Potluck Discussion: Fatigue Training, Impact of Pregnancy, and Athlete Parents 

In this week’s potluck episode, we discuss the value of training fatigued, how to support a pregnant athlete, and what we can learn from parents who are professional athletes.

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Fast Talk episode 385 Potluck 29

In this week’s potluck episode, we discuss the value of training fatigued, how to support a pregnant athlete, and what we can learn from parents who are professional athletes.

Please login or join at a higher membership level to view this content.

Episode Transcript

Trevor Connor  00:00

Matt, hello and welcome to fast talk. Your source for the science of endurance performance. Did I get it? Guys,

 

Rob Pickels  00:11

even if you didn’t, I wasn’t going to say anything.

 

Grant Holicky  00:15

I don’t even know what it is, so I’m just happy when nobody calls on me, just like high school chemistry, as long as they don’t get called on everything’s fine. That’s

 

Rob Pickels  00:24

why you ran all the way to Montana. Yep, you’re like, hiding in the back of the class. Yep, I was jealous that you were remote, and I quickly tested this morning and was like, Hey guys, I’m gonna record from home too.

 

Grant Holicky  00:35

I have a nine hour commute, and you have a nine minute commute, and you couldn’t quite swing it,

 

Rob Pickels  00:39

yeah? But you know, Trevor Griffin and myself, if we were all in the studio and you were off by yourself, grant you would have felt lonely. And right now, we get to be on camera together.

 

Grant Holicky  00:51

Whatever your logic is, you just didn’t want to have to wear pants,

 

Trevor Connor  00:55

and he wanted to make his own coffee. He didn’t want office coffee.

 

Rob Pickels  00:58

I wouldn’t have made pants today, or I wouldn’t have made pants today. I

 

Grant Holicky  01:01

wouldn’t have made pants or worn coffee no matter what goes on.

 

Griffin McMath  01:05

Another sip of that coffee, we are off

 

Trevor Connor  01:07

to a start. On that note, I should stand up because I’m wearing brand new pants. I ordered them yesterday. Oh, I’m sorry I missed that. They’re so crisp, they’re really comfortable, they’re stretchy. I’m accepting the fact that I am not going to achieve my race weight this year. So none of my shorts fit,

 

Rob Pickels  01:22

just the waistband is stretchy.

 

Trevor Connor  01:24

You got it. all right? So we got a bit of a theme here today. We’re talking kind of a combination of fatigue and families that race have I got this right?

 

Rob Pickels  01:37

Yeah, I mean being tired, Trevor, we’re just we’re playing off you and your state of fatigue that you’re in right

 

Trevor Connor  01:42

now? Yeah, no, I am a little tired. I won’t lie to you. So Rob, why don’t we start with your question.

 

Rob Pickels  01:47

I did think of this ahead of time, and there was a fortuitous timing of me listening to the durability podcast that you and Chris case did listeners. If you haven’t listened to that, you should rewind a couple episodes and check out durability. And also an athlete who had made a suggestion to me of, I don’t know I’m going to be able to do this workout really well today. Maybe we can push it and I’ll be able to do a better job with my intervals. And that is not necessarily part of my training philosophy. And I wanted to talk with you all about what is the value, and how do you incorporate training fatigued on purpose, right? Or should we always be fresh for our most important, quote, unquote, sort of workouts? How do you approach this? And you know, when I give my opinion, I’m gonna say I think that there is a tie back to durability with this answer.

 

Grant Holicky  02:40

Well, as always, my answer says it depends. I mean, it wouldn’t be me on the podcast if I didn’t say it depends. Do you wear depends? Grant, no, someday I’m sure it will. But I think probably the biggest thing for me with this question is there’s a time and a place to train fatigued, and there’s certain type of a workout that I like to have athletes do fatigued. I mean, Rob, you know, you’re similar. I like loading and stacking workouts, going from higher intensity to lower intensity and shorter duration to longer duration, with the goal being that by the time you get to that third session, you’ve done it via two Max session. You’ve done a thresholding one. Now you’re going into your base session. This is a really good way to add some load and add some fatigue so that we’re kind of replicating what the fifth hour of a base ride would feel like, but we’re only doing three, so it’s maybe a little way of cutting the corner with that volume. So I like stacking those days, and I like having that fatigue in there. And one of the things I love is having some soreness in the legs, especially for cross athletes and mountain bike athletes or stage race athletes that are racing back to back, having some of that fatigue in their legs, having some of that pain in their legs, and getting used to doing intervals with that so that from the mental side of things, they’re going to be like, I got this. I know how to do this, and I’m comfortable with it. All that being said when I’m talking about a high end session, when I’m talking about a neuromuscular session, sprint session, a pheo two Max session, I do like doing those off the tail end of a rest day, so that the legs are fresh so that we can really hit those high numbers, because that’s the point, right? If I can’t go deep in the workouts where I’m trying to get somebody to go deep, then maybe we’re losing that effect a little bit. I personally am less concerned if an athlete is five or 10% below their threshold number when they’re doing a threshold style workout. I’m much more concerned that if we can’t hit 450 watts when we’re trying to do a vo two Max session, because those intervals are so short, right? We’re not getting the metabolic state that we want to be in if we can’t go hard enough. So I want to be fresh for those short, hard, intense ones. A little less concerned about being fresh for the thresholdy ones, honestly, not concerned at all about being fresh for a base

