Burnout: how can coaches get the rest they need?
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Burnout: how can coaches get the rest they need?
Research spotlights strategies used to cope with the stress of managing elite teams
The contrast couldn’t be starker. Bruce Arians, pictured above, spent most of his coaching career prowling the sidelines. Come off-season, though, Arians could be found in a very different location: his lakehouse.
The ex-Cardinals coach’s decision to distance himself from the training pitch after the rigours of a taxing campaign might not seem unusual. But with increasingly congested fixture lists and rising demands for continuous improvement permeating all elite sports, the window - and appetite - for rest is not what it once was.
The implications can be extremely serious. In 1994, Mike Krzyzewski - who coached the US basketball team to gold in the 2008, 2012 and 2016 Olympics - was forced to miss an entire season after suffering from profound exhaustion. The episode begs the question: how can coaches get the rest they need to avoid burnout?
Recent research by David Eccles, Thomas Gretton, Nate Harris and Svenja Wolf offers some answers. Based on interviews with 22 coaches drawn from National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) Division 1 teams, “Switching the mind off completely” – Understanding the psychology of rest in coaches”, investigates the coping strategies deployed in sports as wide-ranging as football, volleyball, hockey and tennis.
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The study reveals the myriad of tactics that coaches use to rest. From pursuing interests detached from their profession (in some cases, as far-removed as pottery), to devoting time to activities with lower cognitive demands (such as listening to music), the paper shows the breadth of ways in which managers respond to the psychological demands of their job. As one interviewee puts it:
“People management is tough. It’s nice to take a breath from people. I really enjoy the human part of it, but humans are exhausting.”
Add fixture congestion, an unpredictable workload and increasingly vociferous calls for constant improvement to the mix, and it’s perhaps unsurprising that coaches are (in some cases) bolting the office door to find five-minute breaks in their daily schedules.
At least one interviewee suggests that such measures are also driven by the way the sports industry stigmatises rest:
“When we won our first national champs, I remember another coach calling and saying that anything less than this next year is going to look like failure.”
The paper highlights seven ways in which coaches are overcoming these 'barriers to rest', which flip between two key objectives: reducing the amount of work seeping into life at home and carving out time to switch off.
Develop a workload plan to limit demands on time away from the training ground
Study participants reported the effectiveness of establishing strict post-work routines for dealing with ‘out of hours’ team issues. As one coach said:
“Evenings, I won’t make recruiting calls past a certain point or respond to the athletes if they text me unless it’s an emergency. So, I try to reserve a couple of hours each night to rest before I go to bed.”
Identify and recruit 'self-reliant' athletes
A point that might divide opinion, the advice was nonetheless offered by at least one interviewee, who highlighted the time invested in athletes requiring emotional support:
“Once that [needy] student-athlete comes to play for you, then all of a sudden now you have 14 or 15 other young ladies on that team and you cannot be up at 11 o’clock at night talking to this young lady.”
Establish a culture that embeds appropriate levels of communication
The desire to avoid an ‘always on’ approach to communication was pinpointed by a number of coaches, who stressed that professionalism shouldn’t be a proxy for constant dialogue:
“Here’s how in a professional environment, different than with your peers, you need to be approaching communication and understanding that our time is not an unlimited resource.”
Take care in assembling a stellar backroom team
The importance of the ‘team behind the team’ is well-documented, but perhaps less associated with psychological advantages than it is with tactical, technical or physical upsides. One coach was unequivocal about the periods of rest that the right backroom team can help provide:
“The biggest advice I can give to all these young coaches is to hire well. If you go out and get yourself good assistant coaches, they are going to save you a lot of time and a lot of energy. If you don’t spend a lot of time on the front end getting it right, you’re going to spend a lot of time on the backend making up for the mistakes you’ve made.”
Rest when players rest
The temptation to use rest days as an excuse to plan for upcoming games is obvious, but to be avoided, according to at least one interviewee:
“Rest in-season means our off-day. Sunday is our off-day. That means not going into work, not having to do any work, not having to take recruit calls, just purely a day off.”
Include time for rest in project planning
Interestingly, a number of coaches highlighted the need to include slots for breaks when setting out a schedule of long-term work:
“In my early years, I never planned a break. I worked through, trying to improve our process. I worked very hard in November and December, so then you tag on the spring load straight after, and, come May, I was exhausted,” said one coach.
“So, as the years have gone on, I have learned the value of being fresh in the spring and I know when to plan projects and development projects to allow myself time to relax in the holiday period. So nowadays, I really welcome that and I look forward to the mental breaks and I am planning on it.”
Practice what you preach when it comes to self-care
A number of coaches also stressed the need for their peers to adopt the attitude they attempt to drill into players. As one interviewee put it:
“This is important what we’re doing, but it’s not the most important thing. If we’re not OK as people, as a human, we’re not going to be good at our job. And that’s something we stress all the time to our players: we care about them as people first, so that they’re OK as people. We’ve got to do the same for ourselves, caring about ourselves, so that we are as good as we can be professionally. Trying to put that in practice in our lives is a focus.”
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Burnout: how can coaches get the rest they need?
A valuable article for those coaches who may be too single minded in their approach. However, an omission from the content is the preventative action a coach or player may take to reduce any progression to burnout or poor performance - mentally, game or life related..
Players and coaches will both gain equal benefit from undertaking activities that improve their brain health and cognitive function. They can improve their resilience and thereby strengthen their mental health and be better placed to deal positively with the challenges and opportunities that present themselves over the years.
A Mentored Brain Training approach can significantly enhance the Education, Health, Business and Sport sectors. Every decision and action we take comes from the brain but the emphasis in preparation is far too often limited to the fitness, technical and tactical aspects of sports.
Tom Brady is on record as saying his use of brain training tools helped his decision making which enhanced his performance. Every single coach and player can improve their performance and mental health through such innovative approaches.
www.footballingbrains.com