You pull into the parking lot at 5:47. Practice starts at 6:00. You grab your bag, walk toward the pitch, and you realize — again — that you have no idea who's actually showing up tonight. You hope the kid who rolled his ankle last week is cleared. You can't remember what you told the team you'd work on this session. You wave at a parent whose name you're 70% sure of.

And then the whistle blows, and the next ninety minutes happen to you instead of being led by you.

Every coach has lived this moment. The good news: the difference between a reactive practice and a sharp one isn't about the drills. It's about the five minutes before.

Here's a ritual worth stealing.

It's Sunday evening. The dishes are done, the kids are finally in bed, and you're at the kitchen table with your laptop open. One tab shows your members spreadsheet. Another has your bank statement. A third is your WhatsApp export from the parents' group chat. You're trying to figure out who actually paid their monthly fee, who owes you from last month, and whether little Marco's medical certificate is still valid for tomorrow's training.

This is your Sunday. It's also your Tuesday. And your Thursday. And every quiet moment between.

I order for an athlete to have the best possible chance at reaching peak performance, coaches have to carefully balance training stress and recovery. To avoid guess work it’s important to have a structured plan that will help coaches always know where their athletes are and towards what goals they are working. Athletes will be able to see what lies ahead and get ready for the coming sessions.

Let’s first zoom way out and look into planning a year.

A season is planned around certain goals. It can be to achieve a new personal best, win a race, or finish in an event.

In order to get there, it’s important to be realistic and understand the key limiters that are holding you back. Someone who is a fast runner will have a problem stepping it up to longer distances just as a cyclist who is great on the hills has trouble holding on to a group on the flats.

It’s important to recognize those weaknesses early on and have a battle plan ready to address them throughout the season and come to the race ready to achieve peak performance.

This last weekend (13th of October) the 32nd annual Zagreb Marathon race was held with over 5000 participants in different categories - marathon, half marathon, 10k and relay.

I participated once some 7-8 years ago but never had the time to race it again because a lot of triathlon races I take part in are also taking place during that time and I just like triathlon races a little more :)

How much an athlete needs to spend training in a certain intensity zone depends on the type of events they are participating in.

The shorter the race, the more they will spend at and above their anaerobic threshold. The longer the race is, the more time they will spend in aerobic zones to build the needed endurance.

Let’s dive into some more interesting topics and physiological states the athlete’s body goes through in today’s blog post.

The more we understood how to design a training process the more we relied on devices that will help us gauge training intensity in order to be able to precisely stress a desired aspect of the athlete’s physiology.

Heart rate monitors started gaining popularity but proved to be an unreliable witness quite often. That’s why sports scientists and coaches have devised multiple methods that when used together give us a better way of crafting the right workouts for our athletes.

How we can measure intensity is the topic of todays blog post.

As our understanding of the influence training has increased and we learned more about the physiological processes that are happening in our body, we started using that knowledge to improve athlete’s performances.

Today, even someone who isn’t to interested into the science of training has heard about different thresholds and training zones.

This will be the topic of today’s blog post.

Regardless of the sport someone is involved in, the primary goal of every athlete and their coaches is to delay the onset fatigue. The way to do this is by training at specific intensity levels that will stimulate different mechanisms of the athlete’s body.

This week we will spend a lot of time talking about intensity in training and how to use it to our athletes advantage. We will dive into specifics of measuring intensity as well as how much someone should train at different intensity levels.

We will finish it off with a few training sessions with different goals in mind.

Let’s start with fatigue and where it comes from.

Training frequency and duration are easy to quantify when it comes to describing a training schedule. It’s gets quite fuzzy when we start talking about intensity.

That’s because training intensity is the most potent of those three. If it’s dialed up too much, the athlete will, eventually, get injured and can only wait and watch their competition compete. If there isn’t enough intensity, the athlete will never be able to catch up to the front of the pack.

Let’s have a closer look at intensity and how it can be used to the athlete’s advantage.

Along with training frequency, the duration of an individual training session needs to be tailored to the desired goals as well as the current phase in an athlete’s preparation.

Depending on the intensity of an individual training session, which we will cover in the next post, athletes have to train for a certain amount of time per session to stimulate different physiological adaptations.

Today we will cover the second component of a perfect training schedule - duration.

How often an athlete trains, frequency, is one of key components to training. Along with intensity and duration they form the backbone of every training schedule.

There is a big difference to how often someone should train based the desired outcome an athlete wants to achieve as well as the level of performance the athlete is currently at.

Today, we will dive deeper into training frequency and how it can be used to boost performance.

When everything an athlete does blends into a perfect storm, anything is possible.

Let’s finish this blog series on winning by looking into something that is at the heart of every sport - winning.

This is a very personal topic because winning can mean different things for different people.

How this looks in practice is the topic of the last blog post in this series.

No matter how hard an athlete is prepared, how motivated they are for the event, or how well their state of mind is.

There will come the inevitable brick wall that will either be overcome or stop the athlete dead in their tracks. This is the moment when an athlete has to find the answer to “How bad do I want this?”. If they can’t find the answer that will push them forward, they will lose.

Let’s finish the 2 week blog post cycle with the key benefit of mental toughness - the ability to simply grind it out.

There is a big difference in running the, for example, Boston marathon and the marathon part of the Ironman in Nice, France. The former is a point to point race while the latter is a 4 x 10.25 km course. If we take out the swim and bike portion out of the equation, running a multi loop race is, generally, easier than running a point to point race.

You can divide your efforts into smaller parts and tick them off one by one while it’s more mentally draining to tackle a distance all at once.

That’s the principal of microgoalling and the topic that we will dive into today.

Every athlete goes into an event with a strategy. That’s their ideal sequence of actions that will lead them to the finish line. Most of the time, there will be something in their way that will put that plan in jeopardy on force the athlete to change it altogether.

Many athletes struggle with these situations and it’s always the ones that can quickly change their strategy that come out on top.

Today, we will discuss adaptation and how it can help you make the most out of a tricky situation.

Every day a thousand thoughts go thorough your mind. It can be related to work, sports, your life in general and anything in between. It’s important to have sift through those thoughts and check for individual words and their sentiment.

Are most of the words and phrases positive (“I can do that!”) or negative (“This sucks!”)?

Today we will take a look at positivity and the impact it can have on athletic performance.

It’s your big day! You have trained for months and are ready for the gun to go off. But it’s not all about your physical state, your head plays a great role as well.

One of the ways you can help take your race day and training performance to the next level is by utilising visualisation techniques that will help you stay focused on execution.

Today, we will talk about the power of visualisation.

If you have ever been to a race, you have seen all kinds of people doing different kinds of things before the gun goes off. Many chat with other people, some listen to music, and others have a specific warm up routine.

Any of these actions can help you focus on the race or hard training session.

Today we will dive a little more into focus and what you can do to improve yours.

You have signed up for an event and have, what seems, the perfect training plan. You are starting your month long preparation and at some point you will feel doubt creeping in.

Are you on the right path, are you doing too much or too little. Can you even execute on your goal?

Today we will cover how you can build confidence through your training.