Coach Development with Andy Kirkland PhD | KoopCast Episode 177

trail and ultra runners what is going on what's happening welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always i'm your humble host coach Jason Koop and this episode of the podcast is coming to you recorded out of the mobile base camp my adventure van my mobile recording studio i'm on my way to the canyons 100k and 100 mile events to support a number of cts athletes but that does not stop the show from going on and today we have a good one and andy kirkland who is somebody that i have looked up to in the coaching space for a long period of time for his quick wit and no holds barred approach to providing some reasonable criticism across coaching and coaching structure now for those of you that don't know andy andy originally started out as a sports scientist at the scottish institute of sport he then worked for british cycling and is now a lecturer in sports coaching at the university of sterling and this is one of the more unique programs around the world where they are actually educating the next group of coaches to work with athletes andy has been involved in every single level of sport ranging from young children teaching them how to swim to working with developmental and professional athletes now what brings andy on the podcast today is his newest paper that caught my eye the title of which is an exploration of context and learning

and endurance sports coaching this paper was thought-provoking enough for me as a professional coach as well as a mentor and manager of coaches that i shared that paper across our entire coaching group and i wanted to bring him on the podcast to get his thoughts and perspectives on coach development and the coaching marketplace in general as i mentioned earlier andy has a quick tongue he's not afraid to deliver reasonable criticism of coaching and coaching structure and that is something that i think we in the ultra running space need to get accustomed to it's the professional criticism and critique of why we are doing what we are doing that is ultimately going to make coaches and athletes better and we need to be mindful of that in a cottage industry especially in an emerging one such as ultra running and all too often we take this professional criticism which i have delivered on a number of occasions as a personal one when in fact it is not it is just that it is professional it is just professional criticism okay with that out of the way i am going to get right out of the way here's my conversation with andy kirkland all about how we learn as coaches and how we should be developing ourselves as professionals well if you're ever here uh we should go on a trail run or a bike rider i'll take you up the incline how's that oh that that would be cool i've actually got an invite from joe frill as well if i come across for us to go and play golf in arizona so and i've promised them the same uh on the east coast of

scotland where we've got the best golf in the world i was about to say you guys have really good golf there so arizona is known for its golf but you guys have really good golf there yeah yeah all right well we're not going to talk about golf we're going to talk about coaching a little bit um and uh we're neither of us are experts in golf but i think we can both qualify as domain experts and coaching you and i have both been in the in the arena for a long period of time and you just mentioned our mutual colleague joe who's been in the arena for a long period of time as well as a sundirk for a long period of time and yeah as long as i can remember well i think that that length of experience it kind of gives you a little bit of license to discuss the just the coaching arena in general because it has it has changed a lot over the course of the last you know my career is going on 25 years now um and um a lot of those times those changes happen happen kind of in different phases where one thing starts to leapfrog the other and then the the athletes you know develop along a certain time course and the commercial space develops along another time course and then the needs of the athlete develop along a time course and i think the research that you just did um that we're going to talk about today kind of starts to uncover a little bit of those timeline discrepancies in what the athletes and the coaches are actually saying to you in terms of what they want and what they need and how they're educated and things like that but before we get into it too much

because the listeners aren't going to be familiar most of the listeners aren't going to be familiar with the study itself this was a big effort like when i was reading just the participants like that's the one that's the one thing that i kept coming away with is that this was a big effort to get in touch with this many people and to to gather this amount of information so can you start to first like lay the landscape of what the survey was and how many people and the the kind of the scope of people that you were actually uh interfacing with absolutely so i think it's useful to talk about where the project came from as well uh and as you've alluded to we've been in the landscape for many moons now uh including a few blue ones and i've worked in environments like british cycling as a coach developer in various different environments that uh and as an academic in the coaching world and not just the endurance coaching world but broad sports world uh and there was absolutely nothing out there to uh describe and explore the world that we operate within and i i perceive that to be a a problem in which uh my conceptualization of coaching is uh my conceptualization of coaching is it's a profession we need to be expert at what we do and there was clear gaps in knowledge and expertise within

the wider profession and something some of that related to how we educate coaches internationally uh so that broad international context i'm in scotland but uh i think it's probably coach development in the u.s is more diffuse than it is in the uk uh and i'm quite critical of it in the uk uh but we've got very similar structures in new zealand australia uh and such and i thought uh to to do more research in that area first of all requires foundations we need foundational description of that context and and there was very little out there in the academic literature uh exploring coaching in the endurance world so i thought that was a really important gap to fill before we start developing more empirical work to uh look at things like coach athlete relationships in the endurance world so it was all about laying those foundations uh now i worked on developing a broad survey uh in which we hit nearly 10 000 people yeah so in my space as well that's absolutely unprecedented 100 yeah tends to get that uh many people primarily uh they were non

coached athletes uh so that was the majority of the respondents uh had about just over a thousand coached athletes and 800 coaches i think off the top of my head i've not got the paper open so it was a big survey now a paper goes through a peer review process as well so there's reviewers reading it and asking questions and one of their questions and one of their questions was yeah it's a huge survey uh but what relevance have non-coached athletes uh got in that environment why have you included them in the study and i suggested that it's really important to understand the the landscape that we operate within what uh coaches coaches coached athletes non-coached athletes perceive our world to look like uh so so that's what uh we did the reason i think i i got so many participants is probably testament to uh my relationships in our world that i know quite a lot of people uh i know a few top athletes who tweeted that i've got a million plus followers so that's kind of helpful too uh so but the the project was years in building so uh what came out is the tip of the iceberg and what's under the ocean was years

