Coaching Academy: “Trust in your athlete”

Marc Pschebizin (” Mr. Inferno “) has been working with Azum for over a year.

Also important for him when choosing Azum: the simple training planning, the highly individual training control of his athletes (the metabolic profile makes it possible) – and the perfect integration of nutritional planning into daily coaching.

Marc sees another advantage in Azum – and that has a lot to do with the trust between coach and athlete.

But read for yourself:

“As a coach of amateur and top-class athletes, I understood one thing early on: everything starts with trust in your own abilities and interpersonal trust.

I would like to start by telling you about my own professional triathlon and duathlon career. This almost twenty years of experience has shaped me on the one hand as an athlete and on the other hand as a coach.

Trust as the cornerstone of work

My coaching philosophy, but also dealing with people, became the cornerstone of my work.

In 1996 I received a scholarship from the State University of New York and was allowed to be part of the Uni-Cross Country team there.

What I didn’t know at the time: one of the most distinguished coaches in the world – Dr. Jack Tucker Daniels, Professor of Exercise Physiology – practiced at the university and also coached the XC team.

The trade magazine Runners World later referred to Daniels as “The World’s Best Running Coach ”. He coached several Olympic athletes and won the Olympic Games 1956 the silver and 1960 the bronze medal in the pentathlon.

The training of our XC team was staggered in such a way that we always got together in the afternoons after class for running training on the university campus to train intervals or endurance runs.

Always as a team, always together. Which I later saw as a decisive strength of this system.

Tuesday and Friday were the tough key sessions. These were units, such as the legendary: 4x Mile + 4x 400+ 3x 1000 meter unit. In combination with short breaks, these units brought us to the edge of our minds and the limits of our individual performance.

Jack Daniels always accompanies these sessions personally. And paid close attention to the correct step frequency. It was also he who set up the Vdot Running Formula. And this has been summarized in the book “Daniels Running Form”.

Feedback as the core of trust

My coaching philosophy, but also dealing with people, became the cornerstone of my work.

In 1996 I received a scholarship at the State University of New York and was allowed to be part of the Uni-Cross Country team there.

What I didn’t know at the time: one of the most distinguished coaches in the world – Dr. Jack Tucker Daniels, Professor of Exercise Physiology – practiced at the university and also coached the XC team.

The trade magazine Runners World later described Daniels as “The World’s Best Running Coach ”. He coached several Olympic athletes and won the Olympic Games 1956 the silver and 1960 the bronze medal in the pentathlon.

The training of our XC team was staggered in such a way that we always got together in the afternoons after class for running training on the university campus to train intervals or endurance runs.

Always as a team, always together. Which I later also saw as a decisive strength of this system.

Tuesday and Friday were the tough key sessions. These were units, such as the legendary: 4x Mile + 4x 400+ 3x 1000 meter unit. In combination with short breaks, these units have pushed us to the edge of our minds and the limits of our individual performance.

Jack Daniels always accompanies these sessions personally. And paid close attention to the correct step frequency. It was also he who set up the Vdot Running Formula. And this has been summarized in the book “Daniels Running Form”.

Personally, at first I couldn’t do anything with these Vdots. It describes the running performance of an athlete using the determined VO2max, based on the individual running economy / efficiency and mental state of the respective athlete.

For the athletes this meant: we had exact passage and split times at our intervals, which we had to strictly adhere to. Otherwise there was a lot of trouble.

I have seldom seen such hard training! Usually there was also a cross race on Sunday.

We drove all over the beautiful New York State to take part and compete against other universities.

There was always a team classification. In the end, the team victory was more important than the individual placement and thus the whole pride of the university if it was enough to win.

Often the training itself became a competition within the team. You always wanted to present yourself to the coach in the best light so that you would be positioned at the next race. The school grades, however, had to be right, otherwise you weren’t even allowed to take part in the training.

On Wednesdays, after the hard interval training, there was still a medium endurance run through the hilly landscape of Cortland. For this purpose, a pace was set on the 5-8 km, which often, or better always, meant competition pace.

That is why one day I went to coach Daniels to explain to him that the training on Wednesday was simply too hard for me and that if I continued with the training maxim it would not improve my performance, but would catapult me ​​straight into overtraining. < / p>

In my opinion, I should rather do a quiet endurance run in order to better cope with the interval load the day before. That was my plan 😉

Daniels looked deep into my eyes and was silent for a while. I just thought, okay, that’s it now, now there’s a huge shit about foreigners and new members of the team, what I would take out of it.

His eyes fixed me very precisely for quite a while and turned my soul to the left. At least that’s what I thought at that moment.

After what felt like an eternity, he just said “Okay” very calmly and calmly. And: “As long as you perform great, I don’t care. Do it! “

I almost fell out of my running shoes. This trust placed in me was ultimately the impetus to train even harder and more motivated in order to perform well.

The season has come to an end. And we ran cross races every weekend on the most beautiful golf courses in the world. Running across the fairways with 12 spikes was just great. I never quite got it – but college sports in the USA are just huge.

Trust makes athletes better

My form was getting better and better and I noticed how Daniels’s training had really hit.

The goal was to achieve the NCAA Division III National Championships, the American college cross championships. For this occasion you had to qualify through the previous races.

I won a race in Albany and was able to actually qualify for the championships with this victory from our XC team, originally consisting of 10 runners.

We finally flew with a university delegation to Arkansas to the NCCA Champs. As the only foreigner, I was incredibly proud to represent my university.

Coach Daniels, who came specially from Arizona, joined us the evening before the race to ask us to pray again.

He came up to me and looked into my eyes for a long time after doing some magic tricks with a pride. Again with that piercing look and after a while just said “I knew I could trust you. Go out tomorrow and run as hard as you can! ”

You can imagine how motivated I was to show my very best on race day. I only wanted one thing: namely to convert this trust that my coach had given me into a top performance.

In the end I ended up in the front midfield. With a really convincing performance for me. The coach was happy, me too.

Today, many years later, after I became a coach myself, I try to pass this trust that Coach Daniels placed in me on to my athletes.

Everything is nothing without trust

“Trust is the basis of everything, without trust everything is nothing”, the FAZ once wrote in a newspaper article. I also believe: Trust always wins!

Trust is a crucial component within top-class and popular sport with cognitive, emotional and behavioral relevance.

If I want to convince an athlete of my work as a coach, the quality of an initial interview is of enormous importance. Am I building a healthy level of trust here or am I just trying to sell my expertise here.

Appreciation, no matter what level of ability he / she has, plays an enormous role. As a coach, I have to be able to listen empathetically and patiently. Because everyone has a story to tell!

I have to put myself in the athlete’s shoes. And understand what makes him tick and what needs he / she has. This quickly shows whether trust in the athlete can be built up and a fruitful cooperation can result.

Azum helps enormously here. Even and especially when I cannot constantly look after an athlete “live” and personally. As the only platform, Azum enables not only the obligatory data analysis but also direct and unfiltered feedback from the athletes on every training session. In this way I can promptly influence change processes and intervene in the training. In short: because the exchange between athlete and coach plays a crucial role in building trust, Azum works perfectly for me.

Sincerely, your Marc. “

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