Coaching Best Practices

Performance Improvement

One of the most important things to be conscious of is that performance improvement is a long term process. Sticking with something long term is hard. Motivation and dedication are the two key words and both of these can ebb and flow over time.

Many training best practices boil down to techniques to keeping motivation high and remaining dedicated. Below are the key steps that help a student stick to the long term process:

• Goals - Clearly defined and measurable goals are so important and so easy to skip over. Goals are a huge motivator - seeing yourself progressing towards the goal makes all your efforts feel worth while. Goals need to be specific! A well defined goal looks like “I want to achieve Diamond rank in Valorant by June this year” and a poorly defined goal is “I want to get better at Valorant”. With a well defined goal a coach & student can discuss if they believe it’s achievable and then make an action plan for getting there.
• Training Regime - Once a goal is set there needs to be a training regime to achieve it. Identify key areas for improvement then make a schedule of training and activity to improve. Having a clearly defined training regime every day means a student is far more likely to stick to it, complete their set exercises and start seeing improvements - this is where the dedication comes in. If there is no plan then there is no student accountability and it’s so easy to slip out of the habit of training.
• Measurement & Results - Seeing improvement is such a motivation boost and you can do this by measuring your training and seeing improvements over time. Add all these individual improvements up and you should start seeing movements towards your main training goal
• Feedback - Regular check-ins on form, technique & performance are essential. A student shouldn’t mindlessly be repeating exercises. Instead they should be constantly thinking and refining their technique. VOD reviews and technique sessions are a great way to achieve this.

Student / Coach Relationship

The relationship between a student and a coach can be enhanced by a number of factors.

Communication - Both parties having good communication is helpful and it’s on the coach to lead this. Communication is a soft skill which everyone should develop but having the right communication channels and technology facilitates good communication. Having regular meetings scheduled in, having the right channels available - be it chat, discord, phone, in person and having all your communication history to hand will smooth out the whole process. Coachable does all this for you!

Clarity - How can a student practice something if they don’t know how to do it? The coach should provide materials explaining how to perform an exercise. Coachable provides a rich content system so that coaches can explain techniques with text, videos, images, links, comments and hints & tips. Coachable also provides an extensive free library which coaches can pick and choose from.

Notes & History - A coach needs to keep on top of everything they know about a student, everything they have asked a student to practise and everything they’ve discussed with each other. Realistically few coaches are going to be able to simply remember this for each of their students, so it’s down to note taking and filing. Boring! Coachable does all this for the coach. As you’re using Coachable to run your coaching business everything you do with a student will be recorded and accessible via a few clicks.