What Their Score Doesn't Tell You

Every coach has heard it before.

"I was 30 seconds slower than last time."

"I beat my PB."

"I finished ahead of Sarah."

When a workout ends, the score is usually the first thing people talk about. That's hardly surprising. Scores are simple. They give us something to compare, celebrate and track over time. They tell us whether today's performance looked better or worse than the last one.

The problem is that a score only tells us what happened. If we want to help someone improve the next time they attempt that workout, the score alone isn't enough. We need to understand how that score was created.

Imagine two members finishing with exactly the same time.

One selected an appropriate scaling option, settled into a sustainable pace from the opening round and adjusted their strategy as fatigue began to build. They broke sets before reaching failure, maintained consistent movement quality and finished knowing they had executed the workout almost exactly as planned.

The other started aggressively, convinced themselves they could hold the pace, reached failure repeatedly and spent the second half of the workout trying to recover from decisions made in the opening minutes. Their movement became less consistent, rest periods grew longer and by the end they were simply hanging on.

The whiteboard says they performed equally.

As coaches, we know they didn't.

A workout score is an outcome, not an explanation. While the score tells us what happened, coaches improve future performance by understanding the decisions, strategies and execution that produced it.

Effective coaching goes beyond analysing scores. It focuses on understanding the decisions that influenced performance, helping members reflect on those decisions and identifying which ones should be repeated or changed next time.

Understanding the decisions behind the score

If one of those members asks how they can improve next time, the easiest response is to focus on the score.

"Let's try to go faster." But faster isn't a coaching plan.

Instead, our attention shifts to the things that influenced the result. Was the opening pace sustainable? Was the chosen weight appropriate? Did they understand the intended stimulus? Were unnecessary no-reps costing valuable time? Did they recognise when their original strategy was no longer working?

Those are the conversations that influence future performance because they focus on things that can actually change.

We can't coach last week's score.

We can only coach the choices that create next week's score.

The goal isn't simply to achieve a better result once. It's to consistently make decisions that are more likely to produce better results over time.

Helping members think like coaches

Perhaps the more interesting question is whether we should always be the ones providing those answers.

One of the long-term goals of coaching is helping members become better at evaluating their own performance. The more they understand why a workout unfolded the way it did, the better equipped they are to make good decisions the next time, whether we're standing beside them or not.

That doesn't mean abandoning feedback. It means asking better questions before giving it.

After a workout, try asking:

• What decision are you most pleased with today?

• If you repeated this workout tomorrow, what would you deliberately do the same?

• What would you change?

  
  

Those questions often reveal far more than we expect. They encourage members to connect their decisions with the outcome rather than seeing the score as something that simply happened to them.

The same principle applies everywhere

This way of thinking isn't limited to workouts or competitions.

Imagine a member wants to improve their Hyrox performance. Their rowing split is perfectly respectable, yet every time they step off the rower their running pace drops dramatically. The problem isn't the score on the rower. It's understanding how their effort on one station affects everything that follows.

The coaching plan becomes much clearer. Rather than trying to row faster, today's focus might be developing a more efficient stroke or learning to row at an intensity that allows them to maintain their running pace afterwards. The outcome improves because the decisions improve first.

Whether we're coaching a benchmark workout, a Hyrox race or a new movement, the principle is the same. Outcomes tell us where we finished. Understanding the performance tells us what to improve.

Good decisions don't always produce good outcomes

One of the easiest mistakes to make as a coach is judging the quality of a decision purely by the result it produced.

Imagine a member starts a workout far too aggressively. They hold on just long enough to set a personal best.

Did they make a good decision?

Perhaps not.

On another day, with a slightly harder workout or a little more fatigue, the same strategy might have caused them to fall apart halfway through. The outcome happened to be positive, but that doesn't necessarily make the decision a good one.

The opposite is also true. A member returning from illness might execute the workout exactly as intended. They pace well, scale appropriately and maintain excellent movement quality throughout, yet still finish with a slower score than they had hoped for.

The outcome wasn't what they wanted.

The decisions were still good.

If we only judge decisions by the score they produce, we risk reinforcing behaviours that won't consistently lead to success and overlooking decisions that absolutely will.

Great coaching looks beyond whether something worked once. It asks whether it was a decision worth repeating.

Looking beyond the whiteboard

The next time a workout finishes, don't let the conversation end at the score.

Use it as the beginning of the coaching conversation rather than the end of it. Help members understand why the workout unfolded the way it did, what they would deliberately repeat and what they would approach differently next time.

Better scores are rarely the result of simply wanting them more. More often, they are the result of making better decisions, recognising them sooner and learning from them afterwards.

The best post-workout conversations aren't about the score itself. They're about understanding the decisions that created it and identifying which ones should be repeated or changed next time.

Perhaps that's one of the most valuable things a coach can do. Not simply help someone achieve a better score, but help them become someone who increasingly understands how to create one.

Continue the conversation

If this way of thinking resonates, it is worth paying closer attention to how your coaching is landing across different members in your classes. Small shifts in how you respond can make a significant difference over time.

If you would like to explore this further, you can find more insights on coaching, communication, and coach development through the weekly Inspire Elevate Transform newsletter.

Find out more about coach, team and leadership development at Virtuous Coach Development.