and years of developing relationships with people in the endurance coaching world and so the aim is is to try to try to figure out how coaches learn and then in addition to that how the athletes also receive that training whether they are coached athletes or non-coached athletes and one of the real stark like contrasts that this that this study kind of points out is there's this mismatch between what the various education models require of the coach like what the whether it's through an ngb or through an external certification or even training peaks as their own you know type of internal certification as well and then what the what the coach is actually asked to do and i know i noticed this from a couple of different perspectives first off i've probably hired you know over 100 coaches at this point and they come from a huge variety of backgrounds all the way from athletes that are transitioning into coaching people who kind of grew up knowing that they wanted to be a coach whether or not they had a formal education in that arena whether that actually exists or not i mean you have one of the few programs in the world where you're actually developing coaches from an from an educational perspective that's that's very it's very atypical especially uh in in the united states and then we also have career transitioners where they were you know a teacher or a you know bricklayer or whatever for the first

part of their career and then all of a sudden they decided that they want to be a coach and in melding together all of the an educational model that um would suit the needs of all of those individuals even if you had the right endpoints is extremely is extremely problematic but i think what your study kind of pointed out like from the onset of what what what i noticed is that there's this very stark contrast between how those educational models are built and then what the coaches were are actually asked to do on a daily on a weekly on a monthly basis when they're interfacing with their athletes i'm wondering if you can explain that a little bit that discrepancy a little bit further and how we might go about developing education models in the future so that that gap isn't so big absolutely uh in the the challenge is a stark one it's a stark one for me on the program that i work on at the university of sterling as well where one coach may be working in the united states on a soccer program with 3 000 kids on it and uh i'll pick up the program and say that one of our coaches was uh head coach of the pitlane crew of mclaren f1 so that so we've got to be able to differentiate from for these people in developing programs but the educational uh theory really tells us that the the most important thing

uh in helping others learn uh in helping others learn is their pre-existing knowledge what they already know and how to develop it from that point to the point where uh they're able to fulfill their coaching role and probably the gap and it's not simply based on the educational programs but it relates to the market of selling products the software we use that there's a real biophysical bias in what people are interested in and and that's important to me as well because uh i'm a physiologist by profession so i've been that buff and wearing a white coat in the laboratory taking the lactate samples measuring vo2 max and thinking it's the most important thing in the world and arguing that to uh coaches at heart at a very high level and i'm completely ignoring me every coach out there feels that plight by the way just to just uh as a physiologist thinking i'm a professional i've worked really hard to gain my qualifications the professional accreditation and then for people not to uh listen this is kind of tough but it's the same as the coach athlete relationship as well and the clear gap is

the in psychosocial stuff in relationships and being able to develop relationships to understand the wants and needs of the athlete or if you want to term them the client then it's understanding the wants and needs of the client and also understanding that humans aren't always logical or rational and they don't always do what they're taught uh that's a normal part of the coaching process that uh well coaches will tend to moan uh and complain that athletes don't give very good feedback but that's normal that's normal in my world as a lecturer an educationalist as well the students uh often give rubbish feedback too but then as a coach i need to think about that interface it's a relationship so my skill as a coach is to be able to develop a feedback loop to develop a deep relationship uh to develop feedback with each other to talk through conversations and to understand uh the complexity as a sports coach of uh performance of adaptation and how that adaptation works as well that it's not purely determined on

training load whether that's volume intensity whether you you do a vo2 max session a fartlek session or whatever it's interwoven with life experiences what's happening with the wife the children uh with work uh where we live in the world uh so so the stressors in uh colorado in the mountains are very different different to what they are uh at sea level in scotland uh so that as coaches we need to learn to be agile in multiple different environments to deal with these different challenges and i would suggest that most educational uh programs use cookie cutter approaches so this is the way to do it here are the models we use so periodization for example uh that's an easy one to pick so here's a periodized model this is how uh to use it but the reality is coaches when we go and try and apply the theory of bumper and a nice spreadsheet to say this is how the program is going to work uh we spend a month developing the plan and two days in uh the athlete gets a cold and nothing works and then we think we're rubbish

so i i would suggest that educational programs need to support coaches to deal with that uncertainty also as a high performance coach working with some good level professionals i would liken uh my role as almost uh a conductor of an orchestra to orchestrate a complex process that involves working with other people as well uh and that may include psychiatrists when things go badly wrong uh and in other experts but as a coach i want to be able to uh orchestrate what others do i want the skills the expertise to uh guide uh other professionals and simply by attending a short course for two days uh or three days uh or three days doesn't necessarily equip uh coaches to deal with the complexities of that role of managing people understanding behavior uh understanding how to provide feedback how to deal with things when they go wrong uh uh i've got uh three uh uh kirkland's laws of coaching first one is uh

shit happens the second one is life is not fair yeah yeah and the third one is the goalposts change the goalposts change and these are the absolute realities of coaching they apply to every coach if i see a coach telling me everything's gone to plan a session's been delivered as it was envisaged they've achieved all their goals with their athletes uh then i smell a funny smell uh i i i don't believe them because it's not reflective of the experiences of the coaches that i speak to well because normally when you get that feedback you're like coloring it with the crayon color that you want right if it's all rosy if you're typically rosy optimistic person you're always going to view life and the training that your athletes are producing through that uh through through that type of lens and we want to you know we we want to kind of like fulfill our own destiny as coaches and and and i think a lot of that bias starts to come through in the in the in the conversations and in the feedback that you just mentioned where yes athlete or coaches think that their athletes are doing everything you know as planned and the session's going great and the season's going great and things like that and that's because they're starting from the framework that everything is going great that

