Coach Valle has coached Track and Field at every level, from high school to the Olympic level in the sprints and hurdles. He has had the privilege of working with great athletes that have been All-American and school record holders. A technology professional, Coach Valle has expertise in performance data as well as an understanding for practical application of equipment and software. Carl is currently the lead sport technologist for SpikesOnly.com, and focuses his time on testing elite athletes and using technology to help everyone on any level of human performance reach their goals.
T oday, the average strength coach has more responsibilities than they did in the past. They are expected to monitor an entire program, not just the weights and conditioning. Communication with athletes is a key part of success, as we all know, but doing it in an effective manner is a challenge.
Enter: a readiness survey.
A simple readiness survey can make a good program great, and it can help prevent a great program from crashing down due to overtraining or injuries.
Using a readiness survey daily is the strongest ally a coach can have next to another coach, and watching the trends of your training group can make you a better coach if you invest the time into the process.
In this article, I cover why you should start or get back to using readiness surveys, and share how the information can change your coaching process. If you are not using a readiness survey now, you need to step up your game. If you already are, science and expert coaches have made our job a little bit easier.
Image 1. Readiness survey data should be easy for the athlete to log, and easy for the coach to access and analyze. Over time, a coach will be able to guage the readiness of his athletes, both from a team perspective and an individual perspective. Sample above is from inside the TrainHeroic calendar.
A readiness survey is a frequently asked series of short questions that athletes answer about how they feel and how they are recovering from training. They are exactly what their name implies: a direct question of an athlete’s status to train for that moment.
Using them fosters better communication and results.
Asking subjective questions is an effective way to improve a training program according to the science, but only if you use them consistently will they make a difference.
If they don’t have any information from the athletes they work with, c oaches will worry constantly about overtraining or fatigue, and sometimes about being too conservative. Readiness surveys reduce either doing too little or too much… and sometimes shed light on the wrong type of training.
If you truly value listening to your athletes, then do it every day and do it efficiently.
It’s easy to say you communicate well with an entire team, but if you are honest, it’s hard to juggle dozens of athletes in your head every day without help. Every coach values communication, but doing it without a readiness survey is difficult logistically.
Starting out with an organized summary of groups is the best way to keep training on the right track and ensure athletes are not left behind.
Plenty of research is available now to show how valuable and useful subjective monitoring is, and the work of Anna Saw, Shane Malone, Martin Buchheit, Aaron Coutts, and others like Dr. Sands is more than enough evidence for the inclusion of readiness surveys.
One of the fathers of modern monitoring is Dr. Sands. His work from decades ago is still useful today. If you want to make a difference with results, training needs to be complemented with science.
But the main issue of readiness surveys is that while the science supports their use, most coaches don’t add enough or any energy behind them. After a few weeks of daily questions, typically the honeymoon period wears off with athletes, and the coach is now the villain for asking for information on how they feel over and over again.
I don’t blame athletes for getting annoyed, as most of the questionnaires are rarely connected to the training and get old quickly, but that’s due the process, not the science.
If you don’t put the passion into communication with your athletes like you do with sets and reps, the best you have is just guesswork.
Science can only help if it’s valued by coaches and athletes, and if it’s not implemented properly, the compliance fades fast.
