If you’ve seen the movie Groundhog Day, you’ll know the setup.

Bill Murray’s character wakes up to the same song, the same jokes, the same day… over and over again. At first it’s amusing. Then it’s annoying. Then, punishing.

I reckon June 29th is Groundhog Day for winter sports here in Down Under. It’s around this time of the season, each season, a lot of you and your players quietly start living your own version of Groundhog Day.

Nothing’s wrong. But nothing feels very new either. It’s the same trainings, on the same days. It might not be:

but it’s probably

It’s training design that’s led to boreout.

Boreout (legitimately a psychological term) is what happens when the work keeps coming (e.g. we still have to train twice a week), but the environment plateaus. The weeks start blending together because we’re in the rhythm of the season. Everyone’s busy. But potentially everyone’s unchallenged too. You might describe it like ‘everyone’s just a bit… flat’. And the tricky thing with boreout is that it often hides inside good routines. Good routines from good, consistent training design. But, consistent training design can be a strength as well as a weakness.

A great coach gets the most learning and preparation out of every training session, and that starts with how the session is designed. Structure and routine are central to this. When players know what to expect, they can give their full energy and focus to the work in front of them, with no surprises pulling their attention elsewhere. This is why I believe consistency to be one of the most underrated skills a coach can master.

But consistency is a double-edged sword. The same structure that frees players up to focus can, left unchecked, tip into predictability. Predictability can put players on autopilot. Training design is exactly where groundhog day creeps in if you're not paying attention. The job isn't choosing between repetition and novelty. It's building enough consistency that players feel secure, while staying alert to the moment it tips into predictability.

Autopilot is when your players know:

They're still training, still sweating. But just ticking boxes; not needing to think hard, not needing to engage. That's when groundhog day takes hold. The problem isn't repetition. We need it. But repetition without variation, curiosity, or challenge can slowly drain energy from the environment.

In the movie, Phil (Bill Murray's character) tries everything to escape the day:

What finally changes things isn’t a new day. It’s how he uses the same one. That’s the lens for training design and how it can help prevent Groundhog Day in your environment. This isn’t about rewriting your programme or throwing chaos at the group. A better way to think about this is, it’s about adding small twists that wake people up. Training through the plateau’s that long seasons give us is actually a skill. But it only works if we help players stay mentally present, not just physically involved.

In Groundhog Day, the day only changes when Phil stops waiting for something different, and starts doing something different inside the same structure. That’s the coaching challenge at this time of year. Not more volume. Not more intensity. Just more thoughtful design. A small tweak here. A different question there. A little curiosity injected into a familiar space.

Enough to make people look up and say

“This is different!”

The fix isn't to throw structure out. It's to treat your training design the way you'd treat any system that works: protect what makes it reliable, and stay alert to what makes it stale. Build the consistency players need to trust the environment. Then go looking for the small moments where that trust has quietly turned into autopilot. If you can get that right, then you’re breaking the groundhog day loop and, and using thoughtful design to turn your training into a competitive edge.

"It's a nine-month season. ... This is every single day for seven, eight, nine months depending on how your team does. And so everything gets pretty monotonous. I think you've got to do your best in the NBA to keep things light and loose and occasionally throw the team a curveball”

Steve Kerr, after stepping back during a game and letting his players coach themselves.

The constraints collective is a great resource for anything related to great training design. In this episode, stay to the end for a good conversation around warm ups, and how a bit of thoughtful design in that space can be really helpful with player performance.

It’s also a great listen in understanding the concept of momentum in sports, but from a different lens than you may have considered:

Want to talk any of this through, or work with us directly? [email protected] is the way in.

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