everything i'm prescribing is the right prescription and i'm going to be able to forecast the outcomes of of how the athlete should be progressing based on whatever model that we have uh whatever model that we have in front of us and a lot of a lot of it is driven by something you mentioned kind of on the onset of that answer is this biophysical bias that we're awash with with kind of everything to be honest with you i spent a lot of time thinking about this over the past couple days as those as i was reading your paper the the paper points out that some of this bias is due to just the leaps in technology on the consumer side that uh that we've experienced over the course of the past 20 years there's no better example of this than the the revolution of the of the onboard power meter and cycling when that when that became more commercially available meaning age group athletes and uh as well as professional athletes could put it on their bike they could immediately download it and then the tools to get that information from the bike into the hands of a practitioner whether it was a coach or an athlete who was coaching themselves became so seamless that started to create part of this biophysical bias that we now have because it's a new shiny object that we can kind of like look at and we can measure ourselves we're literally measuring ourselves day after day but in addition to that i think this biophysical bias also comes from the background of the athletes and the coaches the coaches and

you're a great example of this andy you come from a physiology background right so you're you have that inherent biophysical bias i i kind of have the same thing as a biochemist absolutely yeah it's kind of that journey started from uh chris boardman when so the british i think it's fair to say he's a timed trialist he fell off all the time uh in road races but getting the world record world our record and such uh and that's really what spurned my interest is this is really exciting and what uh peter keen he's coach at the time and chris did uh sparked my interest and various other things developed my career because i was interested in the physiology and the numbers uh and it floats my boat but the more and more i got into coaching myself and then coming entering into the academic world uh it's probably a typical i've written on it as well as the dunning-kruger effect so i had worked uh one of the uh world's leading national governing bodies where we've won an unprecedented amount of olympic medals and world championships that's translated into tour de france wins and such uh and whilst i was backroom uh staff i still wore the t-shirt so it's kind of you build this belief that uh you're also the world's greatest at what you do uh and i call it the magic t-shirt effect because

you've got the t-shirt whether it says coach uh or you've got your federation's name on it it gives you magical skills and magical expertise uh but when i i came into the academic world and into the coaching world a new world somehow i managed to get a job in quite a difficult area to get a job in uh i realized goodness i i really don't know uh very much about coaching at all it was it was one of these lessons that i'm speaking to people in other sports reading more work and going oh my goodness uh i'm really really really biased in my approach and my perception of or illusion of expertise even one of my favorite phrases my illusion of expertise was absolutely profound i was kind of all right i've been a coach educator working with hundreds of people uh and then i started to recognize the error of my ways and what i was teaching and recognizing that i wasn't an expert in what i had been doing for the last however many years and that that was pretty profound to say i don't actually know what i'm talking about well because the craft of physiological analysis and the craft of coaching are two completely different things all too often we want to think that there's a a larger venn diagram overlap than there actually

is between those two endpoints and certainly there is an overlap between those two i mean we can trace physiology to performance and you know we can track physiology and how physiology changes and performance does or does not change and and kind of go that from multiple different angles but whenever whenever i i've been seeing this more and more and more whenever i encounter physiologists even the ones over on the training center they realize their limitation of expertise and they can look at the physiology they can look at kind of like what's going on in the lab and what's going on from a physiological you know perspective and then they've kind of they've kind of like learned over the you know just the past several years that the interpretation out in kind of the real world becomes very limited because that's such a narrow scope of what they are seeing in terms of the entire uh in terms of the tire athlete performance uh spectrum absolutely uh now something else i was introduced to in my current world is behavior change science as well and that it was something that is employed extensively in uh the health sciences and recognition that uh implementation of evidence-based medicine wasn't very effective uh that's such a fascinating statement by the way just that right there implementation of evidence-based medicine is not very effective

yeah so so that was the realization that all right we're producing this work to say that this method is best but it's not actually being implemented at the coalface in the wards uh the surgeries by general practitioners and such and the question is why uh and the reasons are complex but they're they they relate to the fact that humans aren't always logical they're not rational and there's institutional factors which sometimes prevent us doing what's uh uh best or what's uh best or what's ideal certainly in the united states uh it's fair to say that uh medicine is probably more about making money than it is about making people well so that's uh an institutional barrier to implementing good evidence-based practice as well so so i apply some of these approaches approaches to coaching and it surprises me that few others do that is recognition that everything we do as a coach if we're being effective is behavior change what we want to do is influence the behavior of others to result in positive enhancement to performance what often happens and this is the glass half

uh empty side of me is that what a lot of coaches do is make people worse uh so so we've got to recognize that and think well how do we actually make people better how do we make them healthier how do we influence behaviors in ways that uh help people adapt more effectively and that means understanding the whole person rather than simply what's happening at the mitochondria well and this dovetails into something that's that's also fascinating about something that i guess you postulated you you and your co-author kind of postulated uh in the in some of the latter parts of the paper and that is that retention should be the thing that coaches are focused on the most and i extrapolated that kind of in two uh two ways both the the the retention of the athlete how long the coach is actually working with the athlete but also to your behavioral change piece the compliance of the athlete as well and i i've got this you know my coaching colleagues will you know probably lament me for tell for telling the story ad nauseam because i feel somewhat vindicated now you know a decade removed from coming up with this policy but many years ago i was asked to come up with a coaching quality assurance program across our group of coaches and it was not an easy task because as you can probably theorize or imagine our coaches wanted to base everything off of functional threshold power and lactate threshold pace and all of the you know the biophysical things that we were kind of

