What makes a successful coach, and what steps can you take to get there?
Learning from others is a great way to level up your coaching career. How do other successful coaches do it? How do they structure their day, manage their athletes, and what tools do they use? What advice could they give to other coaches?
Jason Koop is the Head Ultrarunning Coach at CTS, leading a team of 40 other coaches who all contribute their own philosophies. He has coached hundreds of athletes of all different levels, including world-class ultra runners.
We spent a day with him to see how he does it, from researching new ideas to talking with athletes throughout the day. Then, we asked the TrainingPeaks audience (aka, you!) to ask Jason Koop their most pressing questions about training and coaching.
Jason Koop’s Journey
When we spent a day with Koop, we asked him to reflect on his 25 years of coaching experience. He started as a youth track club coach and progressed to coaching some of the world’s best athletes while leading a full team of other coaches.
Here, he offers advice to new coaches and shares what he believes all coaches should come to agree on:
Your Questions, Answered.
You asked, Koop answered.
We asked our TrainingPeaks audience to ask Koop any and all training- and coaching-related questions. Here’s what he had to say:
Q1: What topics have you changed your mind about over the years?
A: That women should train significantly different than men. There’s no compelling evidence to do this on a gender-wide basis beyond the individualization that you would do for any athlete. You can read more about the impact of menstrual cycles on female athletic performance in these two studies: The Impact of Menstrual Cycle Phase on Athletes’ Performance: A Narrative Review and The Effects of Menstrual Cycle Phase on Exercise Performance in Eumenorrheic Women: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis)
Q2: Since you lead a group of coaches at CTS, what’s something you’ve unexpectedly learned from a newer coach?
A: The newer coaches usually develop frameworks for their workflow that I’ve never thought of before. Sometimes it’s the sequence of things and other times it’s the tools and technology they use. But they always keep me on my toes as they are more in touch with what’s coming out than I usually am.
Q3: What are the benefits of strides after/at the end of long runs?
A: If you are regularly doing hard and/or fast runs, there really are no additional benefits to this beyond what you are getting in those workouts.
Q4: I’ve heard that you tend to coach about 40 athletes at a time. What are the main features or tools you use in TrainingPeaks to coach at a high level with that number of athletes?
A: Honestly, the main feature is having a library of workouts that I draw from. Outside of that, the post-activity notification emails that prompt me to do some level of analysis on every file is critical to my workflow as I analyze everything that comes across the wire.
