Staying connected to your athletes remotely

BY KRISTINA SKROCE & FEDERICO FONTANA , TNN Coaches

The COVID-19 pandemic had an important impact on athletic performance as racing goals and calendar were changing all year long while trying to adapt to the global situation. Prescribing exercise and monitoring the training process became an extremely delicate process as well as staying connected with athletes remotely over the year.

The biggest challenge from coaches’ point of view was to create an optimal training plan that would aim on increasing athlete’s physical fitness but in the same time maintain his/her adherence to the program and motivation on a high level. These points are crucial as athletes were facing the challenge of mixed indoor/outdoor training, individual training while missing their teammates and just simply dealing with a non-precise goal preparation.

This is why giving a “why” to athlete’s daily routine had a huge impact on their engagement during this period.

TrainHeroic’s structure permits coaches to create a system of active communication that improves the feedback from coach to athlete and vice versa and therefore strengthens their relationship even without having physical contact on a daily basis. From the coaching standpoint, this is extremely relevant as it gave us a huge help on encouraging daily adherence to the program and therefore enlightened athlete’s responsibility to reach their daily training goals. This had an important impact on their motivation and helped in maintaining their focus on a short-term goal and therefore increased the quality of training as focusing on long term insecure racing program was hard to reach.

Having a library with all type of exercises makes the organization of the training routine easier too. Having precise indications about the execution of the exercises helped avoiding injuries in the period where many athletes were self-controlling their movement during the workout.

The possibility to have an immediate feedback from the athletes improved both training prescription and monitoring during this period. Coaches were able to do quick adjustments, where and when needed, on recent data which improved the quality of the overall prescription, monitoring and analyzing of the training process.