 

Rob Pickels  05:06

workout. Trevor, what are your thoughts? How do you work with this? With your

 

Trevor Connor  05:09

athletes? I kind of go with what you see in the research, which is there is what they call functional fatigue and non functional fatigue, and often it’s just a matter of time that you get yourself to a fatigue state. Initially, it’s called functional because if you take a break, you will see an adaptation where, if you go too long, that’s where you get into the non functional fatigue. And if you take a break, you have to take a longer break, and at best, you’re just going to get back to where you were. So, you know, I agree with Grant. I think it depends in that you need to get to these points of fatigue. You need to do this sort of work by where by the end of it, you go, boy, I’m pretty tired, but you need to know that line where you just say, Okay, I’ve done the damage. Now. Let’s let the body adapt and get stronger. And you know, we were talking about this Off mic right before this episode that I kind of went through that myself. I just did three big weeks of training and did a crit last night, and I could see at the crit that I was struggling to respond to the attacks that sort of thing. Had my alarm set to get up for an early morning training race. This morning, the alarm went off. I got out of bed and went nope, and went back to bed and said, Now I’m taking four or five days off or super easy, because I’ve hit that

 

Rob Pickels  06:23

point. Yeah. So Trevor, it sounds like you’re thinking about fatigue, kind of in the bigger, sort of global sense, and making sure that there is enough fatigue in there for some stimulus, but not necessarily using fatigue like really playing with turning fatigue up and down. Specifically

 

Trevor Connor  06:39

when I’m doing this personally? Yeah, I’m monitoring the fatigue. The fatigue is the indicator. It’s one of the ways that I know I’ve been doing this long enough, and this is the conversations I have with my athletes. So I really want to hear them describe what they’re feeling. There’s certain types of fatigue where you go that’s functional, that’s working, and that’s good fatigue. And then there’s the fatigue I felt this morning, which is, if I do more training, I’m just doing damage.

 

Griffin McMath  07:02

Yeah, I think what Trevor pointed out is half of what my answer was gonna be, which is functional versus non functional fatigue. Or some people will talk about it as useful fatigue versus harmful fatigue in the non scientific community. But I think, since he already covered that, I also think there is intentional fatigue and then low capacity days. I think when you plan for fatigue and you use it really artfully, I think you can get adaptations out very intentionally and then recognize when you are having a spontaneous or an unplanned day of fatigue to actually just label it as low capacity and have a protocol with your coach on Okay, on low capacity days when I’m not intentionally trying to manipulate this fatigue, this experience, these conditions, what does low capacity look like? And I think if a coach and an athlete haven’t truly distinguished what the expectations are, what the purpose of a workout or training session is, when it’s low capacity versus intentional, planned fatigue, where we’re tracking the results, we know what the goals are specifically, and we have intentional rest planned afterwards, then you’re doing a disservice to the athlete. Griffin,

 

Rob Pickels  08:09

I think that you bring up an interesting point in here, in that fatigue, for me, is almost another metric for how I’m defining a workout. I want to be clear that I’m not talking about pushing people into a non functional overreaching or an overtraining situation, but that when I’m thinking about a workout, obviously we have the duration, we have the intensity, but I’m also thinking about the amount of fatigue that the person is carrying coming into that and there are workouts where I intentionally want people’s legs to be tired. I want them to be glycogen depleted, maybe even a little dehydrated from the day prior. And I think that this becomes especially important for the athletes that I tend to work with, right which are more brave riders, bike packers, multi day stage racers that I have discovered over time, you know, and this ties back to the durability conversation, that this is one of the biggest boosters of durability, when we’re talking about that ability to continue putting out workload over the course of a singular long ride, or even multiple days. And so I just want to encourage people to be thinking about this smartly, because it’s something you can leverage, as opposed to always being perfect all the time, which is something I do more in the physiological versus the performance phase of training. For

 

