![]() ![]() ![]() Periodic one-on-one sessions with athletes within your group can be very valuable to highlight technical issues or build a stronger connection with a specific athlete who may need a little more focused attention. While there is a desire to maximize the “density” of the interaction in one-on-one scenarios, focusing on one quality or message usually goes a long way to realizing success over an accumulation of individual sessions. ![]() In these situations, it’s extremely valuable to give the athlete space between sets and reps to digest the work they’re doing and the cues offered to them. The downside is that it becomes very easy to fill the silence with too much information and grow fond of the sound of your own voice. If you’re working with just one athlete, you can take much more time to explain technical details, field feedback from the athlete, and use rep-to-rep video review to document progress and solidify prescriptions. Knowing how to manage the individuals in your group is imperative for sustained success. If you focus too much on one or two athletes, everyone else will suffer from a lack of coaching. If you spread yourself too thin over every athlete in your group, no one person will get enough attention for appropriate feedback and prescriptive advice to allow for significant and sustainable results. Speed training is less about intensity than it is about intent and small improvements. A commanding presence isn’t about a loud voice or using the latest cue words, it’s having a grasp of how to manage athletes. And it’s your choice on how to allocate that attention in terms of when, what, how much, and how frequently. Hence, your coaching instruction must be adaptable to fit with varying group sizes and athlete types. Your jokes may be a hit in one city, but if they start missing the mark on a college campus, you have to adjust and improvise on the spot to avoid being heckled into irrelevancy.Īs a coach, you rarely work with just one athlete over an extended period of time. Just like a good stand-up comedian, you have to know your audience and plan your routine for the best responses. The comprehensive courses explore running mechanics, sprint training, return-to-play protocols, and integration of running programming for various sports and are directed at coaches, strength and conditioning specialists, and physical therapists.įor those who have not had the luxury of attending these sessions, this post summarizes some of the key issues for implementing sprint workouts. In our Running Mechanics Professional courses, which I’ve been delivering over the past year, we spend a great deal of time outlining this process. Patience comes from experience, as you have an understanding of what is likely to occur during a speed session. Coaching speed is knowing what you have for that day and where you need to go. While it’s difficult to document the mastery of coaching in one article, we can describe some basic premises around planning an individual sprint training session for coaches. ![]() I had the fortune of learning under some masterful coaches like Charlie Francis and Al Vermeil-wise individuals who had well-thought-out reasons for every rep they prescribed and every minute of recovery that separated individual runs. And this process perpetuates the disorganization and randomness of training. They simply regurgitate workouts and cross their fingers hoping that natural selection or dumb luck will make them successful. They don’t actually plan for the individuals under their charge. Rarely do coaching instructors spend hours and hours looking at every possible scenario, combination, and permutation of circumstances and identify appropriate progressions.Īnd, let’s be honest, many coaches fall back on what they did as an athlete. Even coaching certification courses offer generic examples for program planning. Unfortunately, efficacious sprint programming is not taught in a university exercise science program or-on the other side of the spectrum-YouTube videos. But they’re less prepared to integrate each element in an organized way that gets the most out of their athletes. They may have a few drills they like to use, along with some general ideas on the total volume of work. While coaches often spend a great deal of time and effort deconstructing and making sense of research, theory, and movement biomechanics, they often don’t have good information on how to plan and implement a basic speed session, let alone plan for a week, month, or year. ![]()
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