Working with your coach

This post is a continuation from the 2010 December post, "the role of the coach."  In the December post I talked about how important it is for the athlete to use their coach as a tool in their learning process, but I didn't comment on how one goes about doing this.  This post will focus on an example of how to use the coach as a tool.  It is very challenging for anyone to detect and correct any skier who has very well developed technical skills.  For example if you watch the skiers in the video below, each one has a slightly different technical recipe.  It is very difficult to specifically identify what each one is doing differently, much less how to make their skiing better.  Another issue when making a change in a skier's technique is how the coach is defining "better."  One could define "better" in a number of different ways.  "better could mean faster, more efficient, more controlled, more synchronous or just "look better."  The video below shows technical skiers from the international ski team.  These skiers represent the best "free" technical skiers of 2010.  This will give you an idea of how difficult it is to spot the technical differences between really advanced skiers.

In the above video you may be able to describe what the difference from a "what it looks like" perspective, but what is more challenging is tell what each skier is doing differently with their body to create the difference.  What wpuld also challenging to do is to give them a correction, something they have to do different with their body to make a desired change.  Even the desired change itself may also not necessarily make the skier's skiing "better," because one has to also define what is meant by "better."  For this reason it is a challenge for any coach to "help" their athlete develop their skills.  Now let's look at this issue from the perspective of the athlete.  After watching you ski, your coach may want to give you feedback.  Different coaches have different approaches to how the feedback is delivered.  The most common approach is to identify something you are "doing wrong'" and give you something to do to correct it.  The first thing you have to do as the athlete is to separate this feedback into two parts.  The first part being what you are "doing wrong."  Having a coach is like having your own person video camera taping you as you ski.  So when they describe what you are "doing wrong,"  ask them to describe what it looks like you are doing.  This will give you more insight into what you are doing from a technical perspective.  The next thing I would do is write the description down somewhere for future reference.  I suggest that you keep some kind of a logbook.  After that I would work with the second part of the feedback.  When the coach gives you the feedback, I would ask the coach how the correction will change your skiing technically.  It is important that you understand what the correction will do to change your technique.  I would also ask the coach how the change will make you ski differently from a "better" perspective.  It is also important that you understand the direction your coach wants you go in with respect to your technical and tactical skiing.  For example your coach might be initiating a change that might make you ski faster, however an increase in speed might might make it more difficult for you to maintain control and stay on line in a course.  This example highlights the issues around making a skier's skiing "better." Let's now look at example of how you might use this approach with your coach. First we will view the video below as an example.

I chose the above video because the skier in this video has very advanced taechnical and tactical skills, and therefore it is very challenging to do a detection and correction on this skier.  If i were this skiers coach, my goal would most likely be to give this skier feedback to make them skier faster.  I choose this focus because this skier already skiis with good control and rhythm, and speed management skills don't seem to be a weakness for this skier.  It is important to note though that free skiing is different than skiing in a course.  It is necessary for the coach to also assess this skier in course as well, to get an ideal picture of this skier's strengths and weaknesses.  Ok let's  look at what could be done to get this skier to ski faster.  From a coach's perspective you might be able to identify that the skier takes a tactical approach of controling speed as opposed to generating speed with each turn.  It "looks like" the skier is generating speed in the beginning of the turn and then putting on the breaks at the end of the turn.  The overall effect being that the skier ends up maintaining a consistant speed as they descend down the hill.  This speed is probably the speed they feel comfortable traveling at, with respect to their ability to stay with the gravitational forces as they descend down the ski slope.  The problem with this skier's approach is that in racing it is ideal to be able to generate speed at the beginning of the turn, and accelerate out of each turn if at all possible.  This will result in the skier increasing their speed as they descend the ski slope until maximum skiing speed is reached.  It is important to note that the skier does need to know how to put on the breaks at the end of a turn, like this skier demonstrates, however in ski racing the skier spends more time accelerating than decelerating.  What the coach will probably want to tell this skier is to get them to ski faster is to use more edging and less pivoting when making their direction changes.  To do this, they would probably tell them to "try making their turns without pivoting the feet."  They might even show them how to edge the skiis through more inclination and angulation.  You can probably start to see where the problems are going to start to occur for this skier given this feedback.  One of the problems being that if the skier is used to managing their speed through pivoting, removing the pivoting might cause some issues with speed management, not necessarily making this skier's skiing "better."  I won't go into detail how I would change this skier's skiing from a technical and tactical perspective, because this skier isn't necessarily a racer and therefore does not change their skiing.  I just wanted to use this example to help describe how to use your coach as a tool.  This feedback is valuable to the athlete, however it would be important in this case for the athlete to know what the coach is thinking in as much detail as possible.  This is so that the athlete is able to understand what direction the coach wants them to go in from a technical and tactical perspective.