talking about earlier if i can get my athlete to move the needle on those things that's how i should be rewarded that's how the quality of my coaching should actually be judged but i came back at the end of the day and said you know what we're going to judge this on primarily not exclusively but primarily on your retention rates and we had a way you know we're in the commercial space largely so we have a way of judging this based on contract renewals and things like that and about 75 of of the coaches through a complete hissy fit but but seriously like they went berserko they just you know they didn't think that it you know had any kind of bearing on their uh on their coaching outcomes but come three years later our more our more senior and our more experienced coaches had far better retention rates than our more junior and less experienced coaches and you know i kind of use that as a as an experience lens to come back to this fact that you're absolutely correct that this behavioral change is the thing that we should be aiming at the most because then you can get the performance change from the behavioral change and so i'm wondering if you had any additional thoughts on this retention aspect that coaches should be looking at that they're probably not even taking into consideration at this point oh it's a difficult one because it it relates to how we see the world that sometimes the most valuable things in life are things that we can't measure things intangibles uh uh but we we can measure uh retention rate

and well i've worked with the guys at training peaks as well and i think part of the the buy-in and why we've developed a good relationship is that well they've got a commercial model as well obviously yeah exactly they they they behoove they want high retention rates for sure absolutely absolutely uh and i'm probably one of these types of people that doesn't care too much about uh money i i just want to have a nice time in life and have nice relationships with with peoples and that's where i get my worth not through uh any financial gain but these aren't dichotomous uh i believe that through really effective coaching through building strong social connections strong relationships getting buy-in from athletes so it's not uh do as you're told or else so so if we look at uh uh i'll i'll be careful what i say uh for fear of litigation but uh there's a few high profile cases where the well-being of athletes particularly in the united states very fast runners uh have been on a big program and not had a very nice time of it and i would suggest that there's power dynamics in that in those environments where it's acquiescence to what the coach does under threat of sanction do as you're told or else and uh within

that it means accepting that what the coach says is right as well i don't accept that sometimes i'm wrong uh what's much uh better is uh that athletes do what you ask them to do through informed choice uh that means uh that means understanding what the needs of the athlete are it means uh well well some of the uh athletes that i've worked with i would suggest have had quite extreme exercise addiction so that's a definable uh uh psychiatric uh if you believe in such things you can go through a tick box diagnostic uh process to say that this person is uh has exercise addiction and as an endurance coaches we've all got experience of these people so that in my decision making processes i've got to understand those behaviors of the athlete too so i'm almost think about myself uh like an addiction counselor so that the the dose of exercise i suggest they do except that they'll probably go a bit over it sometimes so i might suggest they do a little bit less known fine well they'll do more uh and in the long term i'm

working with them to develop a healthy relationship with uh their sport uh i know that if i push them too hard if i do support their uh potentially destructive perfectionist tendencies to want to push the barriers all the time that can be destructive it can be maladaptive it can be harmful so it's understanding the athlete at a deep level to understand where their behaviors are coming from why they behave the way they do and being able to uh make my decisions based on my appraisal of of those behaviors as well as listening to the athlete voice what do they want what do they think uh they need uh an example would be uh an athlete i was working with went over to a big event and found themselves in an environment with uh another 10 professionals who are known to be amongst the top in the world and they're all pushing each other they're all influencing each other so that as a coach uh me coming along and saying what they're doing is nonsense uh the athlete doesn't always buy into it they're just as or not more influenced by what their peers are doing so that i've got to consider what the peers are doing as well

and tailor my coaching uh to the wants and the needs of the athlete and that's really nuanced uh and sometimes we we get it wrong but to coach in such a manner really knows meaning your athlete knowing your athletes at a very deep level well and here's the limiting factor with that andy that you can probably appreciate a lot having your your amount of experience actually working at the coalface with athletes it's time you need to need that you and it's time kind of along along two different courses the first off is the amount of time that you can just spend with the athlete communicating with them not prescribing the training but communicating with them on a weekly basis and you can recognize this in the commercial space most coaches have their kind of practice set up which at the end of the day they're monetizing their time right so they want to be as efficient they want to be as they want to be as efficient as possible they want efficient systems to build they want efficient systems to communicate and those that that efficiency can and usually does compromise the depth of the relationship between the coach and the athlete and i've seen all kinds of models and i will raise my hand as as making a big mistake with this uh when when uh earlier in my career where i worked with as little as 10 athletes or five athletes and that was not enough repetition to be very good but then i

also worked with as much as 200 athletes and that's not near that's that doesn't allocate nearly enough time to know athletes from a personal from a psychological from a lifestyle uh level and eventually the medium is some is somewhere in between it's different for everybody but i point out those two end points just to illustrate the fact to your earlier point that when we talk about how deep you can actually know an athlete how much you can actually know about their their behavioral patterns in the commercial space a big limiting factor on that is just simply time and coaches one of one of the things that they need to do in addition to all this other stuff that your that your fantastic paper talked about is just set up their coaching practice so that they can actually do that and a lot of them do not they just don't allocate the correct amount of time in order to do that because they just don't understand how long it actually takes and i think that comes down there's a really good model from researchers in the uk called professional judgment and decision making so and abraham's dave collins and such uh and i'm sure you know as well that the more people uh you work with the quicker it is to identify what behaviors you expect from individuals it's almost like the this the stereotyping uh so uh i've often joke when i'm developing other coaches is to joke about uh coach education courses so i'll say

that you're guaranteed to have uh the egotistical know-it-all who wants to speak all the time uh through to through to slightly humble people who listen intently uh i've got to be careful here and the underconfident female who's an absolute genius that knows everything that needs to be known yet they think they're rubbish so we can stereotype quite quickly and almost taxonomize uh individuals uh uh entail our offers uh and tailor our offers based on our perceptions of people the the commercial side is really really important as well so what what's the break even what's where can coaches uh make a living i've been fortunate enough uh not to need to make a living from coaching uh i'll typically only work with people who a i think can use my expertise and be who i really like uh and uh with those that are good to work with so during lockdown i semi-retired i had some issues with my eyes i was struggling to do my job because i couldn't see properly uh uh and the semi-retired from coaching

