Hello Reader,

It’s been a while since I last shared a Coaching Prof excerpt, and that’s because the team and I have been deeply immersed in all things product development. We’re excited to announce a big release coming next week, and I want to extend a huge thanks to the Athletica product team and our incredible group of patient beta testers. Your consistent feedback on the forum has been invaluable in guiding us.

For those of you who are new to Athletica (and there are many — welcome!), the Coaching Prof email series is where I share brief, science-based insights that you can apply to your training and racing. If you’d like to catch up on past instalments, you can find them here.

Today's topic aligns with a small but significant update — especially for coaches. Let me start with a question. Take a moment to reflect on it:

If we gathered 100 of the world’s top coaches and asked them what they believe is the most important factor in achieving successful performance outcomes for athletes, what do you think their answer would be?

You might think it’s physical training, right?

That was my initial assumption too. But as I learned from Professor John Kiely in a previous Training Science Podcast, the reality is more nuanced.

An overwhelming 99% of elite international coaches with more than 15 years of experience emphasized that non-physical factors play an even more crucial role. These factors include the coach-athlete relationship, belief in the program (athlete buy-in), athlete participation in the training process, and the ability to manage life stress. While the quality of the training plan is undeniably important, we must not overlook these non-physical coaching elements.

This brings me to our latest release. In addition to the existing chat feature between athletes and coaches, we’ve now added the ability for direct voice communication within a session. Simply click the microphone icon in your chat window and leave a message (up to 5 minutes). Please note that this feature is currently available only between human coaches and athletes (example exchange between me and athlete Mark shown below).

While this feature might not be for every coach or athlete, the option is now there for both. Sometimes, text is all you need. Other times, it’s powerful to hear the emotion in someone’s voice. The choice is yours.

Stay tuned, everyone—there’s a major release coming soon!

Paul Laursen, PhD

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