Staying Fit at Home. Is the Coach Making Any Sense?

In recent weeks, due to the stay at home orders and the lock-downs imposed by the authorities, training has been severely hampered and in most cases suspended. The creative coaches and trainers have kept some of their charges engaged through modified workouts based on the resources the athlete has access to at home. What are the objectives of the virtual training sessions? Are they really effective? Does it make sense to do any of that seeing that it does not resemble the normal training session? #AskingForAFriend.  How does a team sport maintain itself in this isolated and dispersed reality in the midst of the virtual divide? Those are important questions that the novice might gloss over.

Interestingly, an organized training session is deliberate in its design. Each session has a theme and a specific objective. In  most cases, this is unknown to the athlete but front and center in the mind of the coach/trainer. The objectives are tied to a fitness component for which the intention is for the body to adapt and therefore improve in that specific component. It is the improvement in the various components that affect how fit the athlete or player is. The fitness components include things like Strength, Power, Flexibility, Mobility, Balance, Agility, Endurance, Speed, Quickness, and Coordination among others. Many of those can be divided into sub-themes for example strength could be maximal strength, elastic strength, core strength etc.The coach/trainer can then specify specific exercises or activities to achieve the specific fitness component.

Many of the components can be developed with limited or no supervision if the athlete/player follows the workout as designed even without any assistance and certainly in the virtual world. This is where the homework aspect of training becomes useful and effective. The very technical stuff, which may require immediate visual feedback to maximize the skill, can be avoided as a training objective, based on the skill level and experience of the athlete/player. It is also important to make the clear distinction between skill development and fitness development. We know for sure that an athlete/player’s technical ability is affected in a major way, by their fitness level and therefore using the lock-down to develop the fitness level is a great strategy in making them technically better when the team training sessions resumes.

Teams also have to be creative. Many of the players get motivated to give a good effort in training because of the physical presence of a team mate who pushes them. The squad effect should never be downplayed. But in the absence of being in the same physical space the coach/trainer should know who those players are and find ways of incorporating some activity that incorporates the squad or a subset of it.  Online group workouts, the pushup challenge, and juggling challenge are a dime a dozen. It may turn out to be more work for the coach but it is surgical work.

Selecting the components to develop virtually is the job of the thoughtful coach, and with a committed and disciplined athlete or player a lot can be accomplished in the lock-down. It will require some amount of individualization of the training program for each of them knowing that there is variation in what they have access to. One may live on the hill, another is just walking distance from the beach, while your best athlete/player may have a 20 ft x 10 ft verandah or porch.  Not being able to train as one is accustomed to should not be a reason not to train any at all. Grab that mop stick, the 2 cans of beans, the cinder block, the skipping rope and LET’S GO!

If you need more information and some expert guidance on this and all your other performance factors then feel free to contact us at performance@techniquelab.com.

David Riley
Performance Coach
World Athletics Level 3 Academy Coach