and i was really enjoying that time it's kind of christmas a day not having someone call me up and ask a daft question uh and it took uh an olympic champion to come along and interview me to be their coach to consider coming back and that's because the making money i've got a day job in a university so so that's not a consideration for me if you need 30 40 50 clients to keep a roof over your head you need to develop effective systems to communicate to maintain retention rates and that's not easy yeah uh there's different ways and means to do it there's also uh a place in the market for cookie cutter approaches using so for new people to sport who haven't been coached before who aren't very fit whatever they do is likely to improve their fitness anyway so a cookie cutter approach is absolutely uh but when uh they may hit uh a rock in the road where they may be struggling then it's really important to give them a positive experience when things aren't going to plan where the adaptation slows or there's a plateau uh so it's been able to build that in your coaching system and and i'm not

sure there's a simple way to say this is the way to do it yeah in my in my experience um having a like a business structure that tries to be everything to everybody is is is really difficult to pull off because you have the cookie cutter side at one end of the spectrum and the price points are completely different and the the what we would call leverage which is essentially the coach athlete ratio is completely different it's one to a hundred or maybe even one to two hundred or maybe one to infinity right if you're just literally delivering static training programs and then you have the what i'll call kind of the commercial space or the age group space where the price points are typically 10x of the static of the static of the static plans you're definitely monetizing the athletes individually meaning you're monetizing your time you're going to charge a certain you know rate and things like that and your ratios are one to 30 or maybe one to 40 or maybe maybe one to one to 50 is kind of the highest that i've usually seen in that space and then you have the elite athletes where it's a completely different ballpark because you need so much time to work with each one of those individual elite athletes and then how you monetize it is really all over the map to to point out to your story right some some people like in your position they're using it just because they want to do it

right they don't need to kind of like make make ends meet other coaches that are just working with elite athletes and you see this in the triathlon space they take a cut of their winnings and i'm not saying that that's the right economic model i don't think that that's the right economic model but it's different that's what i was doing that's what i would do it's kind of it's like 10 of winnings and uh that kind of worked for me because it was i think it's important not to do things for free yeah that's a tendency in the uk a lot of people do because they want to give back to the sport no because people value if you charge more they think they're getting a better product so yeah it's important to charge so so that was my thinking behind it yes i like doing it uh but it's important that athletes recognize the investment in the of the expertise yeah exactly i guess my point with that is is the like the way that the models have emerged are so drastically different on every level from the price points to how you're monetizing it whether you're monetizing it on an instance or on a monthly basis or on earnings or kind of some comp some combination of all of those that it's hard to be everything to everybody you can try you can try to have as big of a you know as big of a footprint as possible as cross all those but they're really kind of like different products which i think leads to a lot of the consternation of the end users which are the athletes whether they're elite athletes or

whatever a lot of that consternation kind of comes from the fact that this sea of products starts to have all of these overlaps and they start to feel you know just unfulfilled on some level because the expectations of what they have the expectations of the deliverables can in some cases be starkly different than what the coach is actually designing the product to actually deliver yes yes you know what so this kind of like leads me to another neat transition point so one of the one of the cool things in your papers is where do coaches spend their time right are they spending their time doing admin are they building programs like where actually is their time being spent and every time i've ever looked at this and your paper was the one like the this is one of the first chances i've i've or one of the first opportunities i've had to actually look at it systematically we've done it internally within our own uh uh within our own coaches and they've also done it at the ngp level and things like that but the one thing i always come away with is we don't spend enough time communicating with the athlete we spend a shit ton of time analyzing files and doing programming and not nearly enough time actually like talking to them over the phone or via video chat or something like that that is at least my impression and the paper kind of alludes to that a little bit i was wondering if you could expand upon your thoughts on that a little bit oh i it was quite difficult in the analysis of the data actually how do i present it yeah and what i

suggested is that it relates to what uh we were talking about just a second ago is that coaching is a a cottage industry yes uh and uh to maintain a living we we do different elements to keep the roof over our head what interests us what motivates us what we need to do uh and that's highly dependent on the individual coach so coming up with a universal model of this is how coaches spend time uh probably would be a waste of my time analyzing any deeper it depends on the coach so we have uh coaches who will do face-to-face sessions uh going to the track going to the swimming pool doing cycling sessions working with young developing athletes developing with uh those participation people who just want to go out and jog and they'll do a variety of different things so that uh i think it's good to conceptualize it like a cottage industry like me i'm traveling around them literally you you asked me from the onset am i in a camper van and the answer is yes i pulled over in rawlings wyoming to do this podcast with you because you know three days ago i was in i was in at madeira islands off the coast of portugal or it's a portuguese island and now i'm traveling out to california to go to another race i choose to spend

my time that way as a deliberate part of my coaching practice but not all the coaches do that to your point of it's different for everybody yes but i think it's useful for individual coaches and it's something we do on our msc program as well is get coaches to define uh and model their coaching process what do they do as a coach uh there was some good work by uh ryan and mallets with steve ryan and cliff mallet mallet in uh australia looking at the coaching process of high performing coaches at an australian institute level uh and and that was really interesting as well looking at what they actually did so some of it was programming some of it was sports science support some of it was dealing with the the media uh a lot of it was dealing with the the the media uh a lot of it was dealing with the bullshit of working in high performance sport uh admin so yes and uh the powers that be that ask you to do unreasonable things that don't contribute to performance as well uh so i think as indiv for individual coaches listening it's a really good thing to do is map out what your coaching process is exactly what you say uh how much time do you spend on programming how much time do you spend on paperwork uh how much at the coach athlete interface and developing relationships do you do uh perhaps

