Since I’ve left West Point, 90% of the people I train are trained by correspondence. In other words, we live in 2 separate places and they receive their workouts and other necessary information via email, phone, IM, or text. In fact, every one on the HPC Elite team was trained this way for most of last year. This isn’t new to me though. I’ve been training people like this for almost 7 years now. And while it isn’t ideal, it can work. Here’s some tips from things I’ve learned on how to make correspondence training the best possible experience for your athlete. A lot of these are the result of mistakes I made early on that were valuable learning experiences to me.
- Communicate often
- Make sure you and the athlete recognize that the plan is a road map
- Don’t plan too far in advance
- Use video reviews for technical activities
- Do some pre-testing with new athletes
- Be flexible
- Individualize the training plan and don’t be afraid to tweak it when necessary
I’ll expand on some of these if there’s an interest. If you’re interested post to comments.
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August 18, 2008
Anything the athlete can do to make your job easier?
August 21, 2008
As long as the communication is adequate and the athlete isn’t hard headed about plowing through periods of fatigue instead of telling me so a change can be made I think the rest is up to the coach.
August 26, 2008
Mike,
As a former college coach, I feel your pain in coaching others via phone and email. I can’t agree with you more about the seven things you listed. To me it is 100 times more difficult to coach and not be there all the time. The hardest problem for me is gettiing athletes to be completely honest about recovery. Take care
February 27, 2010
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