "I'm going to get dead last," or, "I'm not going to finish the competition." That's not something we tend to do.

So when we have performances that don't align with our expectations—especially if we've recently demonstrated in practice that our expectations are founded—we're going to have some real critical thoughts. We're going to have some strong emotions.

As a coach, modeling acceptance of those feelings as part of the process—building an opportunity to acknowledge that, "Yeah, that event was important to us, and so of course we're going to have strong emotional responses if we didn't perform the way we expected"—can be incredibly helpful. This allows the athlete to engage in that same kind of accepting behavior, recognize that the event is meaningful to them, and channel that energy away from fighting the judgment and toward trying something to achieve a better performance.

That leads into the second part: How do we address the unexpected performance?

Well, we look at the situation. We make a reasonable hypothesis as to what may have contributed to the unexpected performance, and we try something different.

It's a very empirical method, but that's what we do as coaches. We gather data, come up with a reasonable explanation for that data, make a prediction, and gather more data—a kind of scientific process.

Sometimes that data aligns with a meaningful performance that doesn't go well. So we look at that, come up with a hypothesis about why there's this misalignment, try something different, and gather more data.

It takes a couple of attempts.

Clients might have a few rough events, and hopefully, you're building skills to work constructively toward improvement. Hopefully, you have more than just single data points about event performances to help parse out what is event-related and what is client-related.

As you work through this iterative process—hypothesis, prediction, gather data, check back on the hypothesis, make a new prediction—you will dial in more and more on the things that work for the client. Very likely, you will make incremental progress or maybe even breakthrough progress for the client, so that competitive performances are much more in line with practice performances.