When Science Fails Athletes (And Why That's Okay)

Early in my coaching career, I came across this idea that has sort of lurked in the shadows of the coaching world for decades: while science is humming along providing rigorous data on what will move the needle on an athlete’s performance, coaches are the innovators. The narrative goes “Science will likely take 10-20 more years to explain why the practices coaches are using today are effective.”

The first 2 months of my masters work involved recalibrating my understanding of how coaching and research should relate to one another. Then, one day I was out for a trail run with a friend from the program, and he helped kick me out of the rut. He off-handedly expressed his own perspective on coaching. 

“It’s not very scientific,” he said. He hesitated and spoke a bit softly, considerate of the fact he might ruffle my feathers with his honesty.

“There’s truth to that,” I replied.

Scientists emphasize something called "experimental reproducibility". Essentially, someone else needs to be able to follow your instructions to conduct the same experiment that you did, and they should get similar results. If your study design is good, then nobody should be able to follow your procedure and get a contradictory result.

Creating reproducible experiments requires several things. A large pool of volunteers to participate, a lot of trials, and to maintain control of many other variables. The ultimate goal that a good study strives for is control over every variable that could be involved, changing only one thing. If something happens when we change it, we feel decent about the chance that something happened because of just that one thing.

The job of a coach is not to use only scientifically validated techniques. The job of a coach is to use all of their tools– to ensure the health, performance, and happiness of the athletes they work with.

You can't do what coaches do in a lab. The coach’s goal is to improve the performance of an athlete. Athletes are people, and people have lives beyond training. Their environment, their mind, and their body shift in innumerable ways daily. Coaching requires that we still try to control the outcome of the experiment, even when we don’t control all the variables.

People can't be controlled in the way researchers control variables in a lab study, and a coach would be doing athletes a disservice to try. Regardless, a coach's task is similar to the researcher's: find variables that can be changed to achieve a desired outcome.

The irony of exercise, health, and performance sciences is that, in many cases, the best that science has to offer coaches and athletes is that we need to approach a lot topics of nutrition, gear, mental strategy, training routines, etc. on a case-by-case basis. The central question of most peer-reviewed studies comes in the form "does this [nutrition, gear, mental strategy, training routine, etc.] make a difference in a person's health/performance?" 

The conclusion of a large portion of those studies: it depends (on the person, the day, or something else entirely that we didn't even know if we needed to consider).

Science is constrained, but research offers the highest standard in rigor. Coaches should respect that, as should researchers. 

The job of a coach is not to use only scientifically validated techniques. The job of a coach is to use all of their tools– to ensure the health, performance, and happiness of the athletes they work with.

Science has a role in coaching, but it’s one tool. Good coaches know that the role it plays is shifting all the time.

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