looking at those retention rates and looking at gaps within your process to say is there something that i could do better more effectively to improve my retention rates so it could be uh more effective marketing for some uh for others uh who are spending most of the time designing training programs it's possible to monetize that but i also allude to the fact in the paper that i'm not so sure that that market will be available in 10 years anyway because of artificial intelligence and such so that a large part of the market may be taken over by ai in the future so that these the the social relationships the developing the brand and being a an approachable coach who uh athletes really value it's not a like going into a shop and buying uh a coffee when i i'm a bit of a coffee geek as well but if i go into a cafe and the barista doesn't look up and say hello to me and give me a bit of chat uh and if i ask them about the beans where have the beans come from and they go oh i don't know uh then i'll probably think inside my head uh a swearing word and uh i think i'm not going back there whereas when i go into my favorite cafe and they say hello andy uh oh we've got this uh great new uh

ethiopian yurga chef that's got this taste i think you'll really like it you like that fruity sort of uh high note on the coffee then i'll i want to go back to that coffee shop time and time again that will be my choice because i know they value me as a customer they've invested in that time to know that i really enjoy ethiopian yurga chef yeah we we have been on your point with artificial intelligence kind of taking over we've actually been looking at this not just recently but maybe for the last four or five years since it started to when back when it was like really nascent um and not a lot of people kind of understood what was going to happen we started we started to theorize and put things in place in terms of how it was going to impact our business and you know the the the summary of all of that is is it's going to take the bottom part of the market the static training program part of the market or the coaches that high and or the coaches that have high leverage like one to 100 or one to 200 where a lot of their product is program delivery it's just going to take them out of the market or largely eliminate that piece and really put the highlight on the coaches that can create deep interpersonal relationships with their athletes because the programming side of it is going to be so greatly enhanced by using machine based learning and in in a combination of that with uh with with artificial

intelligence and all and so much so it honestly influences our hiring process once again we're in the commercial space right and 10 years ago we're trying to hire people that can create whiz bang programming because that's what the consumer wanted right the consumer wanted like the most effective programming side of things to know that they were doing the right things they're spending their time wisely in order to achieve you know whatever outcome objectives that they have it changes our hiring process because now we have to like look at coaches that have bet and we should have been doing this from onset better interpersonal skills right because that's going to be the differentiating factor in a in in a in a in a competitive marketplace and i don't think we're that far away from it it's maybe a few more years before that before that ai technology gets good enough to where the programming side starts to take more and more care of itself and honestly i kind of welcome that that transition because it you know it puts the i think it puts a bigger spotlight on the coaches that are coaching more effectively using interpersonal skills as uh as as one of their predominant tools versus the programming side as one of their dominant tools no absolutely i think the cream needs to rise to the top uh and uh the coaches that are able to do a really good job that are expert who have invested in their own development as well uh will uh will prosper uh those that haven't won't have a sustainable business model

it's as simple as that uh so i would prefer uh there to be a smaller market but a better market uh where uh clients if we want to call them clients or athletes have a really good relationship with their coach i think sometimes the the challenge right now is that athletes and clients don't really know what to expect from a coach uh if well the market has kind of told them that you should expect a training program from your coach exactly if they get a training program then they're getting the program the the product they expected and they're not expecting more until it goes wrong and then when you ask deeper questions of tell me about your relationship with the coach tell me how often you chatted with them tell me what you know about them well i don't know that and as the expert i might be pulling a face and going all right then uh so that uh and i i don't necessarily think a lot of coaches recognize the importance of the uh uh psycho social element of coaching either uh i i recently did a uh another podcast uh with the guys at fast talk uh uh don't know if that's a good or a bad word with you but we were talking about the the it was uh with

michael crawley who wrote an excellent book uh about running uh in ethiopia as well how the runners use their uh environment to uh enhance training it's similar to my experiences uh in in kenya as well is that it's not necessarily just about going and uh running uh marathon pace or whatever it's about where we do it who we do it with uh who our training partners are uh if we want to take in the special powers of nature if that floats our boat and it gives us magic powers then that's great it's similar to some of my training prescription where i would say right today i want you to go and run uh around the golf course because i know it's a nice soft terrain it's got lumps in it uh that'll be kind to your legs i don't want you to maintain a pace i want you to maintain a feeling because uphill you'll be slower downhill uh you'll be faster so just go out and enjoy it in that environment and some of the underpinning theories influencing what i'm thinking may be relating to the bone modeling and remodeling response how that affects the strength of the bones uh how the strength of the bones is influenced by running at uh different frequencies so the frequency is different when we're on concrete to grass to

running in the mountains so we want to increase the bandwidth because it results in positive adaptations to the bones it's just it's another level of the physiology but looking at the bone modeling remodeling response uh which is probably probably uh not same importance as what happens at the mitochondria but it still kind of is important to have healthy uh bones because bones are living tissue so what can we do to develop that well run in different environments one of the things that you're mentioning between the mitochondrial side which is that's kind of had the spotlight recently right with all the zone two uh phenomenon that's been uh that's been going on these things go through cycles right and you and i've seen you've seen we've seen a few cycles we've been we've both been around the block several several times by now and we often refer to or i often refer to coaching as a practice where there are a lot of individual practitioners out there there's a lot of people especially in the commercial space which is predominantly where i'm in they hang a shingle up they call themselves a coach and there's a really broad array as we were talking about earlier as to how they become developed as coaches how they continue to facilitate becoming better at their craft of coaching and some of them take no time doing it right they just do the same thing that

