COACH'D
Join us on COACH’D, a podcast where the some of the world's top athletes, coaches, and performance experts come together to share their stories, insights and secrets to what has made them successful in their own right.
Think of it as a "locker room" chat — unfiltered, raw, and real. We dive deep into all things athletic performance, wellness, science and culture.
COACH'D
BRAIN DUMP: Foolproof Fitness - How To Maximise Your Training Approach in 2025
Each week I'll share some of my thoughts in a mini episode called "Brain Dump" with some of the things that's on my mind.
These are designed to be short, sharp and straight to the point (maybe with some ramblings).
This episode shares practical strategies that promote consistency and gradual exposure to help achieve long-term success.
• Importance of simplicity in training environments
• Necessity of having multiple plans for flexibility
• Prioritising hard tasks at the start of training sessions
• Utilising varied training methods to enhance efficiency
• Key elements of successful training: consistency, gradual exposure, delayed gratification
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https://open.spotify.com/show/1YJMztpYSgnPusEXB3fWcc?si=FJsWITv7QdSCSgCt3lkElw
Join us on Coached, a podcast where some of the world's top athletes, coaches and performance experts come together to share their stories, insights and secrets to what has made them successful in their own right. Think of this as a locker room chat unfiltered, raw and real. We dive deep into all things athletic performance, wellness, science and sporting culture and sporting culture. Hear from those who have played, coached and built their way to the top with athletes from the field, coaches and medical in the performance setting, or owners, managers and brands in the front office, while also getting an insider's view on my own personal experiences in this high-performance world. If you're passionate about sports, curious about the minds of champion athletes or looking for information and inspiration on your own journey, coach is the place for you. Welcome back to another episode of Brain Dump. For those that have followed some of the podcasts I've done in the past, this time of year I love to do a 2024 slash, 2025 prediction. Welcome to 2025. Now I know that we're pretty much neck deep in the first month of January already, but it is the first proper podcast of the year, so welcome. I hope everyone had a fantastic break and they spent some good time with their family and friends For me it was great Spent some time down in Adelaide, beautiful part of the world, drank a lot of wine, and that was pretty much it from my end. So that was my quick five-second summary. Now today's episode is going to be a real short and sharp one, but I've got here four ways to foolproof your training in 2025.
Speaker 1:Now, I think there's probably two ways to look at this. Option one is to look at it from the athlete's perspective. So if you're an athlete, looking at it from your lens and your eyes. And then also option two, if you're a coach, obviously working with athletes or working with clients, looking at it from your perspective, but then also understanding it from the athletes as well. So, to keep it short and sharp, the first one here is we want to make it easy. Now, I know this sounds silly, but the easier things are to do, the more likely we will do them.
Speaker 1:Great example of that is we had one fantastic purchase at the back end of last year. My partner and I. We bought a Concept2 bike for home. A Concept2 bike for home, and we quite often put off any extra little conditioning work or anything like that, because sometimes, if going for a run, it was either, without sounding too embarrassing, it was either too hard or it was too hot, or it was raining or whatever else. So there's lots of barriers, even though it's just as simple as going for a run versus the bikes. Just there you can jump on, chuck on Netflix, chuck on anything, anything, reply to emails, whatever it may be, do an easy session, do a hard tempo based session, whatever it is. But we removed a lot of the friction.
Speaker 1:Now there's a lot of uh, I guess ways to look at that and why it's become so effective. It's just simple. It just eliminates all the friction. It's right there. It's easy to do so with your training or when you're working with your athletes. You want to make it easy.
Speaker 1:One of the easiest things to do is proximity. So either be close to where the athlete is, ideally, or, if you're an athlete, you want to have your gym or space where you train. It could be a field or something like that as well within walking distance, ideally. It just makes it easy. It eliminates a lot of excuses. There's no traffic, so on and so forth. By the time you get there, you can already be started getting in and get out. Again a real life example of that for me was there's a, just a commercial facility down the road. It's about a five minute walk and it is changed again the back end of last year sorry, the year before I joined there and we A make it close and make it easy. So, if you're a coach, make it easy for your athletes. If you are doing remote stuff, whatever it may be, find ways to make it easy. If you're an athlete, find ways to make it easy on yourself.
