ארכיון Using video - Kinetix AI

Three Tactics for Coaches to Teach Sailors New Skills

Anne Popolizio — Sat, 04 Mar 2023 19:59:35 +0000

When you’re teaching a sailor new skills—there is a lot of information that has to get from the coach’s brain to the sailor’s brain. It’s a challenging task for any coach.

You can try telling the sailors everything you know, but let’s be honest, we’ve all sat through that class where we’ve been talked at for 40 minutes and felt overwhelmed by the tsunami of information. It might have been fascinating information you really wanted to know, but by the end of that class, your brain was mush and your retention was low. Maybe you remember a few interesting nuggets, but you couldn’t necessarily explain it back to anyone.

Your goal as a coach is knowledge acquisition and skills development, not overwhelm. So how do you find the right balance?

Here are three tactics we use in our own coaching to help sailors, from beginner to experienced, learn new skills without the overwhelm.

1. Use questions to guide them to make their own observations.

This tactic works on sailors of all levels. Even if it’s a sailor’s very first sailing class, you actually don’t need to impart information on them to start developing their sailing skills. Instead, you use questions to guide their attention, make observations, and articulate those observations in their own words.

Use It in a Lesson

Here’s how this tactic looks in a basic sailing lesson: how to read the water.

Have the sailors look at the water and ask them, how would you describe the texture of the water in your own words.
Don’t worry if they’re not giving the right answers yet. You’re just asking questions and they’re making observations.
Then point them to a different section of the water and ask them, what differences do you see between the two. How is this section different than the other?
You can use questions to feed them the vocabulary we use in sailing: would you describe that section of water as glassy, scaly, wavy?
How would you describe the color? How does the color of this patch of water compare to that patch? Is this patch lighter or darker.
Now that they’re starting to accurately describe what they see, ask them, which patch do you think has more wind? The lighter patch or the darker patch? The glassy patch or the scaly patch?
Even if the student couldn’t make accurate observations about the first patch of water, when they compare it to a different patch and you feed them vocabulary options, they’ll start to be able to make accurate observations and articulate their observations with the right words.
Summarize the lesson by asking, so what are the two elements we use to read the water? Answer: color and texture.

Why It Helps

By using this technique, you have successfully taught the sailors the observation skills they need to read the water, the vocabulary they need to describe the water, and you’re helping them build a tangible relationship with the wind. All without a lecture.

2. Use their existing knowledge to layer on new knowledge.

Every sailor has existing knowledge. The sailor on day 1 has at least felt the wind before. A sailor that’s been sailing a few times knows what luffing is and that it’s bad. A sailor that’s completed the basic sailing course knows what telltales are and that they should be streaming back.

As a coach, you can use a sailor’s existing knowledge to introduce a new concept, for example, you can use a basic sailor’s knowledge of luffing and telltales to teach twist and how to adjust it.

Use It in a Lesson

Here’s a sample exercise (if you’re coaching dinghies, you might want to do this on land with just the jib up. If you’re on the water, make sure the driver can hold a steady course):

Pull the jib car all the way back.
Have the sailors look at the jib sail and ask them, what do you see? Is the sail luffing? Is only part of the sail luffing? How does the top of the sail compare to the bottom of the sail?
Have them look at the different sets of telltales up the sail. Are the telltales breaking the same top to bottom? Say to them, knowing what you know about telltales, what would you do to correct the telltales at the top of the sail?
Then, have them look at the leech of the sail. Does that look twisted or not twisted to you?
At this point, don’t worry about correcting their answer or imparting information. Your objective is just to get them to observe and put their observations into words. You are a neutral guide.
Now comes the fun part. Move the car forward 2/3 of the way.
Have the students make their observations again.
- How does your sail look top to bottom now? Is there any luffing or leeching?
- Are the telltales breaking evenly top to bottom?
- Did the twist of the leech change? How? Does it look more or less twisted to you?

Why It Helps

In this lesson, sailors already have an understanding of luffing vs. not luffing and what corrections they need to make to their trim if their telltales are breaking. You use their existing knowledge to introduce the concept of twist, how to see that twist in the sail, and how adjustments to the car position affect the twist of the sail.

You could try explaining it all to them in a lecture—it’s going to go in one ear and out the other. By using this teaching technique, the sailors stay fully engaged in the lesson and will have a better understanding of the material than if you had tried to just explain it all to them in the classroom.

3. Use video to show them what good looks like.

This is an important tactic for teaching sailors complex multi-step maneuvers, and thanks to the plethora of content on YouTube, one you can incorporate pretty easily into your coaching.

Let’s say you’re helping sailors transition from the Opti to the Laser. These kids know how to sail, but the challenge is helping them adjust to the nuances of the boat.

