INFORMATION GATHERING

Reasons for gathering background information for an athlete or player or opponent

1. To know the athlete/player’s health status

2. Motivate the player/athlete
3. Know the strength and weaknesses of the athlete/player.
4. Understand injury exposure rates
5. It gives back ground knowledge and information about a player or team and where they
are in terms of training and performance.
6. Profiling the opponent helps in identifying their weaknesses and ways to exploit those,
their strengths and ways to counter or neutralize them
7. Gathering background information about a player/athlete, the team and opponents is
done because
8. To understand current strategy and have a wider review of all performances.
9. Helps map direction and future objectives for the team or athlete.
10. It helps identify the strengths and weaknesses as a way of identifying opportunities and
threat
11. It is done so that corrections and adjusting can be done
12. It helps make improve decisions and give specific feedback to a player or team.
13. Ensures that content is appropriate to period of training.
14. Helps in choosing methods that are appropriate (intensity) to the goals of the training.
15. Ensures that planned methods are age-related.
16. Ensures that the coach sets a balance between training load and recovery.
17. Enables adherence to the Principle of variation in planning training activities.

The first stage of preparing a Training Plan is to gather background information about your athlete
and the objectives for the forthcoming season. The sort of information to collect is as follows:

• Personal details
• Name, address, date of birth, telephone numbers, transport arrangements
• Objectives
• Performance (time, height, distance)
• Technical (development of event technique)
• Indoor and/or outdoor season
• Experience
• Personal best (PB's)
• Competition experience (club, county, national, country)
• Equipment
o Does the athlete have his equipment (e.g. starting blocks, javelin etc.)?
o Elastic harness
o Weight jackets
o Video camera
o Distance, time, % effort matrix chart
 • Finance
o Where can grants be obtained from?
• Competition
o Date of the main competition
o National and Area Championships
o School, University competitions
o Required qualification times for competitions
• Fixture lists - Club, County etc.
• Open Meetings
• Competitors
o Who is the competition and what are their PB's?
• Recent competition results
• Competition behaviour
• Athlete's other Commitments
o School, college, work, part-time jobs
o Family and partner
o Hobbies and other sports
• Time available for training
• Planned holidays
• Medical
o Previous injuries or illness
o Current problems (diabetes, asthma etc.)
o Access to medical support
o Physiotherapy support
o On any medication - is it a banned substance?
o Using asthma inhaler - application to use Beta 2 agent inhalers
• Training facilities
o Tracks and other running facilities (bad weather)
o Gymnasiums and weight training
o Swimming pools, saunas and massage
• Coaching Workshops
• Last season
o What can be learnt from last season - good and bad aspects
• Key questions for the athlete
o How serious are you about your athletics?
o What do expect from your coach?

Analysis of the last program

If this is not the first program you have generated with the athlete, then an important activity to
conduct is a SWOT analysis of the last training program:

• Strengths
o What were the best aspects of the program and why?
o What did we do well and why?
• Weaknesses
o Are there gaps in the program?
o What did we not do very well and why?
• Opportunities
o How can we enhance the program for the benefit of the athlete?
• Threats
o What may prevent us from achieving the short- and long-term objectives?

Athlete Assessment

Before we can start to create a training program we need to analyse our athlete to
determine their strengths and weaknesses. The first step is to identify the ideal attributes
(e.g. body build, strength, endurance, speed, flexibility etc) that will allow our athlete to
achieve their agreed goals. The next step is to assess our athlete against our ideal athlete to
identify their strengths and weaknesses (gap analysis). Addressing the gaps may require us
to think in terms of long-term planning (4-8 years) but for this macrocycle, we can set
realistic but challenging goals to start to address the gaps. The following link provides an
example form for this athlete analysis process.