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Scientific interest in pacing goes back >100 years. Contemporary interest, both as a feature of athletic competition and as a window into understanding fatigue, goes back >30 years. Pacing represents the pattern of energy use designed to produce a competitive result while managing fatigue of different origins. Pacing has been studied both against the clock and during head-to-head competition. Several models have been used to explain pacing, including the teleoanticipation model, the central governor model, the anticipatory-feedback-rating of perceived exertion model, the concept of a learned template, the affordance concept, the integrative governor theory, and as an explanation for “falling behind.” Early studies, mostly using time-trial exercise, focused on the need to manage homeostatic disturbance. More recent studies, based on head-to-head competition, have focused on an improved understanding of how psychophysiology, beyond the gestalt concept of rating of perceived exertion, can be understood as a mediator of pacing and as an explanation for falling behind. More recent approaches to pacing have focused on the elements of decision making during sport and have expanded the role of psychophysiological responses including sensory-discriminatory, affective-motivational, and cognitive-evaluative dimensions. These approaches have expanded the understanding of variations in pacing, particularly during head-to-head competition.

Coaching scholarship (CS) sits at the intersection of multiple paradigms and disciplines. Despite the eclectic nature of the field, most scholars operate only within their preferred paradigm, which limits how coaching is conceptualized and practiced. To address this limitation, we used the dialectic stance to analyze bibliometric records of CS produced between 1970 and 2020 from both an interpretivist and poststructuralist perspective. Using Web of Science, we identified 2,522 coaching articles and organized the bibliometric data into a time-ordered matrix representing five decades of CS: (a) number of publications per year, (b) country of origin, (c) institution, (d) journal, (e) author, and (f) most cited articles. Two research groups analyzed the data concurrently and independently using their respective paradigm. Next, the two groups came together to engage in dialogue and discover areas of convergence and divergence. Through the paradigmatic dialogue, the interpretivist research group realized they were operating in a postpositivist paradigm. Nevertheless, both groups determined CS was heavily influenced by Western societies, sport psychology, and the topic of motivation. The postpositivists highlighted evolutionary trends in CS, while the poststructuralists elucidated relations of power, understudied problems, and the consequences of the dominant knowledge produced.