It Depends
What matters enough to change the decision?
“It depends” is probably one of the most accurate answers I give as a coach.
It is also one of the least useful if I leave it there.
Training decisions rarely exist in isolation. An athlete might have slept badly. They might be sore from the previous session. There may be a match coming. Work or school might have been stressful. They may be returning from injury. Their previous week may have been unusually demanding. They might simply tell me that they do not feel right today. All of those things can matter.
The problem is that the longer I spend listing everything a decision could depend on, the easier it becomes to make the situation sound complicated without actually helping anyone decide what to do.
I do not think the useful question is simply:
What does it depend on?
It is:
What matters enough to change the decision?
A lot of things can affect the situation. Far fewer should actually change the plan.
Information is not automatically an instruction
Take poor sleep. An athlete tells me they slept badly. That is useful information.
But it is not automatically an instruction to reduce training. The same applies to soreness, fatigue, low motivation or simply having a difficult day. Sometimes those things matter enough to change what we do.
Sometimes they do not. An athlete can be tired and still train well. They can be sore and still need the exposure. They can have one poor night of sleep without suddenly being incapable of useful work. If someone has been healthy for a long period, training consistently and showing no meaningful warning signs, my bias is usually more towards occasionally pushing than constantly removing work.
That does not mean ignoring how somebody feels. Training itself creates fatigue and discomfort. There are periods where the athlete will not feel perfectly fresh, and I do not think every unpleasant signal should automatically become a reason to reduce the stimulus. There are days where you have to work while tired.
There are times where soreness is simply soreness. Sometimes you push, the session goes well, and the athlete learns that they were capable of more than they expected. Sometimes you push and later think you probably should not have.
That is part of it too. I do not think there is a clean rule that removes that uncertainty. The job is not to make uncertainty disappear.
It is to decide what it means here.
Autoregulation has to be learned
Ideally, I do not want athletes to depend on me to decide whether every sensation they experience is acceptable. Over time, I want them to become better at judging themselves.
There is a difference between:
I do not feel great today, but I am okay to work.
and:
Something is genuinely different today and forcing this probably does not make sense.
That distinction is not always obvious. It has to be learned. The athlete needs experience of training on days where they do not feel perfect and discovering that they can still perform.
They also need experiences where backing off turns out to have been the better decision. The coach learns in much the same way. Over time, you start to know the person.
One athlete saying they are tired might not change much because they say it regularly and usually train well once they begin. Another athlete might almost never complain. If they suddenly tell me something feels wrong, I will probably give that information more weight. The same information means something different because the context around it is different.
That is not a universal readiness rule.
It is judgement built over time.
Trust matters too. The athlete needs enough trust to tell you what is actually happening rather than what they think you want to hear. And I need enough trust in them to take that feedback seriously without automatically allowing every sensation to dictate the programme.
To me, that is part of autoregulation.
It is not the athlete deciding everything for themselves.
It is both of us getting better at understanding what the information means.
Objective data can help. It cannot make the decision for us.
Objective information can tip the scales. Performance data, training load, wellness measures or simply how somebody is moving that day can give me useful information. But collecting more information does not automatically produce a clearer decision.
A readiness measure being worse than usual might change what I do. It also might not. The number itself is not the decision.
I still have to ask what it means in relation to what we planned, what the athlete has done recently, what comes next and what I already know about them. The same value can matter a lot on one day and very little on another. That is why I am careful about turning monitoring into instructions.
Data can inform the judgement. It cannot remove the need to make one.
Sometimes the route changes, not the goal
I find it useful to separate the goal from the session that was supposed to achieve it. A session is not the goal.
It is one route towards it.
Maybe I wanted a high-speed running exposure today, but something is different. The athlete is more fatigued than I expected. The conditions are poor.
Their response to the previous session was not what I thought it would be. That does not automatically mean abandoning the objective. Maybe we change the dose.
Maybe we change how we get the exposure. Maybe we move it to another day. The goal can stay exactly the same while the route changes.
Sometimes, though, protecting the goal means leaving today's plan out completely. Imagine an athlete who has barely slept and is struggling to function. I could still insist that today was supposed to be the important speed session.
I could probably get some version of the work done. But the fact that a session exists on the programme is not a good enough reason by itself. If doing it today is likely to give me poor-quality work, create a large cost, or unnecessarily compromise what I want to do next, changing the plan may serve the larger goal better.
That is not avoiding training.
It is remembering why the training was there.
The programme is a plan, not a contract
I think this is where programmes can become misleading. Writing something down makes it feel more certain than it really is. Tuesday says three sets.
Wednesday says high-speed running. Thursday says a particular gym exposure. That structure is useful.
Without it, we are just reacting to whatever happens that day. But the programme was written before today happened. It was built on an expectation of what the athlete, the week and the environment would look like.
Sometimes that expectation is still close enough. Sometimes reality gives us new information. I do not think good coaching means abandoning the plan every time something changes.
But I also do not think good coaching means defending the plan simply because we wrote it first. The programme gives me a direction. The athlete in front of me gives me the current information.
I still have to reconcile the two.
More work is not always more useful work
There is a point in many sessions where doing more still adds load but probably adds very little of what I actually wanted. Conditioning is an easy example. The athlete may already have completed the meaningful part of the session, and then we add another few hundred metres because that was the target on paper.
They have done more work.
But what have we gained from it?
There may still be something useful there. I do not deal with this in absolutes. But sometimes the expected return gets smaller while the cost keeps accumulating.
If those extra metres meaningfully compromise tomorrow's important session, increase fatigue for very little additional benefit, or simply add stress because we do not want to leave something unfinished, then completing them is not automatically better coaching. The same applies across a week.
A session can be good in isolation and still be wrong for the week.
