The Three Levels of Athletic Intelligence to Consider

1. The ability to cue into your body’s sensations in line with effort, conditions, pace, power and speed. The ability to adjust as necessary based on body cues and feedback. This can be developed through the help of pace clocks, power meters, watches, measured tracks, heart rate monitors  and other useful tools. Learning body sensations at certain efforts and paces helps an athlete build confidence in their ability to read what they are feeling for. Some athletes experience fear as they learn to push through barriers. More commonly, athletes take time to develop pacing at the sub-maximal efforts for sustained periods and the ability to adjust based on conditions and fatigue levels going in.

2. The awareness of your body in space. This segment is the athletes' ability to know where their body is in space, make technical corrections to be more efficient and feel for how to change technique to get more speed, power, etc for their effort. For athletes that struggle to develop this, video can be helpful. Seeing what they are doing, seeing a video of what it is meant to look like and then aiming to feel the changes. Some athletes learn this through mimicking more advanced athletes who are technically very correct and aiming to mirror them. Seeing yourself in a mirror can also be helpful for athletes struggling to develop this feel.

3. The ability to separate emotion from decision-making in the crucial points of races or training sessions. Less experienced athletes often react to emotion, impacting their decision-making and sending them in the wrong direction. This skill is often developed as an athlete matures. "Think before reacting" is a good cue for athletes learning this. You can help your athlete develop this skill by putting them in several different circumstances that challenge their decision-making. Through success and failure, the athlete learns more to separate emotion from their decision making for performance or even gearing emotion correctly to fuel their success.

Some athletes come by these more naturally, some need to take time to develop. All of it can be learned through practice and experience with a good training program and coaching.