Many would agree in the racing world how important race strategy training is for the athletes' as a way to focus themselves toward specifically training for a race. As far as my limited experience as a coach has been, I have seen for myself how well race specific strategies improve my paddlers on many different aspects of the sport. In this article, I would very much like to share the 5 learning points that I have picked up from using race strategy training.
1) Focus and direction
It seems that on my previous occasions on races before I used this technique, my paddlers would find having an ambigious plan that resulted in me changing the game play at the very last moment very unnerving and disorientating. I learnt alternatively to focus on a very specific game plan that they would be very confident of executing based on their strengths and would give them a very specific direction in how my training would be performed prior to the weeks leading up to the race.
2) Confidence
I have seen how my paddlers became more confident in executing their strokes when they can actually count the number of strokes that they would have to execute at every part of the race. Giving them the exact layout of a race gives them the confidence they need to achieve the targets and it spreads really quick when their execution is exactly (or close to) what they practiced.
3) Increased performance
With increased confidence in their race plan, it is easily observable that their performance increases by more than what they expected. Expectations increase after every race, as the team take advantage of the increased performance from each race.
4) Better synchronicity
As opposed to being very haphazard in their previous races when they were given an ambigious race plan which changes from race to race, it gave the paddlers much attention to making sure that they were all in sync when they have practiced this by counting verbally what they would have practiced and executed this in the race.
5) Reduced complexity in communicating post race debriefs
In contrast to the vagueness of previous debriefs where debriefs are general in nature, specificity gives them much better control in communicating improvements between team members, relating constructive feedback to team members and providing very specific details on race portions (i.e. starts, body or finishes) that they can improve on. It creates a very solid platform for communicating simple tweaks to improve the different parts of the race without confusing the team on too much technicality.
