Posted by Cris LaBossiere (24.66.94.141) on January 23, 2004 at 09:50:22:
In Reply to: Forum posted by Juerg on January 23, 2004 at 08:12:05:
Yes Juerg, I agree partly with your concept on the responsibility of the coach. I see two main possibilities for an athlete not improving
1) The athlete is non compliant – they don’t eat or train the way they are advised to. Any result from this is the athletes fault
2) The coach gave the wrong training advice – any result from this is the coaches fault
In my practice over many years I have experienced many athletes being non compliant for one reason or another:
#1 reason is fear of losing what they have gained/ not being able to gain. Many athletes will train hard on a rest day, because they interpret a rest day as a missed training day, and a missed training day as a loss in fitness.
If an athlete’s performance drops they will often interpret the reason to be insufficient training, so they train harder/ longer. In fact most of the time a performance decrease is due to fatigue, not lack of fitness. So in fact the athlete makes things worse.
It is difficult for many athletes to pass up training with friends, which ultimately turns into competition, which is a diversion away from productive training.
When the coach is wrong it is usually because they have no idea what they are doing. The most common coaching mistake I see is using formulas like 220-age – repetition maximum charts, and depending entirely on calculated exercise “plans”. These coaches know many formulas, but not very much about training. These coaches make up the majority of coaches. Athletes coached by these coaches can still do very well, despite bad coaching. Many athletes have good genetics, and all humans have the innate ability to adapt to any exercise – good or bad.
For the true coach who does not rely on formulas, but rather on a scientific process, errors have a different meaning. It is still the coaches fault for their own bad ideas, but typically this type of coach looks forward to making a mistake because then they learn what not to do.