Speaker 1:Number two, and this is obvious, sounds really obvious and somewhat ridiculous, but have a plan. Now, I know a lot of athletes if they're working on themselves or they have a bit of a plan from a coach they might be working with, whether that be remotely or within a team setting, and if they are doing it by themselves is they have their plan A or their program in front of them and then they don't have any sort of plan B, c off the back of it. So if they go into the gym and they had, let's just say hypothetically, a back squat as their first exercise and the racks are taken, they basically have a mini conniption. They don't know what to do, they panic, they stand there, they waste time versus being able to have a plan B. Okay, so the back squat is, or the racks are taken. I can't do my ideal back squat, but what's the next closest thing? So could I do a leg press, do I have? Okay, leg press is taken, what's next? Okay, can I do a heavy goblet dumbbell squat? Okay, there's an option.
Speaker 1:So it's about having plan A, b and C being as close as you can in plan A, but having the foresight to understand that plan A probably will not always go to plan. So it is great when it does, but if it doesn't, we've got those other options there. And then again, that just saves so much time. It takes all of that stress, anxiety away from being in the gym setting. And same as a coach, I've seen a lot of coaches um, have athletes and they are so rigid in their program that they will not deviate from it. So again, like if something's taken, they'll stand there, they'll wait, they'll talk. It just wastes so much time, um.
Speaker 1:And then, alternatively to that, if you're a coach and the athlete in front of you, uh, that's there, you know, isn't moving the way that you thought they might, or they have a little injury or something like that. They don't have the ability or don't have the understanding to be able to modify that program on the fly. And again, that comes from repetition, that comes from working with clients for a long period of time and having a really good understanding of how to lateralize and modify and regress movements, but also you, as a coach, being able to really be flexible in your programming. The saying that I always like to have is you write your program in pencil, never in pen, because very rarely do you ever go to plan and even myself, as of late, especially in a one-on-one or a small group setting, very, very rarely do we always do the program exactly how it's outlined, from start to finish.
Speaker 1:Okay, the next one is doing the hard things first. Now, this is probably more targeted to athletes than it is for coaches, but it still might be able to help, maybe from a programming perspective. And that is that if you've got a key focus or a key work on that's been identified, whether that be a weakness or an area that you want to bring up yourself personally, use the first 10 minutes of your session to target that. I say 10 minutes, it could be five minutes, it could be three minutes, it doesn't really matter but really identify and utilize that time effectively. It is so much easier to do hard things, uh, when you first get there, when you're fresh, then it is at the end, because at the end it's always easy. I'll just do it next time, I'll just move on. So if you've been identified I don't know let's just say, like around your hip flexors and trunk is an area of a work on, then looking at having two to three exercises of each of those areas to do at the start of your session, even if it's not necessarily a part of your session. But doing that micro dose approach. If you just did three gym sessions a week, you did that three times a week. That's half an hour extra work that you've now done or added into a session, versus if you eliminate that, that's half an hour that you haven't done. So microdosing adding those work-ons, key areas to improve in only a small period of time whilst you're feeling fresh is a really great way to bring some of those quote-unquote weaknesses up and do it in a really effective manner as well.
