I’ll remind you where this series started: for whatever reason, you need to coach yourself.

When you work with a coach, especially a strength & conditioning coach, you get their philosophy, their principles, their key metrics, and, most importantly, their real-time guidance on what work you need in your particular circumstances. Because you’re coaching yourself, you need a way to both prescribe the work – comparatively easy – and to modify the work – the art of coaching – without putting yourself on a treadmill to nowhere. You don’t want to end up with dozens of exciting exercise sessions that don’t progress you toward your goals. You want to trust that the training menu you’ve designed for yourself adapts to your life and sport demands.

“The best laid plans of mice and men oft go awry,” after all. (That’s Steinbeck.)

So once you’ve designed a dozen of your ideal training sessions based on your Top 5 athletic ingredients, think through the rules you will use for selecting among them, changing them, or re-creating them. Those rules come from your metrics, principles, and philosophy. Once you’ve done the work to craft these, you’ll be just as capable a coach as you are an athlete!

In the first installment of this series, I presented my own training. The section “Strategy” contained all the elements we’ll cover today. While these elements were presented as a series of numbered lists, don’t underestimate the work involved to create them. We’re getting to the core of what you believe about yourself as an athlete, about what you believe drives success in sports, and about what ideas you’re willing to debate at length.

What you identify as your philosophy of training will define your commitments at the day and week levels. What you identify as your principles in training will help you decide between Session A and Session B on any given day. Your key metrics are how you audit your progress and the validity of your principles and philosophy.

“Your Philsophy Determines Your Workload”

For example, when I share my philosophy, it tells me what ideas I will entertain and what ideas I will ignore:

Philosophy

1. Speed kills
2. Strength saves
3. Conditioning is overrated
4. Recovery doesn’t just happen

It has taken me years to come to these 4 conclusions about athletic development. My viewpoints are colored by success, failure, injury, and inadequacy at various points in my sports career. My philosophy represents what I believe is true and am willing to fight for – which means it is also heavily biased. Your philosophy will be biased, too. That’s okay – you’re self-coaching, after all, so the only final measure of success is that you enjoy your training, improve in your sport, and feel you’ve been faithful to your own beliefs.

I summarized what these ideas mean in another piece. Consider what these ideas tell me, each day I wake up:

1. anything that makes me faster is good!
2. strength training isn’t allowed to be the main thing, but I can’t skip it either.
3. don’t get tired just to get tired; justify every meter, kilogram, or second used in training.
4. do the recovery things every day, every day, every day, without exception.

That’s the purpose of philosophy. It creates the guardrails for how you view “what do I do today?”.

But you don’t just sit down to write out your training philosophy. Instead, back into it from your principles.

“Your Principles Help You Decide”

My training principles keep me from making dumb decisions. Maybe I’m buried in a work project and working long hours, maybe I had a bad night of sleep, maybe I just had a 4-day road trip with little access to good food…in those situations, even if I have time to train, what training will move me toward my goals? Or maybe I’ve had 5 consecutive days of amazing performances in training where everything is going my way…is today my day to push even harder and crush all my enemies or does it make sense to back off even though I feel great?

Principles

1. ZERO training injuries
2. Better undertrained than overtrained
3. Speed first, beautiful technique second
4. Make perfect a habit
5. Nothing extra except playing
6. Little things are bigger than big things

Principles aren’t self-explanatory. As you read these, you might think you know what they mean, but they will register differently on an emotional level to you than they do to me. Here’s what each of my principles mean to me, in terms of what decision to make:

1. “The next step after a peak is a cliff; better to step down than to fall off” (Mark Reifkind) – if I had an amazing session, I need to choose to back off.
   Charlie Francis describes this extensively in “The Charlie Francis Training System.” Worth your read; I re-read it every year.
2. “I’d rather have athletes who are 100% healthy and 80% in shape than the other way around” (Harry Marra) – I am not being paid to perform, so my health is paramount to my effectiveness at home and at work; further, even if I were paid to perform, what good is one performance if I crumble the rest of the season?
3. “Don’t major in minors” (Pavel) and “the goal is to keep the GOAL the goal” (Dan John) – I have to spend most of my energy on performing, not on every. little. technical. thing. “Marginal gains” (British Cycling) don’t apply to me because I’m not elite, so I have to focus on the basics.
4. This balances the prior principle – I can’t let myself become great at sloppy technique. Building routines out of “good enough” is the path to good technical habits.
5. “Have the courage to do less” (John Scott Stevens) and the analogy of poisoning your tree from Easy Strength – anything extra I do costs energy that could have been spent getting faster, stronger, or more skilled. Thus, anything extra that I do has to add disproportionate value to my life relative to its time/energy commitment (riding bikes with my kids; snowboarding; hiking with an old college friend; all of these are “play”)
6. Is that a twinge in my Achilles? Do my joints ache? Is my appetite off? Do I feel bloated? Every sign from my body is a little thing that deserves my attention. Not every little thing means dropping my big things (my training plan, an upcoming competition, etc), but little things add up to huge, disruptive things quickly if I don’t take them seriously.

So how do you arrive at your principles of training?

You steal them!

Last time, I mentioned that as a self-coached athlete, you have to do a bit of reading. While you’re out reading the musings and positions and guidance of other coaches both in your sport and from other sports, when something really resonates with you, reflect on it. Compare their concept to your experience – has a given statement proven itself right in your life? Has a given statement been the complete opposite of what worked for you?

