How to coach professional athletes in hybrid mode with increased efficiency?

The challenge: maximize performance at a distance, while respecting the players' private time

For several years, Sébastien coached Kévin Séraphin, a French basketball player who played in the NBA for the Washington Wizards and the Pacers. During this period, Sébastien accompanied him in his trainings and his travels, and lived with him to have a constant follow-up of his evolution. 

Indeed, for professional athletes of this level, training with their coach is one of the key elements to optimize their performance. Nevertheless, following this experience, Sébastien wondered if, as a coach, it was necessary for him to be physically present with the athlete at all times. It was important to him to give the players the personal space they needed to invest in and appropriate the training sessions. 

As he was increasingly in contact with international players, Sébastien was also looking for a way to guide and coach them from anywhere, without impacting their engagement and performance, and to reduce the cost of coaching. And it was when he discovered Klaxoon at the end of 2017 that he realized it was the tool he needed to achieve this goal!

The solution: offer a new form of coaching and monitoring with visual management tools

To ensure constant and structured follow-up of his athletes, Sébastien combines several activities in Klaxoon. Visual management allows him to accompany players while making them owners of their performance. At the same time, he gets them more involved in their own process to help them progress and surpass themselves.

Centralizing an athlete's activities with Network

First of all, Sébastien creates a Network for each of his athletes. A Network is a private group in Klaxoon, which its members can manage like a book by adding new chapters. 

And this is exactly how Sébastien proceeds with his training sessions. Each coaching session corresponds to a new stage in the athlete's evolution. So, for each coaching session, Sébastien creates a new Klaxoon activity in the Network:

• A Board with a template for monitoring physical condition
• A Memo with a routine for a day-to-day follow-up
• An Article about nutrition, etc.

This way, both Sébastien and the player can refer to it at any time, the information being stored and accessible from any connected device. Over time, the Network gets bigger with all the athlete's evolution.

Collaborating visually on Board around the player's progress

In his Networks, Sébastien regularly uses Boards. Board is Klaxoon's online whiteboard and, according to the coach, "it's our own basketball court" when his players join it.

Every day, he meets an athlete in this visual space directly through videoconference, thanks to the built-in Live tool. There, they both have visibility on their schedule and all the player’s upcoming games. There is also an area dedicated to sharing ideas and feedback.

In this Board, the player's schedule also includes Sébastien's coaching program, which is shown by links to Memos prepared in advance, asynchronously.

Sharing the details of training sessions with Memo

Memo is an ideal support for Sébastien to sum up the information to share with the athlete at each session: his goals and step-by-step exercises, often enhanced with videos to facilitate a better understanding of the instructions. 

In addition, the player has the possibility to add his own notes at the bottom of each page of the Memo. This allows them to save time by writing down, for example, the intensity of an exercise or the weight they were able to lift on a given day. This way, if they have to do the exercise again in the following weeks, they can easily find their bearings and start again under the same conditions. In this way, as Sébastien points out, it is easier for the player to "either maintain or progress in his loads".

Easily communicating asynchronously with Question

Finally, Sébastien regularly uses the Question tool to monitor his players. In Klaxoon, he can either create an independent Question, or attach it to an idea shared in a Board. This opens up a conversation dedicated to a topic, and the athlete can bounce off of it at any time, when their availability allows.

There are several types of Questions in Klaxoon: a simple and effective Yes/No, a vote or rating on a session, an open Question for a wider discussion... So many ways to communicate and keep it written and centralized in one place.

For Sébastien, this considerably improves his communication with the athletes. Considering that a pro player's schedule is extremely busy, the coach wants to give him the freedom to respond when he has the opportunity, in order to achieve a better balance between private and professional life.

The result: more athletes accompanied simultaneously, and all satisfied with the hybrid coaching format

Sébastien sees clear benefits in using Klaxoon to monitor his athletes on a daily basis: "Without Klaxoon, I wouldn't be able to do what I'm doing right now." From a single face-to-face coaching, he has now moved to a hybrid follow-up of over 25 players at the same time. He arranges his schedule to have sessions with them both on-site and remotely, from several countries around the world. In addition, as Sébastien points out, "this reduces costs enormously".

Moreovrer, Klaxoon's visual and participatory tools arouse the players' curiosity, and make them more involved in their training. It gives them an effective way to express themselves and look back on their past progress. Combined with the coaching and experience of their physical trainer, this solution guides athletes towards performance.

For Sébastien, using Klaxoon is a simple way to centralize follow-up, to bring up new ideas, and to manage and structure his activities with visual management. Whether he is on site or remotely, he can easily explain his expectations thanks to various sharing formats (text, videos, images, etc.), but also effectively collect feedback from players.

Finally, athletes also appreciate the freedom that Klaxoon brings them, it is for them a way to "work while respecting their life", as their coach concludes.

Do you want to adopt Klaxoon to set up your sports coaching sessions, or simply track your own performance in an efficient way? Try the More than an Athlete ready-to-use Board template, already structured for this purpose!