Top 2 Reasons That You've Plateaued In Your Training

With the regular coaching playbook it is easy to get sucked into the black hole of the same monotonous drills day after day, practice after practice. In reality, creativity - not monotonous repetition - is the key to building strengths and overcoming weaknesses.  Consider the two main pitfalls that lead to plateau:

1. You practice a drill that you are comfortable with.  
Got flashy looking roll tacks? Then you're probably not getting a lot out of tacking on the whistle.  Dusting your training partner in every acceleration-on-the-whistle drill?  It's going to be hard to notice small improvements if you're consistently the first one out of the gates.  When looking to build on your strengths, instead of repeating an easy drill that you have already mastered, try something completely different.  Sail with your eyes closed and try to make it around your coach using only whistle signals to find the mark (best with an inflatable coach boat!).  Try to keep the boat stable while sailing heeled to windward as far as possible without taking water over the rail.  If you're working on tacking, try your tacking on the whistle without the crew wearing a harness.  If that's too easy, see if you can tack with the crew crossing the boat in front of the headstay.  To work on down speed maneuvers (like accelerations), try sailing around a buoy without ever being on port tack.

If you mix in drills that force you outside of your comfort zone, your foundation skills will improve a lot.

2. You practice a drill that pulls your focus in too many directions at once.

So on the surface, tacking might seem like a pretty simple skill, but consider the ingredients of a good tack: feet in the correct spot, smooth movement into the boat from the wire, consistent unhook, good timing between skipper and crew, fast hand switch, precise sail trim, precise weight placement, and much, much more.  If you're having trouble executing the perfect tack (and trust me: you are...) single out one skill to perfect before you move on.  One of my favorite ways to do this is to create simple drills that emphasize one aspect of a technique.  For example, if you are having trouble breaking the habit of clipping in before you are at full extension on the wire, practice hanging, and counting to ten after each tack before you clip in.  If you are struggling with your hand switch, practice completing the tack with your arms still crossed (i.e. don't do any hand switch at all).  Sail the boat perfectly for twenty seconds steering with the tiller behind your back and  allowing the skipper to trim main, until the boat is back to full speed, and then switch hands.

There are tons of creative drills like these that can help isolate your issues, or bring a new aspect into focus, so don't get stuck doing the same thing every day!

Dissecting the Training Toolbox

Throughout the season, there are a lot of opportunities to get on the water with coaches, but it's important to incorporate each opportunity into your overall plan in the right way.  Here is a comparison of Training Camps, Clinics, and Regatta Coaching to help you plan the right combination for your goals this year.

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Training Camps

Training camps generally have more boats, broader goals, and higher sailor-to-coach ratios than other categories of training events, which makes them super productive tools for improving boat-on-boat skills, but it is important to incorporate them into your training plan in the right way.  With many boats on the water, there is a premium on self reliance and goal setting: you need to be able to get yourself on the water on time, and know what your goals for the weekend are.  At our 29er HP training camps, we place a major emphasis on sharing information, and the list of drills is set accordingly:  round robin racing (every crew sails with every skipper), short course boat handling drills, starting line execution drills, and generally a list of weird skill drills to force everyone to experience the boat in a new way.

Best ways to take advantage of training camps: Learn new skills and get fresh ideas for what you should be pursuing in your training at home.  Hone racing skills in a non-regatta environment.

Note for parents: Training camps are generally cheaper because we have more teams to cover costs!

Clinics

In contrast to training camps, clinics are all about the coach-sailor interactions.  For newer teams, clinics are an opportunity to get immediate feedback on skills such as boat handling mechanics and sail setup.  For experienced teams, clinics are the perfect environment for speed testing and advanced skill work.  At our 29er HP clinics, we try to break up straight line tuning with personalized skill drills and course work to send everyone home with a whole new list of things to work on.

Best ways to take advantage of clinics: Know what you want to improve before the clinic starts so that you can ask your coach to look at specific skills.  

Regatta COaching

The most important thing to remember about regatta coaching, is that without a good training program, regatta coaching is far less effective than spending some quality time at a training camp, or a clinic.  Regatta coaching provides athletes with the opportunity to benchmark their skill set, while coaches can focus on helping to improve communication on the boat as well as tactics, and strategy. Learning tactics and strategy is one of the best parts of sailing, but without a solid foundation in boat handling and tuning skills, it's almost impossible to learn the process of making good tactical decisions.  Once you have reached the top level, regatta coaching is an essential part of developing a consistent playbook.

Best ways to take advantage of regatta coaching: Do your homework between regattas!  Take notes during debriefs so that you know what to work on.  Keep a playbook to document all of your tactical plays.

4 Ways To Raise Your Personal Bar This Fall

1. Stick to the 70:30 rule of competition.
Glancing at the SCYYRA calendar, your sailing schedule is already booked solid with regattas every weekend, but if you are really serious about getting to the top as quickly as possible, or about your performance at a particular event this year, you're going to need to cut back on the competition.  The top athletes in the sport spend at least 70% of their sailing time training with only 30% spent in competition.  The competition environment is important to get used to, and can be a great tool for evaluating techniques and improvement, but the real substantial improvement happens in practice, so clear some of your regatta weekends, find a good coach or a training partner to work with, and put some sweat in.  Our Fall 29er Circuit is meant to provide frequent coaching opportunities outside of regatta time, so check out the calendar here, or the Fall Circuit Flyer here.

2. Join or a team or form a training group.
Whether you already have a local team training in your class of boats, or you have to scrape together a few friends to come chase you around in another boat, having a training partner on the water is an easy way to boost your training productivity.  If you don't have a group already, start small by trying to get 2-3 boats together, one day per week.  Even if you can't get a firm commitment from other teams, being the role model by committing to a weekly time slot goes a long way towards building a group in the future.

