Staying Grounded: Lessons from 20 Years in Coaching BMX Athletes

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Why Coaches Benefit from Keeping Their Feet on the Ground – A Personal Reflection!

Like any athletic pursuit, performing at the Olympic Games is the peak of a career. For coaches aspiring to assist and plan for high-performance athletes, it is a journey of building skillsets and craft. Coaches will likely face trials and tribulations, much like their athletes pursuing their dreams, drawing undeniable parallels. While the journey peaks at the Olympic Games for both athlete and coach, some key points remain regardless of coaching education or level.

My name is Dr. Adam Carey, and I would like to share some of my experiences working in a wide range of development fields for BMX Cycling. I currently serve as a Development Team Manager and coach for NSW and ACT (Australian States) in BMX racing. Additionally, I lead my development and high-performance coaching business for cycling and sports conditioning practices. In my field, I work with athletes ranging from 12 years old to those representing their countries at the peak of the sport, including one athlete who competed in the Paris Olympics.

My 20 years of grassroots and development coaching, combined with over 8 years in high-performance coaching, have led me to a fundamental realisation: strong coaching practices require knowledge of development key performance indicators and, most importantly, how these two are linked in practice. The similarities between youth development and high performance result in strong practical outcomes as a coach.

Key Strategies for Effective Athlete Development and Elite Performance Planning

1. Annual Planning: Annual planning is as important for elite athletes as it is for development athletes. It involves providing a training peak towards a goal and offering specific training stimuli for the athlete pre- and post-event. For instance, an elite athlete would return to general conditioning training post-World Championships, while a development athlete might engage in an off-season sport or have specific time off to prevent burnout and assist with emotional and psychological regulation. These points are specific to each athlete but provide a structure that prevents overtraining and guards against psychological burnout and exhaustion. Annual planning allows athletes and coaches to evaluate training practices and assess if targets are being met to achieve training and performance goals.
2. Precision in Execution: All high-performance sports require execution with expert precision regarding sports skills. The similarities in training practices mean that development and elite athletes share strong comparisons, offering coaches the opportunity to improve their interactions with athletes, provide relevant and relatable information, performance cues, and efficiency in training practices depending on training outcomes.
3. Understanding Performance Trends: My experience in BMX racing has taught me a crucial truth: the trajectory of an athlete’s success is not a specific data set but rather a threshold of trends. By understanding development athletes, coaches maintain a critical thinking perspective, recognising the multiple directions toward high performance considering the number of variables in sport. This perspective does not diminish high-performance indications toward success but rather emphasises when those variables need to be considered in development athletes.

As I continue to develop more high-level elite athletes in BMX racing over the coming years, I am committed to refining the process of developmental planning for achieving high performance. We, as coaches, need to continually develop athletes with strong physical and psychological readiness to perform.

Skills Academia Research and Insights Collective for Excellence wishes victory and success to all Olympic 2024 athletes, especially the Australian BMX riders. (Pictured: Logan Martin, Australian Professional BMX rider. Photo by Joel Carrett/AAP PHOTOS, courtesy of www.northerndailyleader.com.au)

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