End of Season Reviews: Turning Data into Direction

As another season wraps up, the most valuable session you can do doesn’t involve your bike or running shoes, it’s sitting down with your coach and diving back into the data.

Too often, this part of the season gets overlooked. Athletes and coaches are often tired or burnt out from a hectic race calendar, rushing off for a well-earned break, still buzzing from a big result, or perhaps deflated that the results never came. Whatever the outcome, making time to review, reflect, and understand both the good and the bad is where the real progress happens.

Why reviews matter, avoiding the “on to the next” trap.

Reviews are an integral part of the season, for the athlete and the coach. It’s far too easy to slide straight into the next plan and push on without properly evaluating the one that just finished. Do that often enough and you end up repeating the same loop, using similar structures, and risking stagnation.

Instead, take the time to review the season holistically: look at the data, consider the outcomes, and pair those insights with your athlete’s subjective experience. It’s only then that you begin to understand what happened, what worked, what didn’t, and why. From that place of understanding you can either cement what’s working or make the deliberate changes needed to improve.

Lesson number one: don’t rush it. Be transparent with your athlete about the process, invite them in. They might want to be involved, and their perspective will often add the context the numbers don’t show.

How I Approach End-of-Year Reviews

When I build a season review for an athlete, I use a holistic process, combining data, trends, performances, and subjective feedback to form a complete picture. It’s not just about numbers on a screen; it’s about the story behind them.

1. Holistic Approach: Start with the Season Story

I always start at the very beginning. I revisit the season goals, both mine and the athlete’s notes, to remind us of what we set out to achieve. Then, I ask the simplest but most important question: Did we achieve what we set out to?

I use “we” deliberately, because coaching is a team effort, we win and we lose together. This first step helps me understand the narrative of the season and often shapes the rest of the review.

If the goal was achieved, I look at what type of goal it was, process, outcome, or physiological. That distinction helps when I start digging into the data. If the goal was missed, I ask why. Was it too ambitious? Too outcome-driven? Or was it simply out of the athlete’s control, an “uncontrollable” as we often call it in coaching? Answering these questions gives real context before we move to the metrics.

2. Data-Driven: Calling a Spade a Spade

Next comes the data. This is where the objectivity lies.

Ideally, everything’s been organised throughout the year (if not, your first note for next season should be: “Organise better.”) - we all fall foul of this at times. However, once the (organised) data is in front of you, start asking:

• What were our key principles?

• Did we hit the targets we set?

• What did the progression actually look like?

Take an example: an under-23 GC rider aiming for WorldTour level. We know what physiological benchmarks they need to reach, so we compare their power-duration profile against known data from pros. Are they closing that gap? If yes, we’re heading in the right direction. If not, we dig deeper:

• Was the training structure wrong?

• Was the athlete inconsistent or unwell for large parts of the season?

• Did we fail to provide enough stimulus at key points?

The important thing is dropping the ego. Reviews aren’t about blame, they’re about understanding. The data doesn’t lie. If an athlete didn’t hit the numbers, they simply didn’t hit them. What matters is why.

3. Trends and Anomalies: Reading Between the Lines

Once the data’s clean, I then look for trends. Are there consistent patterns that explain performance changes? Most of the time, yes, and recording these (Note 2: track recurring trends) is invaluable for planning the next season.

Trends tell us which training methods worked and which didn’t. But anomalies, missing power files, heart-rate spikes, corrupted data, require a bit more patience. Data is rarely perfect, so take the time to filter out the noise before drawing conclusions.

From here, I often focus on specific metrics, let’s use efficiency factor (EF) for example, this is the power-to-heart-rate ratio that can reflect aerobic efficiency changes. To evaluate progress, I compare EF before and after key training interventions, and across training blocks.
If the trend improves, great, our strategy worked. If it doesn’t, we ask why: was it illness? travel? environmental stress? These notes become the foundation for next season’s adjustments.

4. Subjective Notes: The Missing Piece

Alongside the data, I rely heavily on athlete feedback. Numbers can’t capture how something felt, and that’s often where the real insight lies.

Athletes’ notes about how sessions felt, how races unfolded, or how they coped with fatigue often explain patterns the data alone can’t. Maybe a bad week lines up with illness, nerves, or poor prep. Maybe “just tired” hides deeper overreaching. This context gives meaning to the numbers.

The key is consistency and openness. The more feedback athletes record, the clearer the picture becomes. And as a coach, it’s my job to make them feel comfortable sharing that honesty. If an athlete is afraid to admit they’re struggling, you’ll never get the full story.

Data without context is just numbers on a page. Data with context is understanding, and that’s what drives progress.

To Summarise

Reviewing an athlete’s season isn’t a quick task. It demands time, curiosity, and collaboration. Plan ahead so both you and your athlete have the space to reflect properly. That’s where growth happens, when you take the time to understand the season in full, identify what worked, what didn’t, and move forward together with clarity and purpose.

Common Insights That Emerge

Over the years, I’ve reviewed data from all kinds of athletes, youth riders, senior professionals, masters’ competitors, and everyone in between. What’s always struck me is how often the same themes appear. Don’t discount this pattern: the lessons repeat for a reason.

Every athlete approaches training differently. Some thrive on structure and numbers, they hit every interval, track every metric, and find motivation in precision. Others prefer a more intuitive approach, training by feel and adapting as they go. Both can work brilliantly.

What matters most is understanding which type of athlete you’re working with. Recognising these tendencies, and building your coaching style around them, is what creates the strongest relationships and most consistent progress.

And, as always, it comes back to feedback. When coach and athlete are open and honest, these traits reveal themselves quickly. That understanding lets you adapt workloads, communication, and focus to suit the person in front of you, not just the plan on paper.

Reflect. Refine. Rebuild.

If your season has just wrapped up, or is about to, now is the time to pause and reflect. Have you taken the time to look back properly? If yes, brilliant, I’m looking forward to seeing those lessons turn into even greater performances next year. But if not, ask yourself why. Maybe you’ve been too eager to jump straight into the next block, or maybe you’ve just never been guided through a full review before.

If anything in this article resonates, I’d love to hear from you. Honest conversations make us all better, athletes and coaches alike. Share your experiences, your reflections, or even what you’d like to do differently next season.

And if you’re self-coached, feeling a bit stuck, or simply want a fresh set of eyes on your data and goals, I’m here. Let’s have a chat, sometimes that’s all it takes to turn reflection into real progress.