There might be work I can fit three days before something important. The fact that I can fit it does not answer whether I should. I still have to ask what I expect to gain and whether that return is worth the possible cost.
Again, it is a judgement.
The decision needs a reason, not a perfect explanation
This is probably one place where my thinking has changed over time.
I used to think that being able to explain every variable would somehow make the decision stronger. Now I am less convinced. There can be ten relevant pieces of information around a session.
I do not necessarily need all ten to point in the same direction. What I need is enough understanding to know what I think matters most. Maybe the athlete slept badly but everything else looks normal.
Maybe they are sore but moving well. Maybe a metric is down but the training exposure is low risk and important. Maybe nothing looks alarming individually, but several small things together make me less comfortable with the original plan.
There is no formula that resolves all of those situations. Eventually I have to weight the information. That does not mean the decision is arbitrary.
It means the reasoning is contextual.
The question becomes:
What is the strongest reason to keep the plan?
and:
What would have to be different for me to change it?
I find those questions much more useful than simply listing everything that could matter.
Most of the time, we are making educated guesses
I do not think good coaching removes uncertainty. I am making educated guesses all the time. Experience does not remove that.
It gives me more situations to compare the current one with. I have pushed athletes on days where it turned out to be exactly the right decision. I have probably pushed on days where, looking back, backing off would have been smarter.
I have reduced training because I was concerned and later thought the athlete would probably have handled the original session perfectly well. There is no way around getting some of these wrong. What should improve with experience is the weighting.
You get better at recognising what deserves attention. You understand the athlete better. You build more reference points.
You become slightly better at tipping the scales. The call is still mine. But it is not certainty.
And even deciding afterwards whether the call was right is not always simple.
Did it work today, or did it work over time?
If I push an athlete through a session and nothing bad happens immediately, that tells me something. It does not prove the decision was good.
How are they tomorrow?
What does the rest of the week look like?
Can they continue training?
Are they adapting?
Are we repeatedly borrowing from the next useful session to complete this one?
A single session gives us a very small window. That is why I care much more about an athlete being able to train consistently for weeks and months than about winning every isolated session. Sometimes accepting fatigue today is exactly what the training block requires.
Sometimes that fatigue spills into everything that follows and becomes counterproductive. Those situations can look very similar in the moment. The longer-term response gives us another piece of information.
Not proof.
The athlete improving does not mean every decision we made was correct. One bad week does not mean one difficult session caused it. But over time, patterns give us something to learn from.
And that becomes part of the next educated guess.
The coach should carry some of the complexity
There is another side to this that matters to me just as much as the programming itself. Communication. If a decision depends on ten things, I can explain all ten things to the athlete.
I can tell them about sleep, soreness, workload, previous exposures, recovery, objective measures, future sessions and every possible interaction between them. All of those things might genuinely matter. And the athlete can still leave the conversation less clear about what to do.
More information is not automatically more education. Sometimes it simply transfers the uncertainty from the coach to the athlete. And sometimes, if I am not careful, explaining every variable becomes a way of showing how much I know rather than helping the person in front of me.
I do not think that is particularly useful coaching. Part of my responsibility is to carry some of the complexity. That does not mean hiding information.
And it definitely does not mean treating the athlete as incapable of understanding their own training. I want the opposite. I want them to become increasingly independent.
I want them to develop good judgement. I want them to learn the difference between discomfort that is part of training and something genuinely different that deserves a response. But teaching that does not require me to unload every thought involved in every decision.
Sometimes education is deciding which part of the explanation is actually useful.
Clarity does not require certainty
Being clear with an athlete does not mean pretending that I am certain. I might not know whether three sets or four sets are objectively perfect today. Most of the time, that level of precision simply does not exist.
But I can still make a decision. That distinction matters to me.
Clarity is not:
I know this is definitely correct.
It is closer to:
This is what makes the most sense from what I know right now.
And that can still be enough to act.
For most everyday training decisions, I want the athlete to leave with something fairly simple:
This is what we are doing.
This is why.
And this is what would make me change it.
That gives them something useful. It also forces me to be clear about my own reasoning. If I cannot explain what would make me choose differently, I may not understand the decision as well as I think I do.
Higher stakes change the responsibility
Not every decision should be handled in exactly the same way.
Whether we do one less set today is not the same as making an important return-to-sport decision. When the consequences become more meaningful, so does the athlete's role in understanding the uncertainty and the alternatives. Important medical decisions, meaningful return-to-sport choices or situations where different options carry genuinely different consequences need more discussion.
The uncertainty matters. The alternatives matter. The possible consequences matter.
And the athlete should be part of that decision. Clarity does not mean making decisions for somebody simply because I understand more of the technical detail. It means helping make the actual choice in front of us understandable enough to participate in.
“It depends” should start the thinking, not finish it
There is nothing wrong with saying “it depends.” Sometimes it is exactly the right first answer. It gives me a moment to think instead of pretending that there is an immediate universal solution.
The problem is when it becomes the final answer. Eventually, we still have to decide. The athlete in front of me does not need a list of every variable that could theoretically affect their training.
They need me to work out which ones matter here. Today. For this problem.
For this goal. And I do not need perfect certainty to do that. I need enough understanding to make the next useful decision.
Then I need to keep paying attention to what happens afterwards. A lot of things can affect the situation. Far fewer should actually change the plan.
And I think that is one of the less visible responsibilities of coaching.
The coach carries the complexity. The athlete should receive clarity.
Not false certainty.
Not oversimplification.
Not a decision made without them when the stakes deserve shared responsibility.
Just enough clarity to know what the next step is, why we are taking it, and what would make us choose differently. “It depends” can start that process. It should not be where the thinking ends.