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Coaches are the ultimate teachers and, as a profession, being called a coach is a true honor. Instruction with athletes is both an art and a science, but in climbing resources have not been available or digestible for the majority of coaches.

Effective sport coaching is a complex, challenging and multi-faceted task that requires a variety of skills and involves many responsibilities.

Becoming an Effective Climbing Coach is the first module of the Climbing Performance Coaching series. When Covid-19 struck in 2020, it became a necessity to provide climbing coaches education through webcasts and the like.
For Climbing Performance Coaching I re-recorded presentations and online workshops I have been given over the last decades and organized the information coherently.
Becoming an effective climbing coach is over 100 minutes of relevant information for climbing coaches of any level, organized in the following chapters:

Intro – Coaching is simple
*Is the athlete enjoying the process?

00:02:13: Coaches Education
* invariable traits a coach must have to be effective *Empowerment *value Athletes and connect with them

00:09:50: My personal coaching Journey
* My path as a climbing coach *“Adapt what is useful, … *Inventions on the way – Polarized Training

00:17:23: Communication
*Skill Training Communication Model *Layering, Pausing, Mirroring

00:33:54: How to breed confidence

00:35:25: What is taught VS what we learn
*Become an Autodidact

00:37:17: Effective coaching

00:39:18: Pedagogy
*Non-linear pedagogy *Ecological dynamics *a pedagogy of exploration…

00:43:45: Skill Acquisition 
*Perception/Action *My concept of skill development *Participation VS Performance coaching *Motivation *OPTIMAL Theory
*…much more in Movement/Learning

00:54:42: Leadership models
*Be specific in your goal…   *Coach-athlete relationship model *Being athlete-centrered
*Engagement

01:01:55: Being a Coach of Positive Significance  (a message to parents)

01:08:07: Athletes and Coaches are in this together!
*Coaches are performers in their own right *Cognitive biases are systemic errors *Growth mindset *Comfort Zone *Examples of what society…

01:16:50: Self-care for climbing coaches 
*Self-reflection *Reflective Framework for teaching in Physical Education (RFTPE) *Four Questions Coaches Should Ask Themselves

01:27:08: Towards a Mastery Mindset
*Key psychological attributes of a mastery mindset

01:35:54: Facts of sustainable success
*Stress + Rest = Growth *Intellectual Humility *Detach yourself for clear thinking  *facts of sustainable success

01:41:37: Climbing Performance Coaching preview

Some more notes on this video:

Sometimes there is a distinction made between sports participation coaching and performance coaching, yet while this series goes by Climbing performance coaching, climbing is a true lifetime activity in which sports participation coaching is the foundation of becoming a literate and competent climber.
Participation coaching isn’t in any way inferior or less worthy than performance coaching.

Developing movement skill and coordination in young athletes requires that they are exposed to years of varied and diverse movements that are both challenging and engaging. It is my firm believe that we should aim to develop good movers and let the kids decide what they want to do with that skill!

Expert coaching is an agile, dynamic and fluid endeavor that is constantly adjusting and adapting to the specific demands of a particular setting in an attempt to best meet the individual needs of each athlete.
Effective coaching is “structured improvisation”, and “flexibility in practice”.

Transfer of skill and learning occur when training in one context shapes performance and learning in a different context. Ensuring a high degree of skill transfer between a training environment, like your home climbing wall and a particular performance context like a rock climb is a key challenge in what we do and want to help you with that.

Across all sports, the work of sports practitioners like us has progressively transitioned toward the facilitation of an evolving relationship between athletes and their environment.

Motor learning
Teaching is about athletes learning, and training is about athletes controlling their bodies — they are congruent processes.
If done right, teaching during training accelerates learning, and training can rapidly help athletes acquire skills.

Learning is high-intensity training. Believing that intensity is only about effort is a common mistake, as the brain is a very selfish entity in the human body and consumes a lot of resources.
An athlete who is tired isn’t going to succeed as much by working on “technique” when the brain needs rest to absorb new information and master old or current skills.
Fatigue is more complex than the absence of power with athletes. Emotional factors play a huge role with injury patterns and poor performance, and we are only scratching the surface now with the current science.

Each movement, like repositioning of the hands, feet and body, excites receptors in the eyes, ears, skin, muscles, joints, and vestibular apparatus that provide a stream of information about the movement pattern and success of our movements.
It is essential to consider the circular nature of the perception / action cycle for motor learning.

The coache’s eye must be developed over a number of years just as with climbers in the field. A major obstacle here are obstructions that make it difficult to observe the entire body, and the speed at which modern climbing moves must be performed.
Video and chronographs are instrumental in showing how gifted climbers create time and space.
I want to help you with developing your coache’s eye with case studies of different situations. I will also describe best practices for video analysis in climbing.

When we move, we receive intrinsic feedback, providing realtime updates about the state of the external environment, the state of the body, and the relation between the body and the environment.
It can be used to monitor performance and make improvements across practice attempts.
As climbing coaches, we aim to facilitate the learning process through additional, so called augmented feedback.
In these lessons, I will describe the potential, but also potential downsides of providing guidance during skill acquisition.

Athlete’s and coaches are often frustrated by performance outcome variability. Variability was often equated with „ error”, due to the linear movement models that were popular in motor behavior theories in the 1960s to the 1970s that somewhat still prevail in current practice.
In my concept of climbing performance coaching, I will familiarize you with contemporary models of movement, such as ecological dynamics, in which athletes are continuously encouraged to exploit self-organizing tendencies in their movement systems to form synergies to make variability functional.
For me, Guided Discovery Is Coaching at Its Finest and I invite you to join my climbing performances coaching online courses!