Nordiq Canada High Performance Coach Seminar

The speaker lineup at this year's Nordiq Canada High Performance Coach seminar looked fantastic, so I decided to make the trip to Canmore for the event. It seemed like a good opportunity to improve my coaching knowledge and interact with coaches from other teams and clubs from all over Canada.

I was also motivated by the fact that I could visit some good friends in Calgary and Canmore: they made the trip a fantastic one and ensured that I explored the stunning trails and mountains that the Canmore area has to offer (thank you Kelsey and Anneke!).

The seminar was held Friday evening through Sunday and chock full of great information. Below you'll find a brief run-down of key points for some of the talks that were more relevant to me.

Also, I live tweeted highlights of some of the talks via the uOttawa Nordiq and my personal twitter feeds if you want to see more detail and pictures of all of the presentations (search #NCHPC2019).

• Athletes who are confident, motivated, able to focus, consistent, and good teammates are important for success and a good team atmosphere. It's important to recognize that these are trainable skills!

• Results/Outcome oriented goals can backfire. If an athlete's focus is too concentrated on being better than others, it can affect all aspects of their training and performance. This outcome focus finds it's way into many aspects of training and can even affect daily workouts - athletes may avoid tasks that show a lack of ability (when really this is what they need to work more on) and gravitate to tasks where they can do well with as little effort as possible (so they look good to their teammates).

• High Performing Young Athletes. Coaches should be highly aware of the wide variability in growth and maturation and meet athletes at the stage they are at, reinforcing the process and not results. Results-oriented praise can lead to fear of failure, diminished enjoyment, and motivation (which can lead to dropout).

• Achieving goals can have a far-reaching impact. So help your athlete set many realistic and achievable process goals.

• Autonomy. Involve athletes in the process (ownership over participation and self-driven). In Norway most athletes write their own training plans and coaches are consultants.

• Develop a performance/race calendar that includes events where athletes can gain confidence and are able to race for a top placing. Confidence and racing to top spots are key elements to success. If too many events are high level and your athlete is consistently placing in the bottom quarter, it can have a negative effect on performance (and your athlete is learning to lose). Experience and exposure to high level racing is good, and can be inspiring, but balance these races with confidence building races.

• Mental Skills Training should be integrated into the Year Training Plan.

Monitoring the physiological stress that training places on the body is critical to performance. The training load has to be sufficient to elicit adaptations so the athlete can improve, but not so big that it will lead to overreaching and decreased performance. Overload periods are essential for progress (fatigue is needed), but there is an important balance.

So, it is critical to assess the load/physiological stress that a training program and training sessions has on an athlete. Even carefully planned training programs have huge individual variation in athlete response (i.e. the same workout can stress athlete A tremendously, while being a moderate load for Athlete B; or Athlete A might respond differently to the same workout at a different time in the training period). Other stressors (i.e. school, work) contribute to the training load and can lead to overreaching and poor performances.

Francois Billaut reviewed current methods to assess training load, and presented a convincing case for using a simple metric - Session RPE.

Session-RPE (rate of perceived exertion) is an easy way to monitor the intensity & volume of training, and how athletes are recovering from the training. Compared to other methods, it is simple and inexpensive. Research shows that it is valid and reliable.

How does it work? Within 30m of training, athletes rate how hard the session was X the duration (minutes) of the session. See below for how you and your athletes can calculate Session RPE to monitor the load training sessions are placing on your athletes.

SESSION RPE is calculated as follows:

TL(A.U.) = RPE x session duration (min)

TL=How Was Your Workout? (on a scale of 1-10) X workout duration (minutes)

• For example, a session of 60 minutes with an RPE of 5 (Hard) would have a TL of 300 A.U. (arbitrary units).

• TL = training load;

• RPE = Rate of Perceived Exertion based on The 1-10 scale is the CR-10 - see Foster et al (2001) - also pasted here.

• Trends in individual athletes are important, so it is important to monitor many (or all) sessions.

• A google form can be a useful way to collect this data, and a good opportunity to add other metrics (e.g., level of sleep, motivation, health (on a scale of 1 = extremely low to 5= extremely high, to give a score in line with CR-10 scale).