Reducing friction supports consistency

I’m currently coaching an athlete to sharpen his 5k time before we move to a Tough Mudder focus from Spring. It’s early days, even though we’ve been training together since November, but the ‘serious’ coaching has started since being back at work in the New Year.

When we started off, I was prescribing his workouts on a spreadsheet. It was the same way his last coach did it, and it’s a free, uncomplicated way to tabulate his training plan. It had his paces, distances and an overview of the strength workouts (which came separately) and it got him going. But it was clunky.

His motivation was there to improve his 5k time, but it’s a bit of a chore to dig out the spreadsheet from our WhatsApp chat, to record the activity on Strava (trying to remember if it was 4 or 5 intervals) and for me to go into Strava, find his profile and check how he was getting on. We were using technology to help in getting his programme going, but not the most efficient way.

Over Christmas, as daily routine dropped away, so did his training. It’s understandable; life can get in the way and when you work away from your family, seeing them at Christmas takes priority. 100%. Though when we got back in the New Year, he was ready and eager to get going again. He actually apologised for not sticking to the plan, which really wasn’t needed!

But what we did is streamlined his coaching. It’s something I’m now doing moving forward with every athlete. As a present from his family, he got himself a Garmin watch, and linked it up to the TrainingPeaks software, which I’ve been using for the past year as an athlete. I set up a coach account there and created his programme in a familiar environment (to me), so that everything’s in one place on the app, and most importantly it links every session directly to his Garmin.

Now the process is so easy. I programme on TrainingPeaks, he checks the calendar to see what’s on and starts the session on his Garmin. For intervals, they’re all there ready for his, and automatically nudge him on his wrist to speed up and slow down as needed. For strength workouts, there are video guides and he can fill the session out with reps and weights, and any skipped sets as he goes along. Everything is automatically uploaded back to TrainingPeaks for me to view, we can both write comments on each session, and he can rate how hard the session was and how he felt. A fantastic tool to streamline the whole coach-athlete process.

This streamlining has reduced a lot of the friction we found when we got started. He’s already commented how much easier it is, and he’s been consistently completing sessions, more so than he was back in November. Whether it’s the New Year motivation or the shiny new gadget, this whole situation got me thinking.

When we want to create new habits and routines, we’ve got to find ways to reduce friction. As motivation falters, anything that makes it harder to do what we say we’ll do, gives us more reason to stop. The easier we make it to do, the more likely we’ll keep up the consistency. It’s the adage of going to bed in your sports kit, so it’s one less thing to do in the morning. We’ve not got to that extreme and I have zero intention of going there, but it’s all about making it easier to say yes, and harder to say no.