With every coaching relationship and coached performance journey starts with an agreement or contract, but it’s the contract to yourself that counts the most…

A bird sitting on a tree is never afraid of the branch breaking, because its trust is not on the branch, but its own wings. Always believe in yourself.

Charlie Wardle, Understanding and building confidence.

Any pursuit of performance starts with a desire to improve. Now if you strip that back to its bare fibres of this you could summarise that its human desire to improve and move forward so to speak, but a desire to improve in your performance on the bike is a little more complex than this simple summary and factor.

The desire to improve as I stated above is more complex and difficult than a desire to move forward. moving forward in life or in cycling simply requires you to put one foot in front of the other and breath. The desire to improve requires a change, or in a lot of cases many changes. It also carries a requirement to “out-perform”, or more specifically perform above and beyond expectations or what you realise you you can do. 110% is easy in conversation but extremely hard and debilitating on the wheels, but this is where your coach steps in and guides you on that road, but this blog article isn’t about that.

So even before a schedule, consultation or even you’ve decided on your coach you have to make the conscious agreement and decision that you are going to put the work in to improve. Now this statement all sounds well and good, and you’re probably thinking “common sense statement” or “stating the obvious” but its surprising how many amateur athletes do not see the gains or performance increases desired due to not conforming to their own work ethic. And this is even before you get to the training schedule and while there are no industry figures on this, when you read forum or chat group posts often you’ll see athletes moaning and griping about undesired/ill perceived or under-achieved results, but what you don’t see is why. Now I’m not going to surmise on these details, but from my experience its usually down to an athletes inability to comply to their own requirements, which are the four Tenets that consist of the contract of performance. These are:

• Hard Work
• Dedication
• Consistency
• Repetition

Now, you’re probably thinking “Wait, that’s it?!”. In life this is harder than it sounds when you take into the mix of Kids, Family, Job, illness, disruptors and all the other stuff that generally is thrown at you on a week by week basis in life and often you’ll find that two of these will fall by the wayside and the entire self serving autonomy of the four tenets will fall over. That aside let me brief on how they functionalise.

HARD WORK moulds and builds -> DEDICATION Breeds Discipline and achieves -> CONSISTENCY is built on hard work and dedication empowers -> REPETITION.

So lets further break down these 4 individual aspects into key areas I think you should focus on in order to functionalise and fulfil the requirements.

Hard Work

• Commitment and Motivation
• Shut up and Show up
• Give 100% On the workout
• Give 110% on the Recovery

Dedication

• Trust in the Plan and Trust in the journey
• When its hard, you go harder and Focus…
• 1 Interval at a time, 1 workout at a time, 1 day at a time. Keep it polarised and small.
• Hit that routine 100%.

Consistency

• Follow that schedule 100%
• Find solutions not blockers to the training plan
• Deliver 100% to the requirements of the Workout or Recovery
• Communicate with your Coach or Trainer

Repetition

• Turn up, give 100%, recover, repeat
• Did you miss a schedule? If so how can you not miss this next time…
• Can you deliver on the rest of the current or next block? What can you change to achieve 100%
• Repeat the successes, not the failures.

Its important to say that each of these sub areas outlined above are individual to myself and how I approach, but you get the idea of the level of self commitment is needed and in a lot of areas, required. Yes you’ll always find that it is impossible to hit your schedule 100% as something will inevitably will get in the way as described earlier in this article so taking these outlining sub-topics listed shouldn’t be taken with absolute literacy simply because it will provide a negative aspect of pressure and likely inevitably lead to failure. My point is to keep these in perspective and learn to use the Tenets positively, not aggressively.

That about rounds up this article on how to mindfully approach your commitment to training and the forward momentum training will move you forward to your goals. There is more details to it, of which I go into this with my clients, but this articles primary goal was to provide outline to how I approach and coach the athletes perspective.

Hope you enjoy, any questions, hit the contact form.

Kai