Grant Holicky  09:30

me, I think that’s really key. And I think there’s a couple things here that I want to bring up. I think one of the things that we’ve been taught a bit through recent research with the recovery modalities is, yes, this may help you recover, but it’s probably not the time of year that you want to be recovering, you know, if we’re talking about early season load, and whereas some of these things that are helping recovery of the legs, there’s some research out there that says, Don’t do that. Don’t recover that way, because you’re looking for load. You’re intentionally trying. Trying to build some sort of a load here. And grivorn, I think you’re really right in the coach making sure that they’re conveying to the athlete what time of year we are in, what phase we’re in, what we’re trying to do. But I really think that there’s a danger among athletes coming back to the coach with this mentality and mindset that every workout needs to be done at a really high capacity and done really well. And if they’re walking into this with mental fatigue, cognitive load, training load, any of these things, well, I should just push. I should just push. I should just push. And this becomes something that athletes are doing with regularity because they want to nail these workouts, and their happiness and their self worth as an athlete are tied to their numbers and their ability to hit a workout. Well, this is super dangerous, because this is where we get into that place of athletes going well, I don’t want to race. I’m not ready. I don’t want to do this. I’m not ready. This is my concern, when this pattern starts to go on of like, I need to be in a high capacity to do this workout. And as you’re saying, trivorn, there’s going to be those low capacity days then understanding that in a certain time of year, build phases between race blocks where we’re trying to rebuild fitness or trying to rebuild sharpness. No, it’s okay to be in a low capacity day with your training life and with your personal life to make sure that we go out there and we do the best we can, we’re hitting what we can. We’re finding ways to talk ourselves into these workouts instead of finding ways to talk ourselves out of these workouts, because their self worth is tied to wattage. And this is one of the failings, in my opinion, of power based training is that everything is about that day’s results, and our whole goal is trying to get to this point where we’re not in results based we’re not a results based athlete, not a results based mindset. We’re in process based mindsets. And when we get caught up in that, it’s real struggle to go through the

 

Trevor Connor  11:59

processes. So here’s my question to the two of you with your athletes, how do you know when they are still doing good fatigue, and how do you know when they need to pull the plug and take a rest?

 

Rob Pickels  12:11

For me, this is sort of the years of experience as a coach, right? There’s no one particular metric, and I think that as coaches and consultants, we need to be taking in the global aspect of the athlete, and it’s why I love to have FaceTime, at least on camera, or be constantly communicating with athletes, because I think that you begin to get a sense of how they’re doing. Are they having an off day, or are they downtrodden? Is their heart rate suppressed or grossly elevated for a long time, what is sort of the long term trends that are developing that’s important. But I think it’s important that we look at it in a very holistic manner, and that we don’t rely on one performance indicator or metric

 

Grant Holicky  12:56

they agree with that. And I think the holistic approach to the athlete is crucial. When you see a mood change, a dramatic mood swing, you have a typically very positive athlete that starts to become very negative, grumpy, snappy, even in their training, peaks comments, and then their comments to you that sucked. I sucked. Everything sucks. You know, often my next questions are about their personal lives. You know, what’s going on? How do you feel at work? How do you feel in terms of productivity? How are you sleeping? What’s your food intake like when I see differences and changes in those aspects of their lives? That’s when I’m going to start to pull back and understand that we’ve reached some sort of capacity load that’s too much, and we got to kind of pull back on that, and that may be time for a rest. And you know, when the relationship is really good with an athlete and the trust is there both directions. I had an athlete tell me two weeks ago, like, dude, I’m toast, and I just All right, let’s shift it. Let’s go rest week now. We’re gonna try to do it in a week, but we’re gonna do it now, or we’re gonna try to do it even in a month. We’re gonna do it now, and we’re just everything downstream from that. And we’ve made that call on the fly. It was a random Tuesday, and we pulled the plug because I knew she was on the edge. And that’s kind of one of those understandings that, from a physiological point of view, understanding where the athlete is. I know they’re on the edge. I know I’m asking a lot of them right now and then, when they start speaking about the rest of their life being influenced by this, that’s when we got to pull back

 

Trevor Connor  14:21

grant. To your point. One of those studies that I read on functional versus non functional fatigue was looking for ways. How do you know when you’re in the one versus the other? And one of the best indicators is the profile of mood states, which is a test people can take that shows your mental state. You can find them online that will score you, but that honestly was one of the best indicators.

 

Grant Holicky  14:42

Don’t search POS. Don’t search

 

Rob Pickels  14:46

POS. There’s an M in there. Profile of

 

Grant Holicky  14:49

mood states, palms, not

 

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Griffin McMath  15:25

as a transition. I would love to just say that if an athlete is a patient come into the office and we were talking about productive fatigue versus unproductive fatigue, if they were to tell me that their performance was declining a little bit, but most of their metrics were still stable if they had an elevator to RPE, but their heart rate’s not again, too far out of whack, if they’re still getting mostly productive sleep, if their mood isn’t completely hijacked, like what we’ve talked about, they’re still hungry, they’re still somewhat motivated, and the protocols that they have To recover are still effective. That, for me, is productive fatigue. But if we’re getting to the point where, again, we’re having some withdrawal, use some examples about flat affect or loss of enthusiasm or real moodiness. If we’re seeing that their sleep or recovery protocols aren’t being effective anymore, that this is persistent fatigue, or some of their metrics are starting to become pretty problematic, like their heart rate, like what Rob said, then at that point, we need to be able to flag with the athlete. Obviously, if they’re starting to show signs of persistent fatigue, where physiological markers are having an impact, or symptoms are starting to get out of control, you need to pull someone immediately. But I think coaches really need to be aware of what the signs are beyond just okay, they said something kind of crappy to me, and I’m talking about this, we need to be able to flag physiological signs as well.

