Great coaches are not always known for being the best with e-mail, scheduling, and calendars.

I’d had an intermittent e-mail thread going with Phil Mansfield and James Jowsey about scheduling a podcast or webinar for several weeks – but we’d never managed to nail down a time. Travel schedules for competitions like the Dubai CrossFit Championship and Wodapalooza – as well as time differences between the United States and Europe – impeded our progress in getting something scheduled.

For those who don’t know, Phil is a multi-disciplinary coach with a history competing and/or coaching in rugby, cycling, swimming, triathlon and more. In the CrossFit world, he is best known as the coach to multi-time CrossFit Games podium finisher Sara Sigmundsdottir.

But, sitting in the lounge at the Intercontinental Hotel across the street from Bayfront Park at Wodapalooza, I saw Phil walking past and shouted him down.

Rather than re-entering the chaotic fray of attempting to align international calendars, we picked a time early the next morning to do a recorded, audio discussion on coaching.

We snuck into a conference room that we didn’t belong in, and had a great discussion on Phil’s perspectives on building mental toughness in athletes and how to rebuild athletes who have been “fast-tracked” and skipped key stages of development.

Check out the full conversation with Phil to learn:

  • How pretty much all training can be broken down into two categories – skill acquisition training and threshold training – and how he find the appropriate balance between each
  • How athletes can back off from focusing on their immediate training results and detach their identity from their results so that they can focus on getting better long-term
  • His best trick and exercise for teaching mental toughness and self-awareness in competition – and how he progresses athletes from developing the capacity for self-reflection to being able to apply this skill on the competition floor

Listen below – or in the podcast player of your choice.

Listen Here

Check out more from Phil and RedPill Training

Show Notes

  • [00:14] A proper coffee
  • [01:34] What are the consequences of fast tracking an athlete – and having someone who is very good in sport but who has skipped steps during athletic development?
  • [06:04] Almost all training can be broken down to either working on skill acquisition or threshold training.
  • [09:51] How to find the appropriate amount of variation in skill acquisition training. “Once we say ‘for time’ everything changes.”
  • [20:49] How do you convince an athlete to potentially back off and focus on rebuilding if they’ve “skipped steps” in their development?
  • [33:18] The value of mindset coaching in competitive sport – and where a lot of people go wrong with their approach to mental toughness.
  • [44:04] How do you help athletes create organization and structure for their thoughts? And how do you translate practicing meta-cognition into training and competing?

Links and Resources Mentioned