I've been on both ends of the stick, firstly as a young athlete receiving regular feedback from sports scientists and now as a sports scientist providing feedback to athletes. It's come full circle and recently I had a look through some of my old training data dating back to 2013 and it made me think, 'how did I respond to the feedback ?' and also 'what way was the feedback provided ?'
As an athlete, your main aim on a daily basis is to get the training done. The way a sports scientist communicates this to you is important. Do you want the full physiological spiel on the session and how it is going to improve your performance ? For the majority of amateur and even elite athletes, the answer is 'no'.
In team environments, you might get 1 in 20 athletes who will ask you to explain more on the reasoning behind their conditioning session. In endurance sport working with individual athletes, you will get far more questions generally on their physiological metrics. As an endurance coach over the past 5 years who has combined this with work in team environments outside of endurance sport, one thing that is key is 'reading the room'. When working with an athlete, you will get to know their 'sports science literacy', some athletes want to follow the session plan, get it done and go home. Others will ask multiple questions.
I was one of those athletes who always wanted to know more, which is why I went down the route of sports science. However, for youth athletes especially, it is really important to keep things simple in terms of communication and feedback post training. Just because you have in-depth scientific knowledge on their data doesn't mean it needs to be provided directly to the athlete. Many athletes will give up bothering to make sense of it or not even try after a certain period.
At one point, as a youth athlete I remember receiving feedback on a session with close to 10 references and an insurmountable amount of metrics that I didn't understand at the time. Fine, I was interested in it, but it took me about 3 days to make sense of what I was told.
As a sports scientist, you don't need to show off how accomplished your physiology background is or the fact you have spent the guts of 4 years drooling over excel files.
If you speak to the athlete, after a handful of minutes you'll get to know their personality and what to provide. Just read the room.
If you are an athlete who receives feedback with references and metrics to put you asleep without sound practical advice while not understanding any of it, you're not actually learning a lot.
I'll leave you with a funny but interesting quote from Lou Pinella, former baseball player.
"Statistics are like bikinis - they show a lot but not everything"
Thanks for reading.
G
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