Stop Pushing, Start Listening
You’ve seen it in class - or maybe you’ve done it. A coach turns up the music, shouts louder, cues “dig deep!” or “you’ve got more in you!” to an athlete who’s clearly struggling.
They’re pale, disconnected, maybe moving in a pattern that’s off from how they usually train. They’re trying to regulate.
And you just pushed them further into survival mode.
We need to talk about overcoaching. About performance pressure masquerading as motivation. About the belief that “more effort” is always the answer - when what’s actually needed is more respect for self-awareness.
Athletes Are Not Machines
Yes, your athletes want progress.
Yes, they signed up to work hard.
But that doesn’t mean it’s your job to override their self-awareness.
Most athletes aren’t lazy.
They’re adults with full lives: jobs, children, chronic stress, emotional loads, fluctuating hormones, unpredictable sleep, and sometimes undiagnosed nervous system dysregulation.
Their bodies are sending messages that say: “Not today. Not this hard. Not right now.” And your job as a coach is to listen, not ignore.
“They Don’t Know Their Limits” - Really?
Here’s something to consider:
If your response to a tired athlete is “They’re just making excuses,” maybe you need to look at your own training biases.
Some athletes don’t know their limits - because trauma, hustle culture, or shame have trained them to ignore every signal from their body. Others know exactly where their line is, and what they need is permission to honour it.
Self-awareness is not the problem.
Your inability to hear it might be.
When Intensity Is the Only Tool, You’re Not Coaching
Some coaches are uncomfortable when athletes slow down, scale, or ask for rest. Why?
Because they’ve equated good coaching with pushing people to their edge every single session.
But true coaching isn’t about breaking people down.
It’s about building them up - strategically.
That includes:
Recognising fatigue markers
Adjusting volume or intensity on the fly
Asking how they feel before pushing
Respecting psychological and physiological feedback
Teaching that recovery is not weakness, it’s skillful training
If your athlete can't finish the workout because they checked out, you didn’t just miss a chance to push.
You missed a chance to coach.
The Cost of Chronic Overdrive
Pushing an athlete past their limit isn’t just bad for performance, it’s bad for trust, adaptation, and long-term progress. Repeatedly pushing past thresholds without respecting recovery doesn’t lead to grit. It leads to:
Allostatic overload (McEwen & Gianaros, 2011): when the stress response system can no longer reset
Impaired learning and performance adaptation (Clark, 2013)
Emotional exhaustion and shame-based training patterns
Increased risk of injury and longer recovery windows
Athletes don’t always know how to recognise this—especially if they’ve been trained to override their own signals. They often rely on the coach to help them differentiate between challenge and threat.
If you treat every internal pause as an excuse, you’re teaching them to disconnect from their own body.
Real Progress: What It Actually Looks Like
Progress isn’t just higher numbers or redline effort. It includes:
Motor stability under moderate fatigue
Faster recovery of attention and breath
The ability to auto-regulate pacing based on readiness
Reduced emotional volatility under pressure
Scaling and intensity modulation without shame
These are signs of a regulated system, not a soft one. And they make athletes more consistent, not less.
Motivation, Autonomy, and Misattuned Coaching
Many coaches unknowingly sabotage intrinsic motivation - the kind linked to curiosity, competence, and joy - by over-relying on pressure, praise, and intensity.
Self-determination theory (Ryan & Deci, 2000) outlines three basic needs that support sustainable motivation:
Autonomy - feeling ownership over training decisions
Competence - feeling effective in one’s environment
Relatedness - feeling safe and understood by others
When a coach pushes an athlete past their signals, they undermine all three. What replaces motivation is performance anxiety, detachment, and guilt.
And the athlete doesn’t leave feeling strong. They leave wondering if something is wrong with them.
What Coaches Can Do Instead
Track thresholds: Learn to recognise signs of CNS dysregulation (e.g., blank stares, disorganised movement, emotional swings).
Listen before pushing: Ask questions like, “How are you today?”, “Anything feel off?”, “Want to go for quality over volume?”
Allow pacing variability: Let athletes modulate pace based on internal cues. This builds interoceptive awareness and long-term autonomy.
Language matters: Reframe intensity as one tool, not the gold standard. Say, “Today can be about sharp movement, not maximal effort.”
When you create psychological and physiological safety, athletes learn better, adapt faster, and stick around longer.
Final Thought: Strength Isn’t About Override
Your job isn’t to get the most out of people. It’s to help them stay inside the zone where adaptation happens.
That requires respect - for physiology, for individual capacity, and for the athlete’s lived experience.
Because the best athletes don’t go hard all the time. They go smart. And the best coaches? They know when not to push.
References
McEwen, B. S., & Gianaros, P. J. (2011). Stress- and allostasis-induced brain plasticity. Annual Review of Medicine, 62, 431–445.
Thayer, J. F., Åhs, F., Fredrikson, M., Sollers, J. J., & Wager, T. D. (2012). A meta-analysis of heart rate variability and neuroimaging studies. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 36(2), 747–756.
Arnsten, A. F. T. (2009). Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 410–422.
Clark, A. (2013). Predictive brains and the future of cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36(3), 181–204.
Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78.