Hi All,

to make it easier for athletes to consider Synergie Coaching, thought I’d do a breakdown on how we can support you.

If thinking about spending your money on a coach, remember that you are the customer, so shop around. Coaches don’t tend to get Google Reviews, etc. so have 4-5 questions prepared that are key to your goals and interview a number of coaches. Get a feel for who you think you can work with.

If we were your chosen coaches then it is a matter of sitting down and talking about your races, which ones are the biggies and what you want to focus on. From that we can do a bit of data mining to see what sort of times have proved succesful on those courses, as well as looking at the course profiles.

Next it would be a matter of establishing where you are physically and comparing that to what good looks like in your Sports Class.

Before coming to see us there would be a number of at home assessments we would ask for.

All are depending upon your self-reported fitness & injury status. So ideally –

1. Critical Swim Speed assessment – ideally done at your regular pool. From this we can work out your current velocity.

2. FTP – done on your own equipment. Gives us an indication of current paces, power, heart rate, cadence.

3. Run assessment – 5 x 1km repeats with a like for like effort:recovery, so if it took 4 mins to run 1km, you get 4 minutes rest.

You would then come to ours to undertake a number of assessments.

1. You would go through a series of mobility & strength assessments to see how well you move and what your limiters currently are. This takes around 90 mins and can be more mentally fatiguing than physically. You get a report from this

2. After a short recovery you would go on the swim bench, completing 3 x 200m swims. First one both arms, 2nd one right arm only, 3rd one left arm only. That will gives us your freely chosen cadence, 200m time and L/R arm power.

3. From that we go into the endless pool where you wear an accelerometer (https://www.incusperformance.com) so we can measure your body positions head to toe & side to side. You are also video’d from the front, side, rear and above. You get a copy of the vid and our comments based on what we have observed, measured and training suggestions.

4. FTP on the Wattbike after the swim for comparison. Looking here to see what effect a light swim session has on your power output and how they compare when done solo, as opposed to having a coach on your shoulder.

These gives us a great insight into where you currently are and the training zones that we can set to work on different objectives as you work towards your race goals.

From the assessments we know your strengths and where the gaps are, so it then becomes that conversation around what is important to you in the short & medium terms.

Other Admin

You get a premium Training Peaks (TP) account included in your month fees and unlimited access to us via WhatsApp, email, call – however you prefer to communicate. As a minimum we expect to be filling in TP every 48 hours and not just with data but also with how you felt during the session. We tend to only set 7-10 days training schedule on TP, as real life kicks in and expect to speak to you at least once a week.

That gives a brief overview of how we work, we only work with 8-10 athletes per year, so if you fancy a chat or a new challenge, ping us an email on scott@synergiecoaching.com or di@synergiecoaching.com