they did in college or they're doing as an athlete and other coaches take and what i would call an inordinate amount of time actually doing that so much so that it detracts from them actually coaching right and and everywhere and everywhere else in between but one of the phenomena one of the really phenomenal aspects of that of the diversity of that learning is this is is shows up in the cyclical nature of what becomes popular and what becomes uh i guess popular practice and whether it's zone two or their norwegian training model or whatever it tends to be driven by other coaches and other athletes that have had success success and the the coaching space as a whole decides to take this like paint by numbers approach well if it worked for ellie kipchoge then i'm going to take this and i'm going to modify it for my three-hour marathoner or if it worked for this high profile triathlete i'm going to take it and i'm going to modify it for this in my world the the trail and ultra space if it worked for killian jornay i'm going to take it and modify it to a certain extent and i'm going to apply it with this athlete and i want to get your perspective on that and more importantly for the coaches out there that are listening to this as well as the self-directed athletes that are listening to this what they should really be doing to better inform themselves as a coach or better inform themselves in terms of if they're a self-coached athlete how they should actually look at these different case studies and things that get popular and use that to sim and use that to kind of like drive what they're doing either for themselves or

for their athletes it's a really difficult one because there's a dichotomy in there which i'm sure you recognize as well and that i would describe myself as a generalist without a definable brand which uh probably means my profile if i was in that commercial space wouldn't be so pronounced uh so that having a thing helps you develop a brand which draws in uh clients and athletes uh and then uh you perceive yourself to be more successful because you're making money and you've got lots of clients independent of retention rate so there there's part of the the dichotomy um i i i would suggest that uh what i do on the program that i work on is first of all to highlight to coaches or help them understand what they don't know rather than giving them a whole lot of information on this is how you coach uh my lecturing approach is to tell stories to say i'll go away and read this paper and see what uh you think it's even this same as the construction of the paper we're talking about today that it was really difficult to publish because uh there was elements of me in it that it didn't have a clear identity a clear brand i wanted the reader to read it and make up their own mind what it

meant to them which is a difficult sell but on the other hand uh fundamentally what i'm doing is supporting other coaches to develop their bullshit filter uh through asking questions of themselves through a deeper reflection uh and asking for deeper justification behind uh why something works works now when i was doing my undergraduate uh study i had this uh biomechanist uh professor uh bill balzopoulos and and we used to pull his leg because what bill would used to say is what's the mechanism what are the mediating factors why does that work why do you think that simple questions like that allow us to interrogate our own practice so why this approach and not another approach why is this likely to be effective what is the mechanism from which this will work now there's a really uh good paper uh from uh john stakowski uh which is about developing your your bullshit filter and biases so it's kind of talk to you earlier about the the magic t-shirt you work for a uh a federation you've got the magic t-shirt

on so people listen to you because it gives you credibility uh i would suggest that the authorities can be wrong and that's what john in his paper says as well is to challenge those in authority uh if it's a national governing body i worked for one for six or seven years and my reflection was what we were teaching was bullshit a lot of the time uh so that it's really important to independently verify facts for ourselves to think why does that work but the simple thing is to ask am i improving yes am i a plateau am i getting worse these are real simple metrics that we can measure whether that's in an ultra running environment am i getting faster am i maintaining pace am i getting slower or am i able to maintain the slightly slower pace but over a longer distance what what's my intention am i prepared for the demands of the event that i'm doing so a good example uh my partner uh she's doing ultra trail snedonia oh yeah a few weeks yeah yeah yeah that's hardcore geez um uh so but we went to a few years ago uh and uh i was sat up on uh near the peak of a mountain in

wales uh and there there was all these people uh who have maybe done UTMB some of the big european big international events looking absolutely petrified yeah uh because the terrain was uh different to say you to UTMB which isn't well i've even ran some of that course and managed to uh deal with uh most of it until i broke my arm tripping over a rock the question is were they prepared for the demands of that event had they done the research of what the terrain was like can they mentally deal with that and these are questions as coaches we need to be asking as well how well prepared are athletes to deal with those challenges uh so i i know on one part of the course uh i saw uh several athletes pull out because they were too scared to go over part of the course yeah so they're not ready for that demand they're not ready for the demand in my world of triathlon uh when i'm doing triathlon i'm standing on the start line of an iron man and athletes are going i'm really scared of this water look at the waves exactly uh the organizers cutting courses short because the competitors can't deal with those demands i'm thinking well i've swam in december in scotland and big waves off the coast and uh very low

low temperatures so it's bring it on this is so much fun and the big waves are something to have fun in and lots of other people are terrified because they've not prepared for these demands the simple question is will this help me manage the demands of the event will it help me go faster uh am i adequately prepared for uh those demands and how how does the information i'm engaging with help prepare me for those demands the appropriate training load is only one element of preparing for these complex demands you take like the way that a lot of classical models will divide that up is are you training for capacity or are you training for the demands and not that those are completely separate things but you can either build capacity build whatever physiological psychological whatever type of capacity or you can take a demand side approach and look at what are the demands of the event and then ready the athlete uh for for the for those demands um i want to i want to just add one point to this since we're kind of talking to the coaches out there and i'll i'm going to just use a like a personal experience of mine one of the most influential things that i've ever had happen to me in my coaching career was working with very experienced coaches that could literally sit over my shoulder and they could listen to every phone call that i had they could review every piece of training that i uh that i wrote and they would ask me

