Two big problems with youth athlete populations…

As anyone who has tried will know, there are several barriers to the effective collection and monitoring of workload and wellness data in youth athletes. This article hopes two set out two particularly challenging issues and to present some areas for consideration as to how to solve them.  

Compliance

Compliance (or adherence) is a relatively obvious issue. Unless you are highly motivated and have created a habit of logging daily training and wellness scores, it’s easy for life to get in the way. This is true even for adults, but just think back to when you were younger! There are any number of excuses as to why you might not have recorded your data for a given session. Without meaningful data being inputted, monitoring and acting upon that information can’t happen - big problem. 

Agility 

If you’ve managed to solve the challenge of compliance, in order to turn the data you've generated into applied knowledge, we must be able to act on it. We must also be able to act on it within a time frame that is appropriate. If an athlete fills out a sub-optimal daily wellness questionnaire, there isn’t much point in striking up a conversation 2 weeks after the fact to see how they were.

We must be able to respond to what information we have in a timely manner. If we can’t do this, we risk losing engagement and buy-in of our athletes. Some will fill out erroneous data to see if you notice. If you ‘don’t bother’ (this is how it looks) responding, then why should they?

Solutions 

So what can we do about these issues. Well, the solutions for both go somewhat hand in hand. To improve compliance you can spend time educating your athletes on the importance of monitoring and empower them with understanding to improve their own well-being and performance. You might also work on cultivating social norms, with appropriate consequences to non-adherence and recognition and reward of good adherence.

While these are essential to good quality athlete monitoring, neither are quick fixes. Another option, which can be run concurrently with the cultural changes listed above is the introduction of default values when it comes to monitoring training load. Using Statera, within each organisation, you can set and alter default values for a given event or workout. This means that in the absence of data being submitted by the athlete, you at least can make an educated guess and fill in some of the holes in your data set. This doesn’t work for daily wellness scores, but it does mean that if it’s appropriate, you can pick your time to ask for adherence when you really might need it.

Agility, or the speed, specificity and appropriateness of the feedback you give an athlete is actually another way to improve adherence. If you create and effective enough system to be able to alert the appropriate stakeholders when an athlete submits a noteworthy set of scores, you go a long way to showing that athlete that the input is valued, required and that their efforts do not go to waste. However, we still need an easy way to notify the stakeholders. Statera has multiple separate logins for coaches, athletes and parents. An organisation can also set up a ‘trigger’ system to notify the appropriate people that a conversation might be worth starting. 

So there you have it, two of the biggest challenges in youth athlete training load and wellness monitoring - Adherence and Agility of response. At Statera, we’re busy working away to solve these issues and more, but please do share and link to us if you think our app might be of help to someone you know!