More Programming Options Don’t Produce Better Programs
One of the biggest challenges we face in our world of information overload is managing decision fatigue.
As coaches, we make dozens of programming decisions for every athlete: exercise selection, sets, reps, loading, session order, movement pairings, and adjustments based on feedback. Most of those choices have several “right” answers, and coaches who care about their athletes naturally try to find the exercise, progression, or training method that will solve the issue most efficiently. In my experience, that range of options can become overwhelming, especially when the athlete’s actual limitation has not been defined clearly enough.
A good onboarding and assessment process helps to narrow those choices. When working with a new athlete or starting a new season, I want to clearly define the demands of the athlete’s goals, assess the athlete relative to those demands, and identify which movements or training qualities deserve priority. This process already reduces the number of choices, by taking a red-pen to things that don’t matter for their goals.
Many training options → one focused approach
Move each slider to describe an athlete. Watch what makes it through.
What does the target require?
Where is the performance gap?
What deserves development?
What fits this phase?
Consider a movement like the front squat. Simply knowing that an athlete struggles with front squats doesn’t inform the optimal method for improving them. I need to answer the question: WHY does this athlete struggle with Front Squats? Determining whether the problem comes from front-rack position, a collapsing thoracic spine, a specific sticking point, or a general lack of leg strength. Each diagnosis points toward a different group of methods. The more clearly I define the priority and understand why the problem exists, the fewer programming decisions I have to make.
The same process applies to HYROX. Consider an athlete targeting a 1:10 finish. If a simulation shows that their sled pull and farmers carry are their weakest stations, I can compare those splits with the ~5:00 sled pull and ~2:30 carry needed for their target (all of this information is freely available with just 2-3min of research). I now have specific performance targets to train toward instead of the vague priority of “get better at stations.” To make the priority even more narrow, I can ask whether the sled pull is limited by strength, mechanics, strength-endurance, or the physiological cost of the preceding run.
Decision fatigue shows up for competitive athletes in a different way, especially during competition. They have to decide what to eat, when to eat, how to warm-up, when to start their warm-up, how to recover, among a myriad other micro-decisions throughout the day. For them, each of these decisions contain nearly endless possibilities. Part of the role of a coach is to anticipate as many of these as possible and teach athletes how to manage and pre-plan for them.
The common solution for coaches and athletes is to create constraints that guide decisions and reduce the number of available choices. The athlete’s goals, the demands of the sport, and what we learn through assessment determine their priorities. We use those priorities to build season plans and weekly templates, allowing us to focus on creating a quality session instead of repeatedly asking, “what should we be doing here?”
For the athlete, those constraints come from competition plans, warm-up structures, fueling guides, recovery routines, and rules for responding when the day does not go according to plan. This might mean deciding what the athlete will eat between events and packing that before arriving at the venue, building warm-ups that can be adjusted based on the equipment available in the warm-up area, or establishing a short recovery checklist they follow after every event. The athlete will still need to adapt on the fly, but they are adapting from an established plan rather than creating one while tired, stressed, and surrounded by distractions. Every decision made in advance preserves attention for the decisions that can only be made in the moment.
Ultimately, this is how I think about many of the systems we use as coaches. Onboarding, assessment, prioritization, season plans, weekly templates, and competition plans give us guardrails for decisions that would otherwise have to be made on the fly.. The more clearly we define the problem and plan for these predictable choices, the more attention both coach and athlete can give to the decisions that actually require our judgement.
- Kyle