500 Words a Week - Increasing Autonomy in the Gym

As mentioned before when discussing culture, a central theme to a productive culture is enabling your athletes to have a voice in the process. Within S&C we can be too stringent at times and implement the “It’s my way or the highway” approach. I believe that this doesn’t foster a productive environment. Especially when dealing with youth athletes beginning their journey. How you interact with them and make them feel in the gym could have lasting connotations and significant implications for their continued involvement in the gym.

I like the methods below as some options for trying to increase autonomy and to encourage our athletes to voice themselves in the gym.

Firstly, differentiate between structured and unstructured both in coaching style and how your layout your sessions. I got some wise advice early on stating that you can’t be on your athletes the whole time, you need to fluctuate. Within the population I work with, we have one structured gym session a week where the majority of the work is prescribed. Then there are multiple other opportunities during the week for the athletes to come in and do extras. These extra sessions are unstructured. We have a conversation about where the athlete feels they need to improve/ work on, and we target this. The coaching style is more laid back than in the structured gym session.

More minute interventions for increasing autonomy include the use of open sets (e.g. 3+ reps). Rather than precise rep schemes, prescribe the minimum work you deem necessary and then allow the athlete to determine how far they want to go. Depending on the population, prescribing a cap (e.g. 3+ reps, no more than 8) on how far the athlete can take the set may be wise. The use of open sets is also a great way to install some embedded testing and tracking into your programme.

Use of timed sections rather than prescribing sets, the reps are prescribed along with an allotted time window in which to perform the exercise (e.g. 5 reps squat, 8 min cap). The athlete can then decide how many sets they want to perform within the allotted time. In youth athletes, this can be nice for encouraging them to explore different movement options. An example is having a section of 3-5 mins with boxes, allowing the athletes to experiment with as many ways as possible to jump onto/ over/ off of the box as they like.

Buckets or options based around various goals in your programme can be another way. I’m a fan of using contrast sets with experience athletes. Here, you might pair 3 types of jumps with your main lower body lift that slightly target different physical capacities and allow your athletes to pick the jump modality that best suits them. You might also prescribe various different set and reps schemes for each exercise targeting different physical capacities and allow the athletes to choose.

Prescribe the movement category or muscle group you would like to target, and allow the athlete to choose the exercise. This is also a useful education tool as your athletes will not always have you with them for the future.

For the main lifts where you might be looking to target the most output, understand what exercises your athletes like and what their individual morphological factors allow them best to accomplish. Then use these exercises as your main output focused ones, and perform supplementary work to target what your athlete misses in their main lift. This is probably more focused upon the more senior ages as we still want to ensure we are teaching our athletes various movements in the younger ages.

A simple and most effective option for increasing autonomy is listening to your athletes. Take on board what they are saying, if they tell you issues/ complaints/ preferences acknowledge them.