one simple question why why are you doing what you're doing and that environment of having somebody more senior to you is a hard one to recreate unless you have those people available to you but it shouldn't stop there because as you just mentioned earlier you can't just take it on authority right we should be criticizing and be critical of information that's coming at us from kind of every different angle from people that have been in the sport for long periods of time or people who might actually kind of perceived uh uh perceived authority and i i use that as a little part of uh just the short upbringing that that that i've had to say that it was impactful for me because not to make me justify what i was doing but just to make me think about why i was doing what i was doing and did i have a justification for even things as why do you have a 45 minute recovery run instead of a 60 minute recovery run right why is this specific duration like this it's not that one is the perfect answer or the other one is the perfect answer this is why are you actually getting to the answer that you got to that became extremely important for me and i think yeah what what's really helped me and my journey to ask those questions is not limiting myself to uh one sport yes so as a physiologist i worked in multiple different sports if you're familiar with the sport of curling for example so quite a big yeah it's worth a few olympic

medals uh but my first experience of uh curling in scotland was going in to meet a number of uh coaches and then sitting down as an endurance athlete as well asking if i wanted a whiskey during the meeting and uh one of the in fact uh they were an olympic champion with a cigarette in their mouth i said oh my goodness and i think my respect changed a little bit then my social interactions were probably not as positive as they could but when i started to understand that environment more it started to make more sense it's the same with the adventure racing world and in which uh i've been to a number of events so the world series for example and those that have been world championship champions i've gone into a shop in a small village the only food available is a fish supper so deep fried fish and chips and they buy two fish suppers because they need the calories it's a professional behavior so we've got all those different sporting cultures where there's different ways of conceptualizing performance uh of different ways of being and doing in that environment a very profound experience for some coaches that i was

supporting on a mentorship program in cycling was to take them to murray field which is the scottish rugby big international stadium to meet the rugby coaches on the performance program there and again it was profound the the coaches in rugby did their practices were highly professional the practices they were using were highly advanced and very different to what happened in cycling yep uh and the coaches were wow that's a different way of doing it i've not thought about that so it's really easy to get so culturally bound in our own sport that we don't see outside that very restrictive bubble and when we do it kind of means i can sit down with uh someone in formula one and discuss how to enhance perform performance performance in formula one in whitewater kayaking and such despite not having a great knowledge of these sports because i i see things through a really broad lens uh and i think that's what i recommend of other coaches is go out and see other sports you'll learn about cultures in other sports other practices other ways of talking about performance uh uh and that's where innovation comes from where true innovation comes from is operating outside that really small bubble that

there's a tendency for us all to operate within we we definitely get that in my sport of trail and ultra running where it's very insular and we don't have a lot of scope not even into the other endurance sports to be honest with you if you just think cycling and triathlon and running and things like that maybe maybe marathon running might be the uh might be the best uh best parallel but we tend to be very insular within our sport and what kind of has worked within their sport and certainly not to the level of hey let's look at the motor sports look at the team sports look at the stick and ball sports and the power base sports and and and see what we can what we can learn from those and i do hope that that starts to to come along uh more and more amongst the group of coaches that that that that i work with in the trail and ultra space and i know in the trail and ultra space because once again going back to my personal experience i've been profoundly uh impacted by the experiences that i've had working within the motor sports and working within the team sports and the hockey players and things like that that i can now translate into into a lot of different contexts um and we're gonna let you go this was really fun um i i yeah it's too much fun it is we could go on for forever i do hope that uh we get together for a run or a bike ride whenever you're up in colorado um i'm gonna link the uh the paper in the show notes but where can the listeners find out a little bit more about you the work you do and the courses that you teach uh so the best way is from my twitter so andy kirkland 71 so that tells you my age uh and

so so so twitter is where i share lots of my views uh and uh i'm a lecturer at the university of sterling and we deliver a program in sports performance coaching uh i'll be careful in how i say it our website isn't that well developed but uh if anyone wants to reach out to me i'm easy to find and i'm absolutely delighted to have a conversation with other coaches what i'll also do jason is uh i'm looking at uh doing a webinar i'm not quite sure exactly when i'm just trying to align the planets with with different people but it'll give uh coaches an opportunity to come in and have a chat about the paper too and implications on their own coaching practice so i'm looking to do that in the next few months is to hold an online event maybe do a a small presentation and then open it up for uh wider dialogue so i'll let you know about that as well and you can maybe share it with your listeners and that that would be great absolutely 100 we've actually shared that paper amongst our own internal uh group of coaches and we've already had a lot of really good dialogue on it so i would love to see and love to hear other people's perspective on it as well because um we can't learn enough about how each other learn how we all learn as coaches because it is a very

as you mentioned a cottage industry in a very fractured marketplace and i think uh we would serve our athletes much much better by coming up with better practices on how to learn and how to develop and how to become better practitioners within our space yeah or simply through reading the paper and understanding how coaches actually learn it's something that we don't often consider uh but that's some an important part of the foundation of the paper is this is how coaches learn this is how they gain knowledge uh this is how i may talk about knowledge as well from an educational perspective and it's not a dialogue we often have in the coaching space yes so let's have more of them andy i appreciate your time absolutely and links everything will be in the show notes great lovely to meet you jason all right folks there you have it there you go much thanks to andy for coming on the podcast and i'm i cannot tell you guys that are listening out there today how appreciative i am of andy's work and how much it has formed and molded and shaped how i think coaches should develop as professionals i hope all the coaches that are out there that are listening to this podcast go and read andy's paper take it to heart and hopefully you change some of how you develop as a professional in order to serve your athletes the best appreciate the heck out of all you listeners if you like this podcast please

share it with your friends your family or maybe your coach if you think that there is something valuable within this podcast that he or she can take away from it to make themselves better and help you become a better athlete that is it for today folks and as always we will see you out on the trails