It is hard for the athlete to make a decision when to press through, or to decide when to back off of training. It is one of the roles of the coach to help your athletes make the best decisions concerning their training.

• Make it a habit to ask your athletes how they are feeling and listen to their answers. Simple as this may sound, many athletes simply have not given much thought to how they feel until the feeling cannot be ignored. Helping your athletes to focus more regularly on their physical and emotional symptoms will hone their self-awareness and their ability to detect symptoms more quickly.

• Encourage your athletes to keep a regular training journal. Elite athletes across sports agree, regular use of logbooks or journals can greatly increase self-awareness and smarter training. Dietary intake, sleep quality, resting heart rate, physical and emotional well-being, as well as workout quality can all be useful information when assessing for the possibility of overtraining.

• Systematically evaluate athlete performances. For many athletes, their competitive performance analysis consists of the knowledge of whether they won or lost. Helping them to understand the process that went into the outcome, including fatigue, emotions, execution or strategy can be helpful in its own right to give athletes an increased sense of control over their performances, as well as connect training quality and performance. It can also help them answer the important question of whether they were adequately recovered, or optimally trained for the competition in question.