Use It in a Lesson

Here’s how you can use video to teach sailors the nuances of tacking in a Laser:

Before you go sailing, have them watch videos of experienced Laser sailors doing tacks. Share clips from different camera angles if you can—camera at the bow, camera at the stern, camera on the coach boat.
Have the sailors make their own observations. What do you see? How far does the tiller go over? How long does he wait to move? How far forward or aft does she sit? How windy is it in this video? What does she do with her mainsheet?
Again, don’t worry at this point about “teaching” them how to sail the Laser. Just let them make their own observations. If there are important points you want to make sure they get, ask questions that bring their attention to that element of the maneuver, but you don’t necessarily need to “teach” yet. Give them enough information to keep them safe, but otherwise keep your “teaching” to a minimum at this point.

On the Water

Now it’s time to go sailing.

Give each sailor a GoPro to put on their boat so they can record their maneuvers. (If you don’t have a camera per sailor, don’t stress. You can rotate the cameras during practice so each sailor gets a handful of tacks recorded).

When you get back to shore, upload the video to the KINETIX ai software so you can quickly zero in on the maneuvers and avoid wasting time fast-forwarding through a 2-hour training session. (You can collect the cameras and upload the footage while the sailors are putting their boats away).

Side Note

When you record your sailing sessions, it actually takes the pressure off the debrief. You can have the debrief right away, you can save it for the top of the next session, or you can debrief over Zoom. Recording your sessions gives you choices.

The Debrief

Here’s how you structure the conversation for the post-sailing debrief:

At the beginning of the debrief, rewatch some of the experienced sailor footage.
Once again, have the sailors articulate their observations. Now that they have experience on the boat doing the same maneuvers, their observations will likely be more insightful and specific. They’ll notice things they didn’t notice before.
Then have them watch their own footage.
Ask them what they notice about their own maneuvers.
- What felt awkward or uncomfortable to you? What felt smooth?
- Where are you sitting? How far over do you push your tiller? When do you bring it back towards center? How is your flow crossing the boat?
Go back and forth between the experienced footage and their footage and have them compare what they see.
If there is an important element of their maneuver that they’re not noticing, bring their attention to that particular spot. Ask them to watch how they’re doing it and how the experienced sailor does it. Then have them articulate the differences they observe.

At this point, you can supplement with additional information that the sailor needs to know to make the necessary corrections.

Slow Down to Go Fast

Using this sailor-led teaching technique might feel slower than simply telling the sailors what they need to know (goodness, we just took two debriefs and a sailing session to teach them when you could have told them in 40 minutes).

But think back to how you felt when you were inundated with that tsunami of information.

This technique slows the teaching own, but the sailors are actively engaged the entire time. You’re helping them build essential observation skills and consequently the judgment skills they will need to make corrections without building dependency on you, their coach. You’re also helping them understand the material on a much deeper, more physical level, so they can actually retain the information. As a result, even though the lesson takes longer to teach, your sailors’ learning will be faster.

Step Up Your Coaching Game

Want to level up your coaching with technology? Schedule an appointment to learn more about Kinetix AI.

הפוסט Three Tactics for Coaches to Teach Sailors New Skills הופיע לראשונה ב-Kinetix AI.

The Secret to Effectively Coaching Sailors – Coaches Conversation with Paul Swan

kinetixu_admin — Thu, 12 Jan 2023 21:44:43 +0000

If you talk to any of the top coaches these days, they’ll tell you, “You should incorporate video and technology into your sailing coaching!” Great–but why? And how?

We’ll start with the why.

Why Sailors Need Video

If you think about how a baby learns how to walk–they learn through watching. No one stands over them telling them to engage their quads and glutes, shift their weight onto their left leg, bend the right leg 35 degrees, bring the right foot forward, extend the right leg, place the right heel on the ground, shift the weight forward to the right leg rolling through the foot, and repeat on the left side. No, they just watch the world around them and start to play with standing, then stumbling, then walking, then running. Babies certainly get encouragement from the world around them, but their brains are doing processing and learning–sans walking lessons.

The human brain is exceptionally good at self-teaching. Just as babies learn to walk by watching other people walk, sailors can learn the same way. But we need what babies have–a good model. This is where video comes into play.

Recently Omer sat down with Paul Swan, who is, quite literally, an expert in learning. Paul has a PhD in Instructional Design and had an impressive career in building training programs in the corporate world. Today, Paul applies his extensive knowledge of how human beings learn to sailing as part of the coaching team at the International Sailing Academy in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.

As Omer and Paul discuss, video and the internet (yay YouTube!) can give sailors the model they need to watch and rewatch what “good” looks like.

Incorporating Video into Your Training

So now that we understand why we should be using video in our sailing training, we need to look at how we can use it. Aside from watching YouTube videos, what else can you as a sailor or coach do to utilize video in your training? How do you understand what you’re looking at? How do you use your own sailing footage? How do you convert footage into a learning tool?

Fortunately, Paul outlines the process for us. He identifies how coaches and sailors can articulate what they’re seeing, define a common vocabulary, and create a learning tool that can be used by coaches and sailors alike.

