Something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is goal setting for my athletes.
Now I know this sounds simple, but one of the most impactful things you can do for someone is to tell them the EXACT metrics you’re going to be assessing them on and why they’re important.
But you should have more than just one KPI – or key performance indicator – that focuses on that end goal!
Here’s what I mean by that…
We’ve all had a body comp client who wants to lose weight on the scale.
But if the ONLY metric that you’re tracking is scale weight, and then that number doesn’t move initially, they probably feel like a failure.
And what’s worse? They’re looking at YOU for an explanation.
So instead of just tracking scale weight, you track multiple KPI’s all of which reflect that same goal.
Here are a few to get you started:
- Scale weight.
- Body composition.
- Total inches.
- How their clothes feel.
This way even if the scale weight doesn’t go down initially (which we all know doesn’t always happen), you can lean into the fact that they’re losing inches in the right places, building muscle, and their clothes feel vastly different than they did a few weeks before.
Got it? Good…now let’s apply this to sports performance.
I’m going to use this in the vein of assessing with force plates, but since you’re creative I’m sure you can think of numerous other ways to do this.
One of my favorite metrics to track is braking.
In many cases my pros probably don’t have a lot of gains left in the propulsive/”increasing your vertical jump world,” so braking is something that transfers nicely to their sport AND tends to be a bit more trainable.
So if I want to focus on braking, I can track numerous metrics that help me understand whether my athlete is improving.
Here’s a quick snapshot of some of the metrics I choose to track:
- Braking RFD.
- Force at minimum displacement.
- Average braking force.
- Average relative braking force.
- Peak braking force.
- Peak relative braking force.
- Braking net impulse.
- Peak braking velocity.
- Relative braking impulse.
Feel free to choose choose more or less, but the key here is this:
Don’t put all your (tracking) eggs in one basket – diversify to get a better understanding of the entire picture, and help keep your athletes engaged in the process.
I hope this has given you some food for thought. Thanks for reading and MAKE IT a great day!
All the best,
MR