Let’s imagine for a second that you love triathlon (it’s difficult, I know, but bear with me).
You’re a member of your local club.
You go to multiple group sessions that they run every week (swim, track, turbo etc.).
In fact, triathlon has become much more than just exercise – it’s become your social life.
So, when you get injured and you can’t train, you’re devastated.
You can’t go to your regular weekly group sessions and you can’t meet up with some friends from your club for an ad hoc social ride, because, well, you’re injured.
And while it’s mildly frustrating at first, the longer it goes on for, the more distanced you feel from your friends and the club.
In the grand scheme of things, it might not seem like a huge deal that one person stops training or attending sessions for a short while.
And on many levels, it isn’t.
But let’s change the scenario slightly…
You love triathlon and your club so much that you’re happy to volunteer. You might be a coach, or a committee member, or just happy to help out at events.
You might even just have been taking your son/daughter along to training for so long that you decided to do something useful with your time and help out while you’re there.
Your club relies on volunteers like you to keep everything running smoothly and everybody safe.
When club volunteers get injured, the impact is much greater.
Volunteers are a special kind of person.
They willingly give their time to help others.
Not everyone is prepared to do that.
These people are hard to find.
So when little “Jimmy” or “Jane” gets injured and they decide that they want to do a different sport, your club loses one of your parent coaches.
It takes time and effort to train someone else and in the meantime, it makes the job of the other coaches much harder and may even impact the type of session they can deliver just because they’re one coach down.
And the people who are prepared to get so involved in the club that they are committee members are even HARDER to find.
Most people are way too busy to willingly take on extra unpaid (usually) work and responsibility, so when THESE people get injured and start to withdraw from the club, the impact is felt by EVERYONE.
It’s in the little jobs that stop being done (like booking the venue and keeping the paperwork in order) – and sometimes the bigger jobs too, like keeping the finances in order.
Without these people, the club could easily collapse.
It’s becoming increasingly common knowledge now that improving movement (call it mobility/flexibility/whatever you will) is a good way to help prevent injury, but most club coaches don’t have the knowledge to safely put it into their sessions, and if they do, athletes don’t want to do it (even though they know they should) because it takes time away from their swim, bike, run training.
And unless something changes, this real cost to clubs and the social lives of club members will continue to be a problem and we’ll continue to lose amazing people from our sport.
That’s why I created the SMARTT® Coach Certification.
The SMARTT® methods make it easy for coaches to seamlessly integrate movement improvement techniques into the sessions they’re already teaching, so that they can be confident that their athletes aren’t going to hurt themselves further AND so that they’re not taking ANY time away from the swim, bike, run training.
Which means, that athletes are happy to do it!
And most importantly, that means we can break the cycle of losing our club volunteers, our budding young talent and improve the lives of everyone within the club by keeping their social connections alive.
The SMARTT® Coach Certification is a fully online course, taught LIVE in easy-to-digest chunks over 12 weeks, so students don’t have to take time off work, suffer with any travel/accommodation fees or spend any time cooped up in some conference room in some strange city.
There’s a great balance of theory and practical, giving you loads of time to practice what you’ve learned each week – and it’s HIGHLY interactive so you can ask questions and start discussions as if we were all together in one room!
The next course is starting on Friday 3rd January 2020 and places are available to book now – but they’re strictly limited, so if you want to help your club, without having to volunteer your time – simply share this blog post with your head coach (or other committee member) and let’s start to change the role that injuries play in our clubs…and the lives of everyone in them.
Click here to book your place
Let’s be SMARTT® – Let’s do this together!
Sarah x
P.S. This course is only open to coaches who are qualified to coach sessions on their own (no assistant coaches please) and it is recommended that they have at least 6 months experience coaching at this level.
Proof of certification will be required and failure to produce it will result in your removal from the course.