I'm excited to share the eighth episode of our "Coaches Ask a Sport Psychologist" series. Today, we're tackling a critical question that many coaches face:

"How do we best address things like overtraining, obsessing over training, obsessing over diet, etc., with our clients?"

In this episode, I delve into strategies for helping athletes maintain a healthy relationship with their sport. I'll discuss how to facilitate conversations that encourage athletes to explore the consequences of their behaviors, and when it might be time to involve a professional for additional support.

Join me as we explore effective ways to intervene when clients are moving away from a balanced approach to their training and well-being.

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Edited Video Transcript:

The question asked today is: "How do we best address things like overtraining, obsessing over training, obsessing over diet, etc., with our clients?"

Basically, how do coaches ensure that clients keep a healthy relationship to their sport, and how do they intervene when the client is moving away from a healthy relationship with their sport?

This is a pretty foundational question to what we do as psychological coaches and clinicians.

The broad answer is to facilitate the athlete or performer in exploring the consequences of their behavior.

We all know from experience that if we just tell an athlete, "Hey, stop overtraining," they're unlikely to make any major sustainable changes. But if we can guide an athlete to come into contact in a constructive way with the consequences of overtraining that are meaningful to them, it can be transformative.

Whether it's overtraining, obsessing over diet, or something else, having conversations that encourage the performer to explore the secondary or tertiary consequences—or direct consequences—of that rigid, rule-governed behavior can really unlock opportunities for them to realize, "Oh, I didn't recognize that I was doing that thing before, and that's not a behavior that I want to be doing, so let's try something different." Ultimately, that's what you're trying to get to—help them navigate to, "Let's try something different."

Whatever the behavior is—the obsessive overtraining, whatever it may be—that behavior is there because it worked for them at one point.

It's really beneficial to approach these conversations from an empathetic place, like, "I recognize that this thing that you're doing was useful for you at some point," because it was. No behavior shows up because it was detrimental to us previously; it shows up because it was useful.

Approaching from that empathetic place of, "Okay, this was useful before, but now we need to move to a new level of sustainable behavior," and maybe part of that move is exploring why it's not so useful today. That can be a much more collaborative way to have that conversation.

If you find that your athlete, your performer, your client is just not receptive to that conversation—or you're having those conversations and yet behavior is not changing—you might bring that data into the conversation. But if they're not receptive to it, it's probably time to bring in a professional.

We're not talking about an intervention like, "Hey, performer, I've just brought this psychologist in, and we're going to have a sit-down intervention." The only thing that's going to get you is that three-year-old in every one of us that's like, "No, I'm not going to do it." But calling up somebody like myself or a clinical psychologist and being like, "Hey, here's the situation. I could use some advisement on how to navigate this conversation," or "How do we facilitate a warm handoff that they're going to be receptive to," so that the performer, the athlete, whoever it may be, actually engages with the professional who's trained in these exact conversations at a much higher level than the coach themselves.

Those are the two ways to navigate that conversation and to decide whether or not to escalate it.