THREE IMPORTANT THINGS AS A COACH
It is easy to think that to be a great coach, the most significant priorities are getting a certification, writing structured training plans, and delivering well-structured sessions.
While those can indeed be excellent foundations, they are not the only vital things for a great Coach. For me, the following three aspects are paramount as a Coach:
COACH THE PERSON AND NOT THE ATHLETE.
You can be the Coach with more knowledge and the best ideas for their training plan, but athletes won’t care about that until they feel you genuinely care about them.
Athletes have a life outside of the training or sport environment. They have jobs, they study, they have kids or have time-consuming relationships. If we want to get the most out of athletes, we need to include training in their lives with a degree of flexibility and not simply “force” training into their lives. If they have a busy week at work, maybe we can reduce the training volume for that week. If they have exams in school, perhaps they need the weekend to study. If their kids are off from school, maybe we can have the athlete training at home for X number of days during that week. If they are very stressed at work, perhaps we can have a phone call offering solutions to help manage the stress levels (as training alone is physical stress). The best training plans are not rigid - they are flexible to make sure we make the most out of the athletes. When athletes feel that we listen to them and allow them to take a step back to embrace more training hours or more dedication in training for any reason, they will be much more willing to do so.
EDUCATE ATHLETES.
Fitness participants train 2 or 3 times a week most of the time, come in and out of the gym in a hurry and want to have fun, be a bit stronger, be a bit faster and learn new skills. Educating them is not a priority, and the majority is unwilling to listen. Sometimes, we see Trainers meaning well and explaining the names of all muscles or how important is “supercompensation”, and the clients switch off completely, thinking “I only have 20 min left of my session. Can we please crack on with some training????”
The opposite happens in a sports scenario. The more we educate athletes on why and how they should do exercises, the goals of such exercises, the order of the training plan, or even why and when we manipulate intensity or training volume, the more the athletes will understand and respect what we are doing. Educating athletes creates bulletproof communication so they respect their horizontal and vertical training plan, their RPE or training percentages, or even change their attitude when doing tedious accessory work. Having the Coach share knowledge with athletes will make them trust the Coach more, respect the work and allow them to read the training prescription through the Coach’s eyes.
KEEP LEARNING.
Like many other professional areas, the sports science world is not static. Things keep changing, and what was once a strategy to benefit athletes is now a discarded strategy. Studying, learning, or sharing knowledge and information with fellow Coaches will turn into confidence. Coaches who often “get it right” are Coaches who keep observing, studying, and adapting their prescriptions/coaching methods to the new information that they get from books, courses or more experienced Coaches.
When you acquire new information, it will rarely make you change your work dramatically. There is no need to reinvent the wheel, and there are no secret “recipes” or magic training programs. Moving a Coach’s work from good to great often comes down to implementing his knowledge. There is no point in knowing a lot of theory if the Coach doesn’t actually implement what they know.
Am I missing any essential point here? Let’s chat about it: message me here.
