Steve Fudge is a switched-on young Sprints Coach with British Athletics, based in Loughborough. There is a lot of wisdom in these short videos applicable to any coaching field.
Links to part 2 and 3 of Steve Fudge's building a coaching philosophy talks:
http://ucoach.com/video/steve-fudge-building-a-philosophy-part-2/
http://ucoach.com/video/steve-fudge-building-a-philosophy-part-3/
Note: non-UK users will have to use a work-around to use uCoach resources.
Follow Steve Fudge on twitter.
Another in the Triathlete Europe coach talks series, this time with yours truly.
In this interview I discuss overall training philosophy, the peaking concept for races, individual workload, injury prevention, and balancing all three sports:
"What we’re trying to do is have the right workloads for each athlete-the right workload at the right time for the athletes. Ithink that’s sort of a broad principle, but there are some different stories for how I can illustrate that. “Philosophy” is kind of a big word-what does that mean? What does that apply? My lessons working with Simon post-Beijing-we were lucky to have success, so you look back and ask, “What contributed to that?” And Isaid there were three things that were really important for Beijing, and they were conditioning, conditioning and conditioning."
Another in the coach talks series from Triathlete Europe, this time from former ITU World Champion and coach Siri Lindley. Siri has coached an Olympic medallist (2004), and now multiple Ironman World Champions, with Leanda Cave and Mirinda Carefrae, among many others in her elite squad Sirious Athletes. In this interview Siri shares her insight on mental preparation, training camps, and injury prevention:
"I think the biggest thing that everybody can do is if you’re logging your training and you know you’ve been training consistently. doing a great job. working hard every day, and if you’re logging that, it’s important to go back-whether it’s weekly or monthly or before a race-and look at all that work that you’ve done and look at the progress that you’ve made and really get a true confidence boost from that."
Follow Siri on twitter.
Triathlon Europe ran a series of coach interviews from their Inside Triathlon magazine in the summer of 2013. This interview with highly accomplished Australian coach Darren Smith has some insight into his approach, with practical examples of how he implements his ideas across competing, improving swim performance, rest days and swim-bike-run balance.
Training Philosophy
I don’t know what too many others do because I don’t spend my days trying to work out what everyone else does. But I think I’m somewhere in between everything. I’m certainly less volume than, say, Sutton, I’m quite high on the technical refinement, and quite high on teaching people specifics about racing.
Darren is known for his technical approach to triathlon coaching, and his success with his private 'D-Squad'.
Follow Darren on twitter.
Jason Bailey has an interview with triathlon coach Brett Sutton, which explores Sutton's philosophy of coaching:
“Most definitely” says Sutton when asked if he feels that he has evolved as a coach over the years. “For some people I'm better and for others I'm worse – it depends on the athlete. Every individual is different though, and it takes great courage on the part of the athlete to give their complete trust to the person coaching them. For example, if somebody is under performing during training, I'll put my arm around one person and say that it is OK and be sympathetic whilst I'll stamp my feet at another ranting that this sort of behavior is totally unacceptable. While you can explain those differing responses to them while it is being delivered, it is very hard for them to process. It is a very fine line between being totally authoritarian or empathetic.”
This quote highlights that the 'soft skills', or people skills essentially, are the differences between the great coaches (or leaders in general) vs the more highly lauded 'technical' coaching skills.
A few other points in the interview may be debatable including Sutton's assessment of current ITU performers, however there are a number of reflections on his coaching process that make this worth reading.
