Introduction
This Blog provides a summary and key recommendations from a recent paper published in Frontiers in Sport and Active Living by Andy Kirkland a Lecturer in Sports Coaching and Joe Cowley a Lecturer in Education (PE and Health) at the University of Stirling, Scotland. These recommendations come under three headers for:
1. Endurance coaches and the endurance coaching industry.
2. People working in coach education, education and teaching.
3. For researchers in sport.
We encourage you to access the full article by clicking here or on the abstract below. The paper is open access, which means you can download the PDF for free. It helps us if you click and download too.
What the Paper is About?
Background
The aim of this study was to explore the coaching context and learning of endurance coaches. It was primarily conducted for coach educators and the wider endurance coaching industry to help them better understand the market they are operating within and how to support coaches within it. This ‘market’ is a well-established one, which is part of a wider multi-billion-dollar endurance sports industry It has grown through the development of technology and the internet without necessitating face-to-face contact in the pre-COVID-19 era. Therefore, we suggest the paper has broader application to those working in education who design and deliver educational resources remotely.
We have written this Blog to complement the paper, specifically to avoid the criticism that academic work can be incomprehensible to wider audiences. Please feel free to reach out to us if you would like to discuss the paper in more depth or have any questions. We are also willing to share raw data and collaborate with others who may have interest in this work. Please note that we have far more data than could be included in one paper, so if you don’t see answers to questions you may have, that does not mean to say we didn’t ask them.
What is in the Paper?
The Literature Review
The literature review is important to the paper as it explores the foundations of effective learning, applied to a coaching context. We also critique current methods of coach education, highlighting how it often does do not address coaches needs or wants. To the best of our beliefs, this is also the first paper to describe the endurance coaching context in any detail.
Methods & Study Design
In designing the project, we were influenced by Behaviour Change and Implementation Science. These scientific approaches place greater attention to ‘real world’ contexts in which any subsequent recommendations or interventions are applicable in. These influences encouraged us to co-create research questions and collaborate with non-academics who work in the endurance sports industry. These collaborations resulted in an extensive survey which posed questions surrounding demographic information, coach learning, athlete wants and needs.
General Findings
Almost 10,000 athletes and coaches throughout the world completed the survey in which the USA, UK, Australia, and New Zealand were the most prominent. Their answers reflected a complex and ever-changing endurance coaching ‘cottage industry’ in which learning is influenced by market forces, technology and biased towards readily measurable physical metrics.
Importantly, the coach-athlete relationship in this context can exist without necessitating face-to-face contact or ‘real-time’ feedback. Rather, coach-athlete feedback loops are created through the sharing of exercise intensity data collected from ‘wearable’ technology. We suggest that this can result in psycho-emotional detachment and can limit the capacity for coach and athlete learning. This suggestion was reflected in what coaches found important and wanted to learn about, with ‘planning and prescribing endurance training’ deemed to be the most important. Interestingly, coaches believed they were poorly prepared by coach education for their roles.
We also explored the influence of learning in the digital world. In common with previous research, coaches tended to value learning through experience far more than through formal qualifications and CPD. Importantly, when asked to report their sources of information and knowledge, they presented a wide array of typically non-curated internet sources, many of which were commercial in nature. We suggest that this ‘illusion of choice’ is influenced by sociocultural and economic factors. Previous research in learning has focused on the methods of delivery and consumption of learning material. However, we argue that the quality of the sources and how they shape coach learning and practice is more important. We highlight the danger when efficacy of learning is measured through web analytics. People will generally engage with things that confirm pre-existing beliefs. Such engagement is likely to influence future content more so than the validity or effectiveness of the content is in developing better coaches.
We also argue that learning occurs most effectively when there are strong social connections. Without these connections, psycho-emotional detachment may result and limit capacity for learning. Furthermore, with the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI), technology is already able to build bespoke training programmes and provide specific feedback to athletes. For humans to be competitive in this environment, they must be able to develop deeper social connections and do things that technology cannot.
