Helping Athletes Individualize Their Workouts

It’s bike sprint day.

Athletes are a little nervous knowing the impending discomfort they face.

You’re excited and are firing everyone up to get ready for the pain cave.

You drop Welcome to the Jungle to set the tone and turn the volume in the gym to 11.

You dim half the lighting, and hit the 10 second countdown. This is gonna be fun.

3… 2… 1… BEEP.

And yet, no one seems to really send it the way you envisioned. What happened?

As a programmer and coach, I get excited to write workouts because in my mind, I’m envisioning athletes executing exactly how I intend, at the intensity level I hope for, resulting in members talking about how terrible the workout was (in a good way). Of course, this isn’t the desired result every single day, but there are always those workouts a coach is excited to watch happen, but just as often the end result isn’t what we were looking for. So what happened? The answer provides us with a friendly reminder that while we may live and breath coaching, many of our athletes do not and are simply glad they made it to the gym that day. To ask that our athletes give a 110% level of effort and intensity every single day is asking quite a lot, and we have to remember that some days our athletes are just in class to participate, because they know that showing up is still better than not. That’s ok, and it’s part of our job to still make those days worthwhile for our athletes by providing them with different ways to measure success when putting up a killer time just isn’t in the cards. Here are 3 easy ways