Performance Coaching – How to Prepare Athletes for Best Performance
Sports competition is a fantastic field in health and fitness, while the significant stakeholders are performance coaching experts. These experts are responsible for imparting skills and knowledge to the appropriate quarters, in this case, the Athlete or performer. At the end of the day, performance coaches have the rare privilege of building a champion out of an ordinary but talented amateur athlete.
Furthermore, over the years, sports and related competitions continue to evolve and thrive at the same time. It is gradually becoming more organized while growing intimacy between trainers and trainees with an already established system of building athletes to reach their full potential and achieve incredible feats.
On the other hand, official licensing boards of coaching institutions also upgrade the coaching education system to accommodate workable strategies that produce the best results in this age and time. Dr. Thomas P. Rosandich described what he called the American Training Patterns on physical components: speed, skill, stamina, strength, and suppleness (flexibility).
What each person now does is combine these attributes to bring the best out of the trainees. By the way, the performance coach’s creativity will become evident in the intelligent combination of the methods and attributes. This article will examine a comprehensive way of perceiving how a coach can help an athlete reach his best performance.
What do high-performance coaches do?
High-performance coaches use an integrated approach to combine all physical, emotional, psychological, and mental skills. Often times, some people assume this category of coaches only deals with elite athletes. However, these professional coaches can work with all athletes or performers to attain their performance’s best level.
Coaching does not only apply to only individual athletes but also a group of athletes as a team. Typical knowledge areas for professional athletes include physiology, psychology, and kinesiology. A coach and trainee’s relationship may be similar to a teacher to student, a mentor to mentee, a leader to follower, a master to apprentice, and others.
In the overlap of health and fitness, these performance coaches may work alongside physiotherapists, dieticians, and nutritionists. Besides the basic training schedule, great coaches go the extra mile of providing superior equipment and resources that enhance the athletes’ performance level.
Significant areas of Athlete Preparation
The effectiveness of an athlete’s Preparation depends on the handling of the performance coach or trainer. Also, there are excellent focus areas that demand skills from the professional coach to help the Athlete. Basically, the most recent trends allow room to develop leadership and communication skills. Some of these areas have been itemized below:
1. Communication
Performance coaching demands that coaches are effective communicators, which involves clarity, conciseness, precision, and non-ambiguity. Like teaching, communication is a practical part of a coach’s success who conveys his mind to his athletes’ team.
By definition, communication involves two or more separate entities sharing or exchanging messages through a commonly understandable code through one or more channels. Besides, all parties must comprehend the employed communication style in use.
Some advanced research even supported that effective communication is a critical element of a team or coach’s success. Coaching without effective communication is like playing basketball without the ball. Apart from communication from the coach to the team, team members must also learn to exchange information to build more cohesion.
2. Nutrition
Performance coaching and nutrition are two inseparable entities because performance enhancement hinges largely on energy supply in physical terms. Therefore, without the right diet in adequate proportion, the Athlete may never reach his full potential. Other adverse effects that inadequate nutrition can cause include slow or lack of recovery and weakness due to depleted energy.
Sports nutrition has also become deepened in research as more studies have analyzed the content of all classes of food available for the experts. The days are gone when it is difficult to tell which specific nutrient lacks an athlete’s diet. These are the days where virtually every essential nutrient can be modified to suit more specific needs.
3. Risk management
Part of a coach’s duty is to minimize the risk associate with team management while pursuing the team success. At times, he must take reasonable precautions to especially when dealing with unique individuals with unique needs in the same team. Also, one of the areas of risk management involves the welfare and health of team members.
Whereas risk cannot be eliminated entirely but can be reduced to the barest minimum. Simultaneously, all involved stakeholders must endeavor to invest the effort to monitor all aspects and identify risks. After identification, there must also be efforts to mitigate those risks. Another area of possible risk has to do with facility and equipment use. Physical exercises require energy and a significant time with this equipment or before results begin to emerge.
4. Injury prevention
Injury is one central area of risk when athletics play out as a competition. In other words, the co-participation demands that each team or individual participant must make extra effort to outperform the others. This additional physical activity also increases the risk of sports injury. As a result of this risk, all performance coaches should know first aid care response.
Also, as the team implements the coach’s instructions, they find technical ways of optimum performance without a compromise. These kinds of movements that may sometimes include acceleration, deceleration, or direction affect injury risk. Apart from the sole body use, external forces such as body contacts and checks may also determine the frequency and risk of injury in some sports competitions and preparations.
5. Goal setting
Goal setting in performance coaching should probably be at the top of this list. As the last item, too, it also connotes care and diligent study to apply it productively. Before the journey begins, all parties should be clear about the goals and the precise way to achieve them. All parties must also understand each team member’s specific duties and produce enough drive and desire to execute them.
At times, performance coaches may use motivational techniques to communicate their points and establish their ideas. But on the road to success, the coach must also enhance the Athlete to build the required skills towards mastery and optimum performance. Furthermore, goal setting has been efficient in promoting perseverance, commitment, dedication, and self-motivation towards achieving the goal.
Conclusion
In conclusion, performance coaching encompasses the procedure that athletes need to follow to be great. And on the part of the coaches, there must be a refined passion, motivation, and other leadership skills to spur and support their athletes to push harder until they become the best version of themselves. Good luck!
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