Effective Triathlon Coaching in the 21st Century

If you’re a triathlon coach, you will probably be one of the first people to point out that effective triathlon coaching was a challenge even before this pandemic hit the world. Getting everybody together, to schedule training and other sorts of meet ups was always a nightmare, as everybody is busy. Unless you are a professional coach for a professional team, everyone has jobs, family lives, personal lives and often academic lives to tend to.

So, triathlon coaching was always a nightmare, and it has taken this pandemic to make a lot of people realize that certain technologies can make this easier. Now, let me state in no uncertain terms that while this pandemic has forced the hands of a lot of people in the sense of adopting new technologies, that doesn’t make this pandemic a good thing, as the loss of lives and, to a lesser degree, money that has come about from this does not justify. However, we can at least learn things from this pandemic, such as, among other things, wash your darn hands. But, aside from that, we can learn that there are better ways to do things. We no longer need to go to an office every day to do our job, we don’t need to go to a school to learn, and we don’t need to meet up in person to train together.

The massive boom in technology over the past 30 years, accelerated at an extreme rate over the past year especially, has made it possible to perform effective triathlon coaching without even being in the same room as any of your athletes. You would think this would be a challenge, and it will be a challenge on a mental level, because you have to change your practices yourself, but the technology involved in this makes it all rather easy to achieve.

Here’s all you need…

Seriously, all you need is for your athletes to have a fairly recent smart phone, a data plan with good reception, a platform like zoom or discord, and maybe an affordable little smart watch the can do biometric reading. Through this, everybody can either train in real time together, or record their exercise routines along with their biometric data, and share it over that platform. You can give them input, direct them, help them through difficult times, and if you still want to have competitions like bike races or track races to train, you can do this virtually through various applications that can take that biometric data and determine who would have one over that same amount of space and distance.

With this sort of semi-parallel approach, you no longer have to battle schedules, and during this pandemic, you no longer have to worry about things like Jim’s where you have to try to do aerobic exercise with a mask on your face (good luck with that one), and so forth. So, not only is this a safe and responsible way to handle being a triathlon coach right now, but it is a far more efficient way to do it even when it is safe to meet up again. Down the line, when this horrible pandemic is over and the quarantine is no longer necessary, the occasional meet up is still a good idea, as that physical social interaction is good for morale in teambuilding. However, it can be an occasional thing, not a thing that has to be done every time you want your athletes to train. Yes, in the long run, this is making your life easier as a coach!

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Created on Mar 15th 2021 03:50. Viewed 105 times.

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