Coaches Ask a Sport Psych, Episode 07, Engaging Athletes in the Feedback Loop
I'm excited to share the seventh episode of our "Coaches Ask a Sport Psychologist" series. Today, we're addressing a question that many coaches encounter:
"How do we get athletes more connected in the workout feedback loop?"
In this episode, I explore strategies to help athletes engage more effectively with feedback metrics, enhancing their performance and making their training more sustainable. I'll discuss how to work with athletes to utilize their own data and how to guide them in expanding their focus beyond a single metric.
Join me as I delve into methods for integrating athletes into their own feedback processes.
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Edited Video Transcript:
The question today is: "How do we get athletes more connected in the workout feedback loop?"
The context for this is that when we start to get athletes attending to useful metrics about their workouts or useful evaluations of their workouts, their performance improves. The challenge, many times, is that athletes either aren't actually using the feedback they're getting—they're not engaged in general—or they're only using a small fraction of the feedback available to them. This might be leading them to less-than-beneficial outcomes.
So, how do we get them to connect with the feedback loop in a manner that helps sustainable performance improvement?
My first response to this question is: work with them. Have them teach you how they're using their own feedback systems. Some athletes may have some sort of quantification device like a Garmin watch, a head unit, a Coros, or whatever device they have that's measuring their pace, heart rate, or other metrics for their sport or performance. They're very happy to have that, and they're like, "Yeah, I've got numbers." And that's the extent of their use of their feedback loop.
In that case, getting clear that they're gathering the numbers but not using them will help you build the skills to close that loop. Because right now, it's not really a loop—it's just: they do, they count, they're done. So we want to: do, count, evaluate in a sustainable manner, and change what they do.
The first step is identifying how they're currently using it. Have the athlete teach you how they're using it. Going through that process is going to uncover opportunities for what's going on.
If, in that process, you uncover that they're only using a fraction of the data—they're kind of hooking on particular data, like the only thing that matters is their functional threshold power, their max weight, their one-rep max lift, or whatever it may be—then you can start to explore. Ask them, guide them to explore previous experiences where using that metric has been beneficial and previous experiences where using that metric has been detrimental to their own progress.
That process of exploring and connecting previous experiences becomes a feedback loop in itself that can unlock flexibility in using various metrics.
In that conversation, especially when they're starting to identify when using that particular metric has been detrimental to their progress, there often becomes an opportunity to explore alternatives. Let's say, for example, that a client is evaluating their competition performance based on whether or not they got on the podium at the end of a cycling competition. That might be a one-in-a-hundred shot of actually getting on the podium—or three in a hundred—not a very useful metric. And so when they're going through and realizing, "Oh yeah, that probably actually didn't help me very much," there may be a moment where they're like, "What would help me? What would be a beneficial alternative?"
Then you can explore that with them. You probably have other clients that have more beneficial process measures, and you can work to integrate new metrics that they're already capturing but just not attending to, in such a way that the athlete begins to attend to the feedback that is most useful for them in those contexts.
This is an iterative process, and it takes a while sometimes to get clients to loosen their grip on certain feedback metrics. But the long-term payoff is that the more flexible the client is towards using available feedback, the more likely eventually they're going to be using multiple elements of feedback and integrating it in a much more rapid and beneficial way.