In defense of 'fake coaching':

(aka real, individualized, programming)

Alan Couzens, M.Sc. (Sports Science)

Feb 1, 2018

I’ve noticed a lot of podcast banter of late about 'real coaching' – defined, according to our learned podcasters as in-person, on-deck coaching (presumably, what I'm doing in the pic) as opposed to the growing prevalence of coaches implementing & overseeing training programs largely remotely via computer. Fundamentally, this is a passive-aggressive dig at remote coaches. As a coach whose current stable consists largely of remote athletes, very high level remote athletes by the way, from all corners of the globe (Australia, UK, Ireland, Canada, Spain, Poland, Sweden Mexico...), I have a thing or 3 to say about that...

The thing is, I haven't always been a remote coach. When I started swim coaching back in Australia, there barely was an internet! So, over the course of my near 25 years in this profession, the definition of coaching (& my required skillset) has changed a lot & I’ve been fortunate to experience this evolution. Here are some observations…

A long, long time ago when I was a competitive swimmer in a small country town in Australia, I was very lucky to also be growing up in the town of one of the best swim programs in all of rural New South Wales. We had multiple national qualifiers and even a national champion/record holder emerge from our little squad in our little country town. This is not to say that our situation was anything close to ideal. In many ways it was typical of smallish squad programs at the time. I had a truly caring, wonderful, intelligent, but admittedly ‘time poor’ coach who balanced his time between learn to swim, coaching squads and managing the pool. Even with these limitations, he was definitely a step ahead of many of the regional coaches that I later came across. He had a good broad annual plan laid out in his spiral notebook but beyond that, daily plans were largely written 'off the cuff'. If I was to guesstimate how his ‘coaching hours’ broke down, I would say the ratio was something in the region of 90% standing on deck implementing the program (/yelling at the general public kids for crossing/sitting on the lane lines :-) and 10% actually programming – i.e. thinking through & jotting down (on his trusty whiteboard) the plan for the day.

As I stepped away from being an athlete and pursued my studies toward being a coach, I moved to the big city (Sydney) & was fortunate to score a coaching position in a big metropolitan program that had a long term history of producing national and international athletes including some Commonwealth Games medallists and members of the Aussie Olympic Team. Beyond its impressive pedigree, this program had another even more important thing going for it: It had a HUGE age group base. Apart from being a talent id/feeder system, this base brought in the $ and time that gave senior coaches more latitude for planning time. We had roundtable meetings each week to discuss things like periodization within the different squads. We had paid time that was devoted strictly to program preparation etc. At a guess, I would say that my 40 hours a week as a full time coach at this next level program broke down into ~70% on deck and ~30% in coach 'brainstorm' sessions & program prep ‘on desk’

Moving beyond this, as I completed my post-grad work, I was able to to secure a practicum at the Australian Institute of Sport with the Australian Olympic Swim Team. I remember to this day just how weird it was to see some of these big burly, by all appearances, ‘old school’ coaches finish overseeing things (with their obligatory permanent scowl) on pool deck only to retire to their office for several hours with a laptop and a stack of the latest ex phys research papers (I know this because I had spent the previous hours scouring the AIS library and photocopying said articles for them :-). As a more stereotypical geek, I was amazed & surprised to have some awesome, very theoretical, planning discussions with these incredibly bright and intuitive men with that all too rare mix of undying curiosity to learn and a lifetime of experience. To say that I learned a lot doesn’t even begin. I would say that the foundation of almost everything that I believe and continue to develop as a Coach to date was created in those thinking, talking, planning sessions in the swim coaches offices of the A.I.S. Needless to say, at this level, with the financial and inter-department ‘brain power’ available, the proportion of ‘desk time’:’deck time’ shifted again significantly, where, despite being 'on deck' for 4-6 hours a day, more than half of the coach's day was actually spent, planning, researching, conversing with other departments (biomechanics, physiology etc), & thinking through the absolute best possible program for a given athlete. At that level of performance, the swimmer was obviously intrinsically motivated & had been through so many sessions, had such an established, ingrained personal technique, that the 'doing' of the session was largely a beautiful afterthought.

The larger point of my walk down memory lane being that we currently live in a period where the importance of ‘the plan’, is being minimized in favor of ‘soft skills’. However, in my experience, that 'soft skills'/'hard planning' see-saw tilted further and further towards the hard-planning side, the higher the level of the athlete/program. Maybe, since I'm coming from a sport where for the vast majority of the time, the athlete’s head is under water, I may be a little biased but my perspective & experience is that…

If you couple an intrinsically driven athlete who is extremely passionate about achieving success in their sport with a truly top notch individual program (even when administered by a coach with admittedly less than soft ‘people skills’), they will go far!

Put another way, the planning time, the 'desk time' is, in my view, at least as, if not more important than the ‘deck time’, especially at the higher levels where athletes are (by necessity) inherently motivated to ‘do the work’ and based on my experience, I would say that the amount of time devoted to the cerebral stuff - planning and preparing, scales proportionately with the level of the athlete & the level of the program. At the highest levels, IMHO, a huge chunk of success comes down to constructing & overseeing (& frequently 'tweaking') a very well organized long term plan that has a whole lot of thinking time behind it & is completely tailored to the individual athlete.

I would extend this to suggest that, even today, truly top notch individualized programs are exceedingly rare because creating one takes 2 of the scarcest resources in the world today - time and thought. And that we need to maximize, not minimize, the importance of developing skills in this thinking/ planning/ program development area.

Is this to say that there aren't disadvantages to not having a large amount of ‘on deck’ time with your athletes? No, apart from the biomechanical advantages of being able to watch an athlete '3D' in real time, frankly, sometimes I miss just being there in person to see the program all the way through to ‘coming to life’. I have to say that personally, there is nothing more satisfying than to be on deck seeing multiple lanes running like clockwork bringing to life a program that previusly existed only on paper. Except maybe to see hundreds of those coming together leading into a peak race that goes similarly to plan :-)

Is this to say that ‘and’, (i.e. the combination of desk time PLUS deck time) is not better than the ‘either/or’ perspective of one or the other? No way! But... and this is a big but..., in my experience doing both of these (individualized planning plus face to face implementation of the plan) at the highest level takes time, money and larger organization - things that are sadly lacking from elite triathlon, especially in the U.S. So, until national governing bodies get their act together (i.e. stop seeing themselves as a business and start seeing themselves as stewards for the national long term development of the sport), I will continue to feel good about prioritizing individualized program development for high level athletes near and far, knowing that plain old good, thoughtful, individualized, programming will take a self-motivated athlete a very long way.

Probably from my desk,

AC

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