 

Rob Pickels  16:50

Yeah. And I just want to point out that for me, in bringing up this topic, this is a very planned execution, and as a coach, I know that the athlete is going to be tired, right? I’m not necessarily talking about you’re just throttling someone and they can’t hold up to the workload, and that we need to be looking for these global signs of overtraining, right? This is all a very planned situation. Wait, Griffin, I want to transition to you, because your question might be planned or unplanned. Kind of depends on the situation,

 

Griffin McMath  17:22

yeah. So recently, Lizzie Dinan just declared immediate retirement after announcing her third pregnancy. Congratulations, Lizzie and her family and has since inspired a lot of conversation on, you know, a variety of personal decisions that athletes make when they decide to expand their family. And when I was looking at the headlines and the way social media were going over this news and this decision, and how she did this at her third pregnancy versus others, and what athletes have done, I thought about this potluck that we had coming up, and I was like, wait a minute, we’ve got fathers on this show. We have coaches who’ve worked with pregnant athletes or new parent athletes. And so I’m curious, what are ways that each of you has either supported a pregnant athlete or the partner of a pregnant athlete for a performance for life off the bike, and then, kind of similar to the fatigue question, are there flags you notice where you need to say, hey, let’s talk about this. Is this really worth it at this point, or what’s incentivizing this decision? So I know that’s a lot, but let’s just kind of talk about that. And huge credit to Lizzie for leaning into the conversation.

 

Grant Holicky  18:29

So I have a question to clarify your question, are we talking about run of the mill athletes, or are we talking about high level professional athletes? Because I think there’s very different goals with each of those athletes during pregnancy, high level, performing amateur athletes, yeah, they may still want to try and race, but the biggest goal is walking into childbirth, functional, healthy, fit, because it’s going to give you your best opportunity to recover from giving birth quickly in all those aspects. And I think that’s one of the things that has pushed lots of female athletes continue training well and much, much later. I know my wife was truly training through both of her pregnancies. Yeah, it was modified, right? We weren’t doing anything dumb in the third trimester with heart rates super high, or anything along those lines. But we adjusted to a mountain bike, we adjusted stem height, we adjusted exercise so she was now on the bike, versus not running as much. She was in the water, swimming when the bike started to get hard, but training with some fairly good capacity all the way through those pregnancies, with an eye on all the things that we’ve been told to watch out for in terms of athletes that are trying to perform. You know, performance can go incredibly well early on in pregnancy. I mean, wasn’t that one of the early ways that the Eastern Bloc used to blood dope was having women get pregnant? I never heard this. No, what? Never heard about this? Oh, yeah, I was screwed up. It was one of the worst things that ever happened in this regard. But there’s lots of benefits. Early in pregnancy performance.

 

Griffin McMath  20:11

Insert incredibly ethically concerned disclaimer right there, if you’re listening.

 

Grant Holicky  20:16

This was also the 80s and in Eastern Europe.

 

Griffin McMath  20:19

No, I know. I’m just floored, but your clarifying question grant is really important. If you’re a high performing, immature athlete or anyone and obviously consult your physician. But for most people who are exercising or training at a certain pace, at a certain cadence or intensity, you’re actually not supposed to drop off completely once you realize you’re pregnant, right? You’re supposed to maintain a consistent level of training. So it would make sense that your wife would continue on and then make adaptions as important. But outside of that audience, let’s talk about pros and individuals like Lizzie.

 

Trevor Connor  20:56

I’m just gonna say I have not worked with a pregnant athlete, so this would all be hypothetical for me.

 

Griffin McMath  21:01

Okay, so what questions would you ask? What questions would you need answered before working with a pregnant athlete?

 

Trevor Connor  21:08

I mean, I would certainly be asking the medical question. I’d want to know what their doctor is telling them what they’ve heard. You know, pregnancies are very different for each woman. Some women, it’s actually a very easy experience. Other women, it is a horrible nine months, and we need to know which are we dealing with. How much is training going to impact? That is training going to be beneficial? Is it not going to be beneficial? And those are the questions I can’t answer. Those are questions that you know, we’d need to hear from her. You know, what she is experiencing every day. We need to hear from the doctor what the doctor is saying about the pregnancy. You know, that’s where I would start.

 

Griffin McMath  21:46

I love this. This is why I wanted to ask you, because I think it’s such a humble and appropriate answer that people need to hear you’re an incredibly experienced athlete and coach who respects that once a certain, I don’t want to say condition, but once an athlete’s life has changed pretty drastically, both personally, physiologically. You already know like, okay, refer out, and you have the respect of the athlete to do that. And I think that’s really important for coaches to hear that just because you’ve been working with an athlete and suddenly she’s pregnant means you’re still fit to be the coach. Maybe not.

 

Trevor Connor  22:17

Okay, I’m gonna change my answer. It’s, suck it up, sunshine, get on your bike.

