Why is Smarter Tri called Smarter Tri?
When I started Smarter Tri, I was thinking of names and I wanted to find a name that meant something to me, but that would also mean something to my athletes and would clearly show the kind of coaching I do.
I started thinking about the fundamental principles of my coaching: what's important and why it matters to me. And 'smarter' was the word that kept coming up over and over again for a few different reasons.
One is that I use a lot of data in my coaching. I look at all of my athlete's data in detail, which, let's face it, is a much smarter way of assessing an athletes performance, rather than just guessing or basing our decisions purely on objective information.
I also work with my athletes on goal setting. I use outcome goals to set the overall objectives, combined with performance goals and process goals to define how we achieve those outcomes. I kind of hate smart goals and the whole acronym of smart goal setting (because some things are really difficult to put a time frame on) but it is a form of smarter goal setting that we do. It's really effective for my athletes and it works.
The other reason that the word smarter kept coming up is because, for a lot of my athletes they don't have a lot of spare time. They're busy people, they have hectic jobs, they have families, they have lives, they have so many different things that they're trying to balance. And so creating training plans for my athletes is about making those plans as smart as possible so that they get as much as possible from each session. Every session is working hard to make that plan as smart as possible so that the athletes get the maximum possible return on the investment of their time that they've put in because we don't have a lot of time. So we've got to make sure that they're doing the smartest possible training.
It's also called 'smarter' because it's not just about the training plan, it's about the person that that training plan is for. So it's not just the sessions they're doing, it's about working with those athletes on their mindset, on their nutrition, making sure that they're getting plenty of rest and recovery, and working with them on their strength, their flexibility, their mobility. It's everything that sits around that person to make them the athlete that they are.
So Smarter Tri is a very human-centered approach to coaching. For me, I spent a lot of years working on projects and process improvement so trying to find the efficiencies, trying to find the smartest, easiest, most efficient way of doing things that gets the best possible results is something that's important to me.
Smarter Tri is thinking about how we get the best possible result for you as an athlete. What's the smartest way we can go about doing this? And the more I talk to people, the more I talk to athletes, the word 'smarter' just kept coming up over and over again.
And so that's where Smarter Tri was born. I take a smarter approach to my athletes, how I coach them and how we work together. It kind of does exactly what it says on the tin really.
Are you ready to become a Smarter Tri athlete?