Learn from the Pros

Watch the full interview with Paul Swan to learn his process for accelerating learning between coaches and sailors.

Want to level up your coaching with technology? Schedule an appointment to learn more about Kinetix AI.

הפוסט The Secret to Effectively Coaching Sailors – Coaches Conversation with Paul Swan הופיע לראשונה ב-Kinetix AI.

The Problem with Debriefs in Sailing

Anne Popolizio — Fri, 02 Sep 2022 18:19:07 +0000

It’s Not the Bow’s Fault!

Here’s the scenario: you’re a Farr 40 with a crew of 8. You go into a gybe, the bow person takes too long to get the new guy in the jaws of the pole. The gybe ends up being too slow, the boat decelerates and your competition pulls a boat length ahead of you.

What happens next?

Likely some yelling.

The skipper yells from the back of the boat that the bow person needs to move faster to get the pole attached. (It’s always the bow’s fault!)

The bow person gets frustrated and yells back that something was stuck. (It’s fantasy land’s fault!)

Two hours later, when you’re back at the dock, you’re sitting around the cockpit discussing the gybe, trying to remember exactly what happened and why.

The bow person had too much resistance and couldn’t get the guy into the jaws, but where did that resistance come from? Was someone standing on the guy? Did the guy trimmer pull it in too soon? Did the bow person just not pull enough slack forward before the maneuver?

So much happened that day, and now you’re trying to piece together the sequence of events from two hours earlier with 8 different points of view. The bow person feels put on the spot and gets defensive. Everyone’s just a little frustrated and the skipper wants to keep the peace, so you say screw it and go into the club for a drink.

Feedback is Essential

Ultimately, the issue for the team is not whether someone pulled a line too soon or too late. The issue is how the team gave feedback to each other.

Feedback is an essential part of sailing training and coaching. Without it, you can’t improve. But how we give and get feedback determines how well the information is received, understood and implemented. It also plays a major role in how motivated a sailor stays long-term.

There are a few ways that sailors get feedback. If you’re part of a structured team with a coach, you’re (hopefully) getting a proper chalk talk that involves some video, a white board, little magnetized boats, and a lot of bar karate.

But for the rest of the sailing world, feedback–if you get it at all–comes usually in one of two forms:

In-the-moment feedback (often in the form of yelling over the chaos)
Round-robin debriefs

If you’ve sailed long enough, you’ve experienced both of these methods, and you know they have some limitations.

In the scenario above, the skipper yelling from the back of the boat doesn’t take into account what the bow person was actually dealing with in that particular moment or what caused them to be delayed. Stakes are high, and things are moving fast. Which means emotions run high. The bow person feels attacked, and we end up with the perpetual blame game between the front of the boat and the back of the boat.

Round-robin debriefs are certainly calmer, but they rely on memory, which could be fuzzy an hour or two after that gybe. Round-robin debriefs also risk turning into finger-pointing sessions, and when people’s defenses go up, they’re not open to receiving feedback.

When someone’s viewpoint is limited, their feedback is inherently biased.

If you want to take the blame game out of your debriefs and have feedback sessions that actually improve team cohesion, you need to use an unbiased source–video.

Video gives you facts. Video doesn’t rely on memory. Video can be watched when you’re warm, fed and emotions are calm.

Combine video with boat data and GPS tracking, and you suddenly have a powerful tool that tells you not just what happened, but why it happened. It helps sailors understand why their role matters and how their role fits into the system as a whole. It shows you the impact of even tiny mistakes and helps you identify where to focus your training. And–wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles–it could even unite the bow and fantasy land.

But we’ll never give up the bar karate.

Data-Driven Sailing

You can learn more about how to take the bias out of your sailing training in these interviews with some of our favorite coaches and analysts. We learned a ton!

Want a tool that will help you use video and data easily? Schedule an appointment to learn more about Kinetix AI.

הפוסט The Problem with Debriefs in Sailing הופיע לראשונה ב-Kinetix AI.

Technology + Coaching is Powerful Tool for Sailors – Coaches Conversation with Grant Spanhake

Anne Popolizio — Thu, 25 Aug 2022 16:34:45 +0000

When you’re coaching sailing, whether it’s from a coach boat or the stern of a big boat, it’s simply impossible to pay attention to every sailor at all times. You want to give each sailor quality feedback, but human limitations are real. How can coaches overcome this challenge?

According to Grant Spanhake, one of the world’s top sailing coaches, video and technology are the secret to getting the most out of your sailors. Grant recently sat down with Omer to discuss how he uses video and technology in his coaching programs, and how you can incorporate technology to step up your coaching game.

Why Coaches Should Use Video

As Grant points out, using video in your coaching can create a powerful combination that helps accelerate your sailors’ progress.

Traditionally, coaching looked something like this: a sailor does a bad tack. The coach points it out to them after the fact. The sailor tries to remember what they felt during that tack. