Visual Coaching

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Visual Coaching

This week I have been working on the visual coaching assignment. I do feel that such a concept would greatly enhance communication between the equestrian athlete and the coach. Coach’s usually have one hour sessions with the next athlete waiting so limited time is allocated to discussing upcoming competitions and year long programs. In fact as an athlete this was never discussed with me.

Having a program like visual coaching would also allow a detailed record of the training sessions to be kept. It would however, be most beneficial to have the program designed for the horse. It would be my intention to have a generic program for each year of the horse from commencement of training at 3/3.5 years of age. That way the coach could follow the development and gain longitudinal data which would be valuable in training future horses.

The other information that was useful was the ability to interpret and provide feedback to the diary information. This would again allow isolated equestrian riders a very valuable chance to remain in contact with their coach and identify any trends.

I enjoyed looking at the many exercises available in visual coaching and thought the system worked well. In terms of dressage, it would be useful to have  a similar system set up with the exercises that the horse was able to do. This would enable to coach to prepare a very detailed plan with ease – I wonder if the designers would be interested in building another one for the equine athlete?

At present, the annual plan and diary are the most useful features of this program. It was difficult to do without a PC, however I am still interested in integrating this into my coaching in the future.