25 COACHING TIPS FROM 25 COACHES

Below you'll find 25 tips from 25 coaches from all different sports and area's of life of which I've tried to link to their socials so you can give them a follow if you desire. 

I'm sure you can easily put half of these into action in your very first training session for 2021.

1. Culture (Daniel Abrahams) – award points for idea's and extra points for idea’s executed to incentivize ambition and also try to seperate the outcome from the process where a pass might be intercepted but it was still the right pass to make, rewarding the process irrespective of outcome
2. Skill Level (Steve Magness) – determines what possibilities for action you perceive in your environment and with greater skill level and variability, the more choices you have to act on
3. Chess and Sport (Fergus Connolly) – Chess makes you think beyond the first step and can also be reactionary to other moves in real time where you always need to consider other person’s intentions while thinking of long term outcomes and the final end game
4. Differential Learning (Tim Buszard) – refers to practive where you explore as many movement solutions as possible regardless of how impractical they might seem, exploring the limits of your capabilities which harnesses creativity
5. Leaders in Decision Making (Ed Smith) – decision makers often shy away from risk when the odds are against them, playing it safe to lose conventially but if you want to be differnet/better you have to bear the risk of being differnet and worse
6. Coaching (Rafa Benitez) – in his 1st session he told the squad to start running around the pitch but called them back after 20m and then said "Next time I ask you to do something, ask me why"
7. Learning (Mark Enser) – leads to motivation, not the other way around so provide an initial taste of success, avoid overload, scaffold to success, continue to model and build on what they know
8. Scenarios (Rugby Strength Coach) – are we pushing athletes past worse case scenarios into never case scenarios through the current use of testing/conditioning?
9. Ammo v Elite (Craig Edwards) – amateur players practice until they get it right but elite players practice until they can’t get it wrong
10. Learning Environments (Shawn Myszka) – experience the game in slices with game based learning environments centering around action/movements but also on what information is present so the learner becomes attuned to ony the most relevant information. The game is a great place to gain experience but athletes need opportunities to search for other functional solutions such as a player who prefers to using physical solutions being forced to search for movement/space availability solutions by the constraints of the environment/task
11. Game Model (Cody Royle) – you prob don’t win because of how good your game model is but because your players have consistency with whatever game model you do have and can therefore maintain a greater intensity for longer, essentially helping your players perceive, believe and then embody 5% faster, more consistently and  with more intensity, at what they’re already good at
12. Creativity (Amy Brann) – is intelligence having fun
13. Internal v External Focus (Tim Gallwey) – refers to what the body is doing in flight v what the ball is doing in flight with the concentrated mind having no room for thinking what the body is doing and 99times out 100 you’ll ask a struggling player what they were thinking and they’ll talk about the mechanics of their sport but it’s the complete opposite when you’re playing well where you don't feel anything internal in your body at all
14. Decision Making (Andy Ryland) – if your drill progression isn't increasing/layering speed, space, complexity, chaos and decision making then are you actually improving skill at all?
15. Habit Loop (James Clear) – reminder (the initial trigger/cue) + response (the behaviour/action/response) + reward (the outcome of the behaviour) = alarm goes off for training  and you get up or you don’t + you get more sleep or less training today. You need to identify your positive and negative habit loops
16. Constraints (Dr Matt Jordan) – internal constraints x how do you move when fatigued, how do you move when you can only generate 180Nm of knee extension torque, how do you move with anteriot/posterior knee instability etc? Task constraints x how do you move carrying an unaccustomed load? Environmental constraints x how do you move in a contract year, how do you move in front of a crowd and how do you move in the cold?
17. Beliefs (Ben Hunt Davis) – some things you can control and somethings you can’t so don’t dwell on them and resolve to focusing on what matters. The 3 key sources for your beliefs are personal memories (past successes etc), role models (who else has done this and how did they do it etc) and metaphors/analogies (stories etc)
18. Culture (Ryan Holiday) – you can only control thr effort, not the results
19. Psychology (Alex Hutchinson) – even in elite runners mental fatigue can decrease performance after a 45min computer task so no phones pre-game!
20. Psychological Safety (Dr Michael Gervais) – no one wants to look bad but when the fear of looking bad is stronger then the desire to learn, which is often accompanied by being uncomfortable, ungraceful, akward and clunky, that’s where we find coaches/players stripping potential but you gotta look bad at some point to learn
21. Variability (Adam Omiecinski) – how can you achieve a stable movement in a dynamic environment like sport because even as the earth tilts our center of mass changes?
22. Leadership (Scot Prohaska) – the 6 lanes of performance are psychological (emotional intelligence), sensory motor (vision/perceptual/rea skills), technical (repeat/accuracy/int), tactical, physical and recovery/restoration.These are backed up by courage, honor, respect, responsibility, communication, confidence, perseverance, innovation, ambition, learning and leadership
23. Space/Time (Matt Gordon) –if you understand it then you can position yourself to receive the ball giving you more to execute the skill so you can work a lot on skills but it’s only 1 small way to manipulate time/space
24. Ement (Jorg Van Der Breggen) – obsessing about winning is a loser’s game so you must create the best possible conditions for success then let go of the outcome
25. Efficiency v Effectiveness (Peter Drucker) - efficiency is doing the thing right, effectiveness is doing the right thing