Written by the Xhale Team
Making your coaching more efficient
It is our aim to make all the administration of coaching more efficient, more intuitive, and generally make your life easier. Why? Because we believe the majority of the craft of coaching lies outside of creating a programme. It lies in communication with your athletes, careful consideration of fitness progression, specificity for each individual and the ability to evaluate as you move through different phases of training.
Templates
Imagine you schedule 14 sessions for each athlete a week. Imagine that you coach 5 athletes. That’s 70 sessions. For each session if you can reduce the time you take to schedule it by 2 mins just by finding it easily and dragging it into place, that’s nearly 2.5 hours of your time saved…
2.5 hours more time! And that is a conservative estimate for a small number of athletes. Some of our coaches have found ACRES of time using our platform.
This is where you hear the dreaded words “filing system”. We would love to be more specific here – but the fact is that everyone is different and the only filing system that will work for you is the one you created and understand.
So here are some ideas to get you started:
1. Sketch out your filing system skeleton before you start. Spending time here will save you literally days in the long run.
2. Create order. Putting a number at the start of the folder name will file them in order number (in the example this number is in brackets). You can also use alphabetical letters in the same way.
3. Stack your folders. You can have subfolders under each one (exactly as you would on a computer filing system).
4. Group together. Perhaps arrange by intensity, distance or type of athlete. But there are endless options; type of session, phase of season, sport type – we have seen them all used to good effect.
5. Be consistent. The easier your system is to follow the better use you are going to be able to make of it.
Hide training as you develop the plan
Ok filing system sorted, you are getting stuck into programming for your athletes. But athletes have the option of turning on notifications so that every time you drop in a session or make a comment they are told.
But you don’t want that while you are building their programme! In fact – sometimes you want to build their programme 4 weeks in advance – but only finalise the week and reveal it to them on the Sunday evening before they enter that week.
With Xhale that’s easy. Just click into the week end box, untick the box “training sessions visible to athletes” and save. You will see the red text “training sessions hidden” come up under your week goal (in the image below – Strength Development). Once this text is visible you can rest assured the athlete cannot see any programme development you do (for that week) now. To make this additionally clear – sessions you put in a hidden week will be paler than the ones that have been revealed.
Of course, once you want to reveal just head back into the week end box and re-tick the box.
Copy and paste a whole week
Each week in your athlete’s training is unique. We get that. But quite often there will be some sessions that are the same, or the week as a whole is similar with a few adjustments. So we made a feature to help you – copy and paste a whole week of training.
Once you have pasted the week you can simply click into each of the sessions there and adjust them / progress them to be specific, and delete what you don’t need.
Top tip: if you have a programme where you are repeating swims for three weeks, but all other sessions are changing – schedule the swims first. Then copy and paste the week into the next two weeks before you start building the other sessions. That will save you time deleting!
Oh and of course you can also cut weeks in the same way.
Ready to start?
There are tonnes more features available to make your life easier but that is probably enough information for now!
You can head to part 3 of this guide – or if you want to speed learn then arrange your one-to-one screen share call with co-founder Mark Livesey. Mark will talk you through everything you want to know, share his top tips for efficiency, and give you the chance to ask all your questions about Xhale.
We created Xhale to be intuitive – so have a look around and play with the features. Look at the charts, RPE function, message centre, periodisation, race add feature, session comparisons and much more. You will find Part 3 of this onboarding guide on the Coaches Hub soon.
Got something to add?
If you would like to input to our Coaches’ Hub – or there is a topic you would like us to write about – why not send us your ideas? We are always looking for good content.
Email: caroline@trainxhale.com