This term was introduced to me by Matt Jordan from Canadian Sport Institute – Calgary as part of their Strength & Power Performance Course and was one of my major take-aways from the first day. It can be defined as a partnership between coach and athlete in which the training taking place on a daily basis is influenced by dialogue between said parties.
This is not a foreign concept to me and is in fact something I have touched on in previous posts, but I really like the term “negotiated training”. I feel it does an appropriate job of describing the process that can potentially take place.
Discussing the training session with Christabel Nettey and Malaina Payton.
Say an athlete takes a haymaker from life – they fight with their significant other, sleep terribly, and eat a lousy breakfast. They then arrive to training in a sub-optimal state. Their auto-regulation tells them that due to the blow they recently received, the scripted session for the day will absolutely bury them, if they can indeed get through it, and that it would be wise to alter the session.
At this point, one of two things can happen. Either the athlete can take another blow from life by pushing through the session, end up on the canvas, and compromise training for days to come OR they can start a dialogue with their coach and find an appropriate solution. Great coaches let the athlete have a voice; they listen.
Just because a particular session made sense in your head as a coach weeks ago, does not mean in still needs to make sense in the moment. It is imperative that you lose any emotional attachment to your program and are open to alterations when need be.
What if your athlete sucks at reporting?
This is a very common issue. From personal experience, athletes coming to sprinting from an American football background are typically bad at reporting. They come from a culture that says you must be tough, you must fight through the pain, you must play hurt and injured. Otherwise you run the risk of losing your job. Therefore, they always feel “good” and are always ready to hit the ground running.
It is with these athletes that observation and monitoring take on an enhanced role. When you cannot use an athlete’s auto-regulation or reporting to aid in decision-making you are limited to your own abilities to critically observe movement economy, energy levels, demeanor and the like as well as any objective data collection you may have. Experienced coaches are much more inclined to get by using the subjective measures of observation. Younger coaches will benefit more from the objective, quantitative measures of monitoring. All coaches will benefit from a healthy combination of both.