Making The Switch to Semi-Private Coaching Part II

Last week I spoke about our implementation process for our PEAK90 program. If you didn’t get a chance to read that article, you can do so by clicking right here. With the implementation of any new program, there are bound to be some growing pains. As promised, here are three of our larger mistakes we’ve overcome while launching our PEAK90 program over the last three weeks.

Enjoy!

We assumed we would be good at semi-private coaching from the get-go.

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. I believe it was heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson who said that famous quote. As ridiculous as this sounds, our punch in the mouth was actually coaching semi private sessions. All of our staff training's had covered elements of how to coach semi-private sessions but our entire staff, including myself, had minimal real time experience delivering in this format. After the first night of PEAK90 I realized that if we wanted to execute semi-private sessions with 5 athletes at a high level, we needed to tighten up our athlete to coach ratio. The very next day we worked out our staff schedule to ensure that we would have two coaches for each training session. This allows us to offer a 1:3 coach to athlete ratio during this inaugural period of PEAK90. This is a much more manageable coaching ratio given our experience level and allows us to keep the client experience extremely positive.

We ignored why athletes enrolled in PEAK90

Every athlete who signed up for PEAK90 told us during the initial assessment that one of their main draws to the program was for the group conditioning component. What we failed to do, was actually program a group conditioning component. Again, absolutely ridiculous on our part. What we did was take every athlete's energy system needs as well as their collegiate conditioning program and implemented them accordingly. Essentially we had five athletes doing five different types of conditioning at the end of each training session. Not only was this very difficult to set up, manage, and coach, it wasn’t what the athletes wanted to do. This approach lasted for four days until we decided to scrap our entire approach to energy system development. We now finish each PEAK90 session with 10-15 minutes of conditioning that is, or is a variation of, one of the athletes collegiate conditioning test(s). This allows the group to condition together in their sought-after  team environment and also allows both coaches to be present and available during the conditioning period. A win-win for all parties involved.  

We went ‘off-script’ twice and it kicked our ass

This one is 100% on me. I thought I was above our system and went off-script on two of our athlete’s initial assessments. The repercussion was two athletes entering our program without the prerequisite understanding of our movement progressions and regressions. Yikes. Working with those athletes during their first few training sessions was extremely humbling and was the kick in the nuts I needed to make sure we, as a staff, stayed compliant to our system. There is no direct ‘solution’ to this problem and the athletes have since been successfully caught up to speed. However, it provides an answer to the ‘what if’ scenario of someone doing their “own thing” and not following our outlined assessment approach.

In summary

Mistakes are going to happen and are a very valuable part of the learning process. Our staff has done a good job learning from the good and the bad over these last three weeks. We are not afraid to sit down as a team and say “hey, this is a challenge right now, how can we improve?” and from there, map out a list of solutions. Last week I brought up the point that “we is greater than me”. This concept applies to both the peaks and valleys. What is most important is that the team works together to overcome the valleys and build on the peaks. I hope that the last two weeks provided some key concepts to think about the next time you add a program to your facility or training offerings!