24 August 2016

How Coaches Can Use Technology to Encourage People to Get Moving

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Technology is growing quickly every year, with more gadgets coming onto the market promising to help you lose weight, get fitter, improve your health, enhance your sports skills and more. By monitoring your movements, these gadgets make people more aware of their exercise levels and inspire people to get active, whether that is by going to the gym, playing a sport or simply walking around more often throughout their daily lives.

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Technology as Sports Coach

Sports coaches can use technology and wearable gadgets to monitor their students and to improve communication with them, even when not physically together during a face to face training session. Technology can also act as a secondary coach, incorporating some training methods of their own so students can use their sports watches, mobile phones, heart rate monitors and tablet-based logbooks to keep a track of their progress and training schedules.

Training drills are always useful for sports coaching, whether you are teaching a group of school children, a youth club team, a country standard club or international competitors. These training drill scan be used alongside technology to create a powerful way of coaching and motivating. For example, when using soccer drill videos to encourage different movement off the ball, zone marking techniques or ideas for set pieces, the players can really get a sense of how to use the techniques in their own games.

Video Training Drills

Videos can occasionally be used in this way as a replacement for physical training, for example if a player cannot make it to the training session but can still watch the video. With third party videos such as a soccer drill video taken by Sportplan, you are also able to use an objective outside viewpoint to teach certain techniques, avoiding subjectivity which can cloud judgement when dealing with players you have known for a long time.

Football training videos can be used to teach dribbling, shooting, passing, marking, free kicks, corners, positioning, off-ball movement and much more. Skills can be improved hugely simply by players watching other people perform tactical moves on a video.

Video technology is also useful for recording motivational talks, while players can also be encouraged to record their own movements and training sessions so they can watch them back at a later date and learn from their own mistakes.