Speaker 1:And the last one here and this is again probably more targeted towards the athletes over the coaches, but it's still great if you're a coach, to understand these is utilizing different training methods. That can be looking at the way that you actually prescribe the exercise within the program. So are you maximizing time with sequences? Or you know the classic supersets, slash, giant sets, whatever you want to call it, where an athlete or the athlete that you're working with is actually maximizing their time, so they're not just doing straight sets. You know exercise one into two, into three, into four. You know they are paired in a superset or a contrast base approach to maximize time. There's nothing better than walking in as an athlete knowing you're 50 minutes and you're going to rip in for 50 minutes and get done versus that exact same session but because it's spaced out a little bit differently, it turns into an hour 20 minute session. So things just start to blow out. So understanding basic things like sequences, tempo is another great one again to manipulate and be able to modify, to be able to change the loading structures again. So if it's busy or there's not enough equipment, you know, let's say the 25s are taken. Um, for your chest press can you do 22 and a half, but maybe increase the eccentric just a slightly. So you're going to get a little bit more stimulus and adaptation out of it. Little things like that wave loading, cluster sets, getting a little bit um creative with your uh loading parameters as well, can be A keeps it entertaining, but also B allows you to fluctuate between a few different, I guess, key focuses, whether that be strength versus capacity and so on and so forth. So that's just a couple of little things.
Speaker 1:There's probably three key elements that all successful athletes I guess show over a long period of time, and it's pretty basic, but it really does ring true. The first one is consistency and, to keep very simple, consistency is just how often do you do it? So if you've got three sessions one week planned, do you just do those three sessions and then the following week not do one? Can you maintain three for an extended period of time? For me, when I'm talking to my athletes and I'm prescribing their sessions, I always start on the lower end of things. So what can you, on your worst week, commit to? Not what you can you commit to on your best week, because more often than not we're going to have probably more closer to worse weeks. Now, that could be just life gets in the way, work gets in the way. Whatever it is, there's always things that can get in the way. So how can we angle everything towards those types of weeks versus the weeks where, all of a sudden, you're on holidays, you've got all this spare time or whatever it may be.
Speaker 1:So start on the lower end and look to build up, because everyone loves to come out, guns blazing the first couple of months of the year and they fall off the wagon. Find a routine that you can maintain over a period of time and look to stick to that. The second one is the gradual exposure, which kind of ties in really nicely to consistency. So we don't want to come out. Guns are blazing on on day one. We're using some smart periodization, some smart uh ways to program, especially if we're starting to look at the rise of the hybrid athlete um, some longer distance running. You know how do we actually look to implement that into our athletes or our clients programs. We don't want to come out and say, okay, week one you're doing a 10k run and then all of a sudden, by week four, they've got stress responses and they're back to square one because now they have to have three weeks off while while that sort of settles down. So it's about being smart or how you do. It is the gradual exposure and then, finally, it's the delay gratification, which is how long can you actually do it for when it gets hard Even though we mentioned we target it towards our worst weeks there's always going to be times when you've got something in your program that you have to do and you probably don't want to do it, and it's easy to say, oh, I won't do it now.
Speaker 1:But can you delay that gratification of into the future, trying to skip stuff, knowing that in six months time what you do now is what you get? I did a bit of a post last night, just a little thread that seemed to go really well, and it was basically just saying you know, athletes and in brackets, coaches, often reap the rewards of what they did six months ago today. So if you're ever stuck or feel like you're not progressing, look backwards to what you've previously done. Results don't happen overnight, they happen over time. So I think that's just a nice little summary on today's episode. As I said, short and sharp. I hope that there was just maybe one or two little takeaways in there. If there was, just let me know, because it does help me with my thought process and how I outline things and really looking forward to, I guess, the angles that we're going to take the podcast in 2025.
Speaker 1:There's plenty of things that I want to do from a guest perspective and I've got a couple of ways to try to make things a little bit more accessible.
Speaker 1:Learning, for me, is obviously the best way to grow and promote a podcast is through video. However, there's so much barriers between getting people organizing people based on locations, all those sorts of things. So I'm very lucky to have a really strong network of people within the industry. So I will be utilizing that a little bit more with some audio-only episodes. So those that listen to audio-only, it's probably a great thing for you a bit more frequency there and get some really great practitioners that simply getting in in-person is just not possible. So that's one angle, and then just having these little tidbits here along the way, obviously with the brain dumps, is something that I really enjoy as well. So let me know what you think. If you've got any ideas or any guests that you'd like to hear from or any angles that you like, also send them through to me, because it helps me hopefully make a better experience for everybody out there. So enjoy and looking forward to a huge 2025.