Recommendations for Endurance Coaches and the Endurance Coaching Industry
Our study showed a clear ‘biophysical bias’ in what coaches are interested in and demonstrated a relatively narrow conceptualisation of what coaching involves. Based on the work of Robbie Britton we suggest that the most important metric to assess effective coach-athlete relationships is the duration of the relationship. This is likely to be influenced more by social factors (see Figure 2 in the paper) than expertise in planning and prescribing training or sport science. We also suggest that AI presents a risk to coaches working with high volumes of athletes and/or those without sufficient agency to develop strong social connections with their athletes. Therefore, based on the findings of the study, we recommend that you:
- Focus on more holistic ‘biopsychosocial’ ways of conceptualising coaching, which involve how to develop effective relationships. We offer a leading MSc. in Sport Performance Coaching at the University of Stirling to support you.
- Self-assess coaching effectiveness through your client retention rates.
- Carefully consider how you develop feedback loops with athletes, in which you recognise the quality of engagement will influence what feedback athletes give you.
Recommendations for Coach Education, Education and Teaching in the Digital Age
In the Post-COVID era, remote teaching practices have become far more common. However, we have also seen unprecedented drops in student engagement, including for face-to-face teaching. Whilst the causes are complex, in common with our study, we suggest that pyscho-emotional detachment is a major factor. Additionally, we are operating a market orientated environment in which government policy is also guided by market forces. Students are viewed as consumers with choice. Our study showed that despite having almost infinite choice of learning resources on the internet, the choices made were limited by the wider market discourse e.g. wearable technology & software to analyse its outputs make more money than ‘social connection’. We have interpreted our data to suggest that the wants of the coaches may be very different to what they need to be effective and prosper in the digital age. Therefore, we suggest the following that mediated learning programmes:
- Must be constructively aligned. Coaches/students will construct knowledge for themselves through practice. However, left alone, they will focus on their ‘wants’. As educationalists, we need to provide them with a scaffold which also supports the complex needs of their role. The alignment comes through curriculum design and assessment which prepares them for future roles in society.
- Are informed by the ‘wants’ of the learner, whilst recognising that these wants rarely reflect ‘need’. This requires holistic understanding of what the learning needs are. In our study 85% of coached athletes fell within a Personal Referenced Excellence (PRE) group. However, few educational programmes exist to support this demographic.
- Do not focus on curating and depositing information on students. Rather, in line with the recommendations of Stozkowski et al. (2020), students/coaches should be supported to filter the BS in unmediated learning environments and be equipped with reflective tools to make sense of their learning experiences.
- Recognise the tension between effective education and market forces which influence how programmes are evaluated e.g. effective learning versus income generation and having a nice time metrics.
- Recognise the importance of the social and emotional nature of learning during mediated learning events.
Recommendations for Sport Researchers
Our paper was written through a Critical Realist lens to reflect the complex, realist and subjective nature of sports coaching. We are proud to publish this paper because there were substantial challenges in getting it published, which we explore here.
Our intention of conducting the project was specifically to support the translation of research findings into practice. Our approach was evidence-guided by Behaviour Change and Implementation Science. This evidence demonstrates that research translation without deep appreciation of contextual factors which affect practice. Narrow theoretical and discipline specific approaches are typically incongruent with research translation. We have several recommendations which have emerged from our work:
- It is important to understand the philosophical assumptions associated with the research methods we use and how these affect research translation.
- That you should consider how your work can/will be translated into practice. It is not good enough to state: “coaches require better training” in your disciplinary area of expertise without understanding how it fits into the coaching process or what the mechanisms for learning are. Our paper demonstrates sports physiologists have a particular advantage over psychologists or sociologists in translating research into practice. Arguably, this is not a good thing, however, understanding what coach/athlete wants are fundamental to achieving impact.