3. Solidify lessons and learn to feel the boat by sailing alone.
Sailing with other boats will expose your strengths and weaknesses, but solidifying new skills requires some undisturbed focus on whatever technique you are trying to lock in.  Try to find a few days in your training schedule where you can go on the water alone to track your laser beam focus on one or two skills.

4. Evaluate your strengths and weaknesses on a regular basis.
The best way to get more out of every practice is to go into practice with a clear idea of the micro goals that you are trying to achieve that day.  Try to set process goals - goals that you can control - every day.  An example of a process goal would be, "I'm going to do 100 tacks", or "I'm going to focus on my hand switch."  If you aren't doing it yet, consider tracking your skills and improvement using a SWOT Chart.

5. Schedule in practices to work on the fundamentals.
Especially as we get a few weeks into the season, practice plans typically begin to get more and more racing oriented, but one of the most important things you can do to keep your learning curve steep is to schedule in days to take a step back and work on the fundamentals.  Sail rudderless to hone your instincts, sail with your eyes closed to work on feeling the boat - there are tons of ways to keep the basics fun, but ultimately, returning to these skills will refresh your learning curve and bring new perspective into your racing drills.

29er Worlds Wrap Up

At 22:00, we pull out of the Airport Marriott parking lot… Finally on the way to Pwllheli with ten sailors, two drivers, and four sail tubes crammed into ten seats!  After a quick stop to grab food, I follow Annie Merson’s car down the freeway for about an hour until her GPS directs us to exit and we begin to follow a series of winding side streets to get to the hotel for our first night in Wales. 

Fifteen minutes pass, and the road gets narrower and windier.  Thirty minutes; no sign of the hotel.  An hour passes, and we figure out how to use the GPS in our car, which tells us we’re only half way there!  Max, who is sitting in a foot well in the second row begins to feel sick from the winding road and the smell of traveling sailors…

Finally, as Max is getting ready to roll down the window and lose his dinner, we come around a curve in the road, and see the hotel!  Success!

After checking into our rooms, the kids go to get settled while I pay, and the receptionist realizes that we’re not supposed to be in one of the rooms.  Kids re-locate into new rooms. 

2:30am…  I make one last round to check on everyone and make sure all of the sailors have a bed to sleep in.  California kids are rooming with Florida kids.  Ten sailors are crammed into six small beds.  Everyone is smiling and joking about the situation, and spirits are high.  After a grueling day of travel, I can’t believe what a positive attitude the whole team has.

Over the last two weeks in Wales, there have been almost two hundred teams on the water each day with identical looking sails, identical hulls, and many talented athletes among them, but every morning as I motored out to meet the team, I could spot my group from a mile away.  They were the six boats clustered tightly together, speed testing on starboard first, then on port, then in groups of three splitting to each side of the course to test the pressure difference.  They were always among the first boats on the course, and supported each other both on and off of the water.  The team’s relaxed and supportive attitude on the first wild evening of countryside driving and “musical-hotel-rooms” set the tone for the remainder of the adventure in Wales, and really exemplified the strength of this team that gave them an edge on the international stage.

Reflecting on the lead up to the event this summer, I think that we did a lot of things right, and the results reflected this.  The sapling, US Sailing Olympic Development Program brought together and provided coaching for an awesome group of top talent in the correct venues to hone heavy air boat speed tuning and techniques.  These camps were complimented by windy regattas in the Gorge and San Francisco with teams from the East Coast, West Coast, and Canada.  In Wales, the heavy air preparation paid off in the qualifying series, which saw two days of big breeze and massive waves.  In the final series, Chris and Wade finished 1st and 2nd in the two windy races of the series, with the rest of the team not far behind.  The ODP group training approach really pushed the bar high for all of the teams who were involved in the windy training camps, unfortunately our lead up wasn’t quite long enough. 

This is the first year that the US Sailing Olympic Development Program has existed, and as such, the national effort to bring together the top talent did not begin in earnest until the June ODP Camp at Saint Francis Yacht Club, leaving only two months to prepare for the start of the 29er Worlds.  While teams had all been working separately for some time, the combination of top teams and consistent coaching immediately sent the learning curve skyrocketing.  With the time constraints of working to peak at the worlds, the windy venues made for ideal training grounds, because we knew that the venue would have a lot of breeze for much of the regatta, but as a team, the lack of time together in light air was evident when the breeze dropped for the first two days of the final series at the Worlds.  The team approach to pre-race research kept our teams afloat through those light air days by keeping our scorelines more consistent than most of our competitors’, but ultimately, our lack of time in light air was a major detriment to our overall results.  With a calendar full of ODP events throughout the next year, and training across the full spectrum of conditions, I think that the outlook for the team is extremely positive at the Worlds in Medemblick next year!

The story of the regatta is a podium finish, with three teams in the top fifteen, and five in gold fleet.  It’s a story about a US team who demonstrated that they can compete head to head with the Aussie and Kiwi skiff squads across a wide range of conditions.  Ultimately thought, I think that the biggest story is one that the results don’t show; the story of twelve talented sailors coming together in a few short months to push each other, support each other, and build a body of knowledge worthy of a podium finish.  Among the skills that we had time to practice, I think that our guys proved that they are the very best in the world.  Chris and Wade led the charge with their third place finish, but without the support of Nic and Ian, Max and Andrew, Sam and Michael, Jacob, Rhodes and Evan, and Shane and Pere, the scoreboard would have told a different story.  I am thoroughly impressed by the team effort that all of these sailors put in to make this happen, and I can’t wait to where it takes us as a national squad.