Take this time to reflect on what coaches, what teammates, and what competitors you most admired. Reflect on the people who helped you make amazing progress. Reflect on your injuries and the 3 months that preceded them. Contained in those memories and those moments are your principles of training.

Mining for those insights could take some time. One other exercise will help you back into your training principles: determine your key metrics.

“Your Key Metrics Tell The Score”

Folks, I am a product manager through and through. I believe in objectives and key measures. I believe in key performance indicators. And I believe in stating them all explicitly.

My key metrics reflect my specific goals. They go from my sport outputs (race times) to athletic outputs (performance measures) and strongly correlated body comp outputs (weight/waist).

Metrics:

• 110m hurdle race time
• 60m hurdle race time
• 200m race time

• 40y dash time
• 10y fly time
• Standing triple jump
• Standing broad jump
• Overhead backward medicine ball throw (15 or 16lb) distance

• Bodyweight
• Waist measurement

I don’t sell weight loss. That aspect of personal training is gross to me. But I recognize that power-to-weight ratio has real implications on defying gravity. Jumping high, running fast, tumbling, climbing, and (weight class-based) hand-to-hand combat all depend on being as strong/powerful as possible at the lightest bodyweight sustainable. Carrying extra weight directly impacts your performance in those domains. And, at this phase in my sport career, I’m carrying extra weight.

So improving my body composition absolutely makes me faster. It could be argued that improving my power output will have as much or more effect as losing weight – which I agree with, for the record – but it can’t be argued that improving both elements of power-to-weight ratio will improve my performance in less time.

Incidentally, that’s how I arrived at my key metrics: I started with how I know I’m successful in my sport.

In [kms] sports (track & field, basically, but also swimming, rowing, weightlifting, and even CrossFit to an extent), there is an objective measure of your performance. [kms] stands for kilogram, meter, second. [kms] sports are sports that are directly measured.

These are the “clear” sports, not-at-all-fuzzy sports. Team sports are the completely “fuzzy” sports. It’s tricky to discern what makes you excellent on the field just by numbers. But it’s your job to determine how to measure effectiveness in your own sport. (Also: read Easy Strength! Seriously.)

As a rugby player, for example, I cared about tries, assists, and open-field tackles. Yes, I was limited by how many opportunities there were to do those things in a given game, but, in my assumption, the better I was, the more opportunities would exist.

As a cyclist, there are categories of competition which roughly group similar abilities, so I just looked to my finishing placement in my category. If that trended up over time, I knew I was getting better. Plus, cycling is extremely data-heavy with a rich history for comparison, so I had benchmarks.

Find yours.

Once you have benchmarks for excellence in your sport that you can measure yourself against, determine your leading indicators. These are selections related to your athletic ingredients which you can measure regularly as part of training. If these numbers trend the right way, you have good reason to assume your on-field performance will trend the right way.

Leading indicators are incredibly challenging. Many a football player (hand raised; guilty) has mistaken a great power clean personal best for becoming a better defensive end. Many an amateur golfer has misunderstood an improving cable chop-and-lift exercise as meaning longer drives. Don’t mistake your leading indicator for actual performance. Select your leading indicator because it reliably predicts performance.

If your performance goal is more broken marks, let a leading indicator be the accuracy of a particular throw. If your performance goal is more scores in the fast break, let a leading indicator be your percentage of layups in practice. If your performance goal is height in the pole vault, by all means vault more often, because training and performance are so similar, but also assess how consistently you hit your takeoff marks in different conditions.

You need leading indicators because there are so few opportunities to perform. An overloaded basketball player gets 40 games in a season…but as a hurdler, I might get 8 races in a summer. Many sports have less-frequent competitive opportunities. And on the day of competition, there are a lot of things outside your control.

Lightning delays, torrential rain, 30 mph cross-winds, broken equipment, an injured teammate…anything and everything could go wrong on the day of competition. It’s still on you to step up and perform, but your measures of performances may not be getting a far shot.

Leading indicators of performance give you good reason to believe your performance would have gone well – when you’re at practice. That helps you evaluate the effectiveness of your training program.

Bonus: “Your Objective Is Your Why”

But you’ll notice I haven’t included “number of wins” among examples of performance goals. I don’t believe measuring yourself by whether you won or lost reflects a healthy perspective on sport. Trust me, I’m not in sports for participation trophies. I am competitive and I want to win.

But not only do I not control winning a match, I don’t control how much time and energy and support my competitors had coming into that match. As adults in sport, as amateurs in sport, and as athletes, we need more reasons than winning to keep striving. If winning is the only thing, then retire at 28 – statistically, you’ll never win again against younger competitors. If winning is the only thing and you’ve chosen an age-graded sport, only compete when you’re the youngest in the age group – statistically, you’re at a disadvantage every year after that. So why bother competing at all?

That’s where this series will end: with your objective. Your objective is your why for being in sports at all. Your objective actually shapes every decision you’ve already made about your training menu, your metrics, your principles, and your philosophy, even if you haven’t stated it explicitly.

I, for example, believe in ZERO training injuries because I still want to be competing in 60 years. Every injury I sustain now dramatically reduces my odds of staying in the game that long.

So next up, last up – your dream, mission, and vision as a self-coached athlete.