Transcript
BO HANSON
There was an interesting study done on-- they took 400 Finnish athletes and they looked at what were the leading causes of burnout amongst athletes. And what they found was that the leading cause of burnout was not a physical occurrence. It was the fact that athletes felt as though they were operating in a controlling and pressuring structure where they were unable to effectively have two way communication with their coach.
And so what that means is that, imagine that if you turned out to practise, and instead of you saying to your coach, oh, coach, my leg is killing me. It might be caught from the weekend. You haven't gotten over it. Or maybe you're just really fatigued or you're mentally just exhausted, and your coach didn't take that into account, to the point where they say, you know what? Get out on the field and try like everyone else. Where the athlete therefore feels like they had such a low level of personal control over their situation. That was found to be the leading cause of burnout.
One of the first questions our coach used to ask us, every single time we turned up to training, we had as a process, before you wake up, before you get out of bed in the morning, your alarm goes off. It goes off at about 5 o'clock in the morning or even just before. You let your heart rate come down from the initial shock of the alarm beeping. And then once your heart rate comes back down, you take your heart rate. If it's more than sort of eight beats above what it normally should be, your heart rate, you go to your coach the next morning and you turn up at training and coach says, how is everyone feeling? It's the first thing he says.
Guys, the programme's on the backboard. It's set for the next month, every week in absolute detail down to the percentage time you're going to spend at every heart rate zone. Every work piece is on there. Everything in the programme is there. But that is subject to change at a moment's notice. As soon as the guys say, coach, heart rate's 10 beats above normal. That's right. Right, you're out of the boat. Jump on the ergo. Let's modify your session. There was always that possibility. You know what I'm saying? So an athlete never felt like they didn't have control over their situation, always felt like the coach cared.