 

Rob Pickels  22:23

Another aspect right is just making sure that everybody is on the same page on what the goals are for before, during and after the pregnancy, and making sure that the work that you’re doing is aligned with those I’ve talked about my wife on this show a few times. She didn’t actually want to become a high performance athlete until she was pregnant. We were watching the boulder while she was pregnant, and she saw the pros run by, and she said, You know, I want to do that one day. And this was after years of her being a good runner, but not one that was super duper, sort of results based. And so her semi, quasi pro level career began, actually, after she was pregnant, right? And there are definitely training implications that we need to be thinking of. There’s things like ligament laxity that begin popping up in the second trimester that can lead to increased injury risk. But for the most part, I think that it’s more of these bigger picture questions of being on the same page that ultimately are most important for me, because we have to answer those first before we worry about any of the details of training.

 

Griffin McMath  23:27

How badass is that of your wife that it was after pregnancy? That’s the turn of events. That’s just such a testament to me. That’s so rad.

 

Grant Holicky  23:36

Yeah, I think you guys have brought up a couple different points that I think are relevant. Trevor, you talked about every pregnancy being different. And Rob, you mentioned ligament my oxidate. My wife, with her 52 degree curvature in her back, says that when she was pregnant, that’s the best her back has felt since she was 14 years old, because she wasn’t in pain daily for the first time in her life. But at the same time, you know, I think one of the biggest things that I think we it’s important to bring up here is that Lizzie do without whatever the hell you want. This is a profession, and it’s probably one of the few professions that is not caught up with the rest of the world in terms of family leave, for pregnancy and for childbirth. I still think that we’re only starting to see men get family leave after childbirth, which is really important in terms of nurturing and getting the family dynamic in the right place. So if we’re talking about male athletes whose wife just had a kid, what’s the problem with stepping away? There’s something that came through about a soccer player in Europe that said, I can’t be at the game today. And the coach said, I need you. I need you. And he said, Okay, I’m gonna disappear. And he went to the childbirth and reported the locker room right after the game. The coach was like, Yes, I need you. And he said, okay, but I’m not starting. He goes, Yes, but I need you on the bench. That’s a total, complete lack of understanding of what priorities are for into. Individual athletes. And as a coach, you need to know what the priorities are for your individual athlete. You may have an athlete that I’m going to disappear, I’m going to go to the birth I’m going to be back training the next day, or be back racing the next day. As a man, obviously, but you may have athletes that are like, You know what? I am going to put racing on the back burner for three months, and I’m going to spend time with my newborn, and I’m gonna spend time with my wife. And in terms of female athletes, this is all up to them. This doesn’t have anything to do with us. Doesn’t have a damn thing to do with me as a male coach. You know it. My job is listening to the athlete and having an understanding of what they want, what they’re trying to do. And so if they’re saying, I’m gonna step away for six months from hard training to the third trimester going into childbirth in the first three months after childbirth, so I get that quality time with my child, and I’m gonna be worse off for it. I mean, the results sheet is riddled with women with kids that are performing at the highest level of their lives post giving birth, and this outdated mentality that once a woman gets pregnant, they’re done as an athlete is just I’ll change the rating of our show. It’s bull snaps, and at some point we need to come to terms with that, both in terms of performance and in terms of age for women, I mean, women are performing at higher levels, later into their 30s, even into their early 40s than men can ever dream of. And we’re watching men perform at high levels that late too.

 

Griffin McMath  26:35

That was fantastic grant. If it wouldn’t irritate Kelly, our audio engineer, I would have snapped in the microphone that entire time. So thank you for that. I will say that I don’t have a child right now. I’ve never been pregnant, and so I can weigh this in based on the experience of family members and friends, or innately, the conversations that I have with myself as a woman in her mid 30s, who I have all of these things I would love to do with my own athleticism and my own adventure in sport, and I think about the timing of whether or not to even freeze my eggs, right, and all the stuff that has to go into that, and all the months in preparing for this. So I think, from my perspective, obviously, Grant’s initial clarifying question is a really important determinating factor here of how the question gets answered. So I’m not a pro athlete, but as someone who looks at this, ultimately, each pregnancy is a different experience. Each day of a pregnancy is a different experience. Obviously, the trimesters really help narrow that down. But I think we have to approach each athlete, when they’re preparing for pregnancy, if it’s an intentional pregnancy, as something different if it’s not a planned pregnancy, right? There’s also situations where miscarriage happens. And thank goodness to all of the individuals out there who’ve been really, I don’t say outspoken, but have spoken out about their miscarriage and normalize that experience. But you also have what happens when a pregnancy can’t be carried to full term, and an athlete is experiencing something like that. So just to say that the conversation about pregnancy is so varied, so multifaceted, you have people like me who are not pregnant. They’re at a certain age where it’s okay if you want to do this, you have to take other certain measures. And then there are people who have had loss or get asked, like, why aren’t you having a baby as an athlete, it’s now or never, who may not want or who can’t. So I think when we talk about this with athletes and with coaches, the point that each of you have made, and I’m so appreciative of that. Let the potentially pregnant person or the pregnant athlete lead the conversation and give you guidance and boundaries on how that will go, but ultimately, that decision is that person’s and that person’s only

 

Suzy Sanchez  28:56

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Trevor Connor  29:16

All right, so we got one more question. Let’s move over there. GRANT You wanted to finish this out,

 

Grant Holicky  29:22

yeah, so I think following our trend here from busy lives, then somebody gets pregnant and now they have kids, one of the things I kind of noticed was, and I’ve looked at this through the years, and I’ve really been fortunate enough to coach a lot of professional athletes, my question to you guys is, what lessons have you learned in watching professional athletes as parents, especially in the capacity of, how do they treat their kids as athletes? How hard do they push? How involved are they? What kind of mindset that they approach parenting and. Parenting athletes through their journey in sport?

 

Rob Pickels  30:03

Yeah, I think for me, one thing that’s, I don’t wanna say nice about being a professional athlete, but a professional athlete is in a position to say, hey, obviously my sport and my training are hugely important to our lives, whether that’s income for the family or whatever else. And I think that this is a lesson that we can learn for even us and amateurs as athletes, to just say and to define and to communicate that across the family, right to your spouse, to your kids when they’re old enough. Because I think that at times, myself as a parent and probably a lot of other parents feel really guilty about getting out and doing activity that you otherwise love and that you can lose a little bit of yourself in there, which is the transition that I’ll make to the parenting side of things, where I have oftentimes seen pro athletes whom are not necessarily trying to live vicariously through their kids, because they have achieved a lot themselves. I think that they can be really good at pushing their kids, because they know that hard work breeds success, but at the same time, I don’t know that they take it to that 110% where it’s a win at all costs. You have to be professional. I think a lot of athletes are super duper supportive of kids, and maybe super duper supportive of what their child is interested in, and they may or may not want them say, to become a professional triathlete or a professional runner or follow exactly in their footsteps.

 

Trevor Connor  31:34

I will continue with that, that I have worked with junior athlete programs, and if anything, I’ve seen the juniors that go on to be quite successful are the ones that have the parents that are just supportive and don’t really push them. And unfortunately, I have seen cases where you have parents who are just, I was never a professional athlete, but damn it, my child’s gonna be a professional athlete and push the kid. And I saw example of one family where they started homeschooling their daughter so that she could be training in two different sports to hedge their bets on which one she was going to go the Olympics with, and she had a mental breakdown. Oh my gosh. They just pushed her so hard that she just couldn’t handle it anymore.

 

Griffin McMath  32:15

You know, it’s almost never the pro athlete parent who’s screaming on the sidelines or doing this, and I think one of the reasons why is because they have already had an opportunity to navigate their own identity through sport. They’ve gone through that journey. They’ve figured out individuation, and the ones who haven’t been able to heal what sport means to them, or they’re, you know, experiencing vicarious achievement, so they outsource their let’s call it unresolved story, onto their kid’s performance. And you see that in sports psychology and in sports psych literature, there’s parenting dynamics called ego involved parenting where there’s enmeshment or their own ego gets extended into the kid rather than themselves, and so if the parents self worth becomes contingent on their child’s success, you’ll see situations like that.

 

Rob Pickels  33:07

Where is the line between ego involvement and just being proud?

 

Griffin McMath  33:12

That’s such a great question. Here’s a great one, conditional regard. If you can be proud of your kid and express that whether or not they succeed by a certain expectation. Let’s say if your kid gets the gold, stands on the first place podium and is holding a trophy, and you express to them, I am so proud of you, and then you go home, that’s one thing. If the kid shows up in the next weekend, the race doesn’t place at all, and you are silent, you don’t say anything. And I think Grant’s actually talked about this before, the post race ritual looks completely different. That is conditional regard. A parent is only offering love, praise, attention when a child performs well. I think that’s an instant cue. It’s not the only definition, but I think that’s an immediate feedback loop to both parent, coach and athlete, that something’s not right, something’s out of balance.

 

Grant Holicky  34:06

Well, I think the biggest thing for me with this is Griffin, stay in your lane. Sports Psychology, stay in your lane. Oh my goodness. See me coming over here and diagnosing patients, stay in your lane. I

 

Griffin McMath  34:21

learned to dabble. I learned a little bit of that in school.

 

Trevor Connor  34:24

How’s that for ego involvement? Great. That was not the response I was expecting. I

 

Griffin McMath  34:28

didn’t either. That made me step straight in my chair.

 

Grant Holicky  34:32

You guys are all bringing up great points. One of the things that has always stood out to me with pro parents watching their kids is that when you ask a pro athlete how they got to, where they got to, I know very, very few that don’t bring up luck, that don’t bring up circumstance, that don’t bring up, you know, I don’t know I stumbled into this. Yeah, they know they worked hard. Yeah, they know they’re passionate on a different level. They know they were. At least intrinsically motivated. They know all these things, but they also know that there’s a whole lot involved here that isn’t just genetics. And so I watch pro athletes on the sidelines, and it’s kind of this bemused look of let’s see what happens here. And for the most part, they loved their endeavors, and they want their kids to love their endeavors at whatever level they play at. And I think what I watch non pros, and this is very stereotypical, right? We’re putting people in buckets. I’ve watched professional athletes be absolute nut jobs when it comes to their kids, and I have a couple that spring to mind immediately. And I’ve watched athletes who were very high level amateurs be wonderful, supportive parents to their kids in sport. And so I don’t mean to be that much of a generalization. I guess my biggest point with this question, or what I really wanted to kind of tease out of you guys, and I got it was, you know, the ones that have achieved the most in sport tend to not be the hardest on their kids, right? They tend to be the ones that are like, this is just awesome. It’s funny, I spent my life in swimming, right? I spent like, 48 years in the sport of swimming, from when I started being competitive at age five to when I retired from swim coaching in 2021 and last thing in the world I wanted my kids to do was swim like no offense. I was done with the pool. I didn’t want to be sitting in a swim meet for five hours to watch my kids swim for three minutes. And my eldest is all about it. Loves the sport, and I find myself at summer league meet after summer league meet. And it’s interesting walking into that setting as a former really high level coach in that sport, and just sitting on the pool deck with a bemused look on my face, trying to remember when I was eight, nine and 10 and swimming and going, Dude, that was so much fun. When I was 10, it was a blast. And I remember how much fun. Swim meets were, and my friends were, and the interaction was and the competition was, all of those things, right? And then I look around and I see these parents, like just losing their mind, waving at the kid, kick harder, screaming, yelling, carrying on. You went a best time. You went this, you went that. And I’m just sitting there going, Wow, none of that helps in my head. I’m just like, none of that helps. But the hardest piece of this puzzle is that I’ll use a lacrosse example of all things. My kids play lacrosse, and I don’t have any background on lacrosse. I love going to lacrosse games because I don’t know what the hell’s going on half the time. It’s great. But one of my kids coaches, the assistant coach one year set in passing, said, If you don’t know how good your coach is, look him up. And I looked the dude up on Wikipedia, and he was, like, three time national champion in college, twice the MVP of the tournament played for the US National Team. Played professional lacrosse for eight seasons. All this stuff, like looking at this guy, going, Really, you the most laid back dude on the planet, and his kid is ridiculously good. And he said to me one time, his kid was nine, he goes, Yeah, my kid is really good for this league, right? I said, Yeah, like, he’s ridiculous. And he goes, Yeah, we went to a lacrosse camp in Denver with all Denver kids, and he’s literally the worst one there. And I asked why? And he goes, Well, all those other kids have private coaches. They’re playing year round. That’s all they do. They’re not playing any other sports. And one of the hardest things in the world that we live in right now is, what do you do with your children? Do you do that? Do you put them in one sport at 10 and try to get the leg up? Or do you do what all the research tells us to do, which is diversify their sport, have them play a bunch of different sports? But here’s the problem, as the sport goes earlier and earlier in talent identification, people are trying to find talent at 12 or 13, and you have a whole bunch of parents that are sitting around going, well, now what do I do? He’s been playing three sports. They’re not great at any of them at 13, and I’ve got kids that are talking to college coaches as a freshman in high school. So did I screw up as a parent of a 10 year old athlete? I feel behind I know what I’m doing, matches up with the research and matches up with what common sense to me says I should do, and what all my experience says I should do, but I also feel behind.

 

Rob Pickels  39:30

For me, it’s about letting my kids be individuals, right? I have twins, a boy and a girl, and they are so vastly different from each other, it’s almost comical to tell you the truth, my daughter is very much of the endurance mindset. You know, she will be a phenomenal runner at some point in the future. We do more to hold her back now than we do to push her forward, because she will have years and years of training and competing ahead of her. My son, on the other hand, he shows some interest in cycling. He loves to do. Cyclocross, but that’s about it. Cycling is just kind of a fun thing that he does a short part of the year, and he doesn’t really ride his bike much, you know, the other nine months that aren’t cyclocross season. And that’s fine too. He’s having fun with it, but what he has taken to is wrestling, and just like you and lacrosse, Grant, I know nothing about wrestling, and that makes it incredible, because I get to learn, I get to be supportive, I get to be impressed by him, and watch his growth in something that’s totally foreign to me. You know, I think for him as an individual, he needed something that was different. He does not like to be compared to other people. I think that it’s potentially hard when teachers are like, Oh, are you as good of a runner as your sister, his twin sister. And so for him to go his own way has been hugely important, and it’s something that we’ve been super supportive of. And, you know, allowing him to wrestle outside of just the middle school program, which, you know, middle school wrestling is a little hit or miss. They don’t get to spend enough time with their coaches or their team. And so we do have him wrestling on a club team as well that lets him wrestle sort of year round, but that’s because he’s engaged and he wants to do it. If he wanted to be sailing in the summer, then great. You don’t have to wrestle. You know, go sail. But for me, the big thing is giving kids variety without overloading them. I think that is a balance that’s really important.

 

Trevor Connor  41:19

You know, the one thing I want to point out, as we’re closing this one out, Norway is a country with 5 million people, and they have more Olympic medals than countries with 100 million people. They do something right with their sports, and they actually have a law in Norway that I think it’s until age 13 or 14, kids aren’t allowed to compete, because it’s got to be fun first. And I think that’s the really important message, because professional sports requires too much sacrifice. It’s way too hard for anybody to do it unless they are loving it. You have to have the enjoyment. You have to be incredibly motivated yourself to say, I want to do this. I want to make the sacrifices. And the one thing I would say to parents is, you wanna kill the fun for your kids. Go and beat up on them, go and try to drive them, try to motivate them when they’re not feeling that motivation, and you’ll make sure they never get there.

 

Grant Holicky  42:15

Yeah, I think my closing thought on this is, what’s your goal as a parent, and I think that becomes the starting point. What’s your goal as a parent? And I think the vast majority of the parents out there is, I want my kid to have fun. And if you want your kid to have fun, great, just help them have fun. And that means they’re having fun in four sports, and they’re not the very, very best. That’s okay. In fact, that’s the point. I cannot tell you how many professional cyclists I’ve coached that were wildly mediocre in other sports before they came to cycling. Mara Abbott’s top of the list. She was a good swimmer. She was able to swim division three in college, but by no stretch the imagination was she even remotely close to the best swimmer on our swim team when she was growing up. She was middle of the pack. If I had her on this show, she would be sitting here going, I was terrible because she was comparing herself to the other people on our team, and she was fourth place in the Rio Olympics on the bike. Instill love of sport, instill love of the process and still love of improvement. Instill love of trying your best. And that’s when true athletes shine, is my opinion. And I think one of the proudest things that I have as my career as a swim coach is that I had somewhere in ballpark of almost 10 athletes turned pro in another sport other than swimming, after their swimming careers. And that really made me feel like, okay, we did something right here. They loved sport. They loved the process, and I didn’t beat it out of them, like we see a lot of European cyclists. Man, they get done riding as pros, and they balloon because they don’t do a darn other thing. And I really like watching athletes become lifelong athletes. That’s the whole point of sport, man, is do something that you can do and maintain health, maintain mental health for the rest of your life. I feel like that’s what it comes down to.

 

Griffin McMath  44:09

I think I would just add one last thing that grant you asked, How did you phrase it? What’s the purpose of your parenthood, or what’s the Yeah, what’s the point. What’s the point. So I think in addition to that, because that answer could still be skewed to like, Well, my point is, develop like an all star. It’s what’s your kid’s goal with this? And then why? If your kid’s goal is like, I want to become an Olympian. Okay, does your kid independently want that? Or does that come from you? And so I think more so than asking a parent, what’s your kind of parenting philosophy? What’s your goal? Here is, what’s your kids? And if your kid’s goal is to just go out there and have fun, you definitely can’t be the screaming parent on the sideline. If your kid’s goal is to become an Olympian, is that actually, because it comes from you, there’s no individuation, or is that your kid’s independent goal because then not that it means you. Should be yelling on the sideline, but it might mean that you’re more involved in a certain way.

 

Grant Holicky  45:04

It might mean that there’s less of a balance. Yeah, and I would also push every parent listening right now to go look up the odds that your kid is going to play that sport in college, any level in college, is absolutely minimal. Check the percentages of kids that play that sport High School, it’s less than half. Now look at those that do it in college. That number is shockingly low. Now look at the number of athletes, the percentages that get to do it on a pro level. And then finally, look at the number of athletes and the percentages that do it on an Olympic level. This is not something that you have control

 

Trevor Connor  45:37

over. Well, guys, Griffin, do you want to take us out?

 

Griffin McMath  45:40

I’m like, Grant, stay in your

 

Grant Holicky  45:42

lane. Griffin, stay

 

Griffin McMath  45:44

I don’t like when you popcorn over to me for the intro. Exit. Repeat

 

Rob Pickels  45:47

after Rob. That was another episode of

 

Griffin McMath  45:52

That was another episode of fast talk. The thoughts and opinions expressed on fast talk are those of the individual subscribe to fast talk or wherever you prefer to find your favorite podcasts. Don’t forget, we’re now on YouTube.

 

Rob Pickels  46:04

We are, we are. We’re live streaming this to YouTube right now. GRANT crap, to

 

Griffin McMath  46:09

learn more about this episode, from show notes to References, visit us@fasttalklabs.com and to join the conversation on our forum, go to forums.fasttalklabs.com for Rob pickles, Grant holicky And Trevor Connor. I’m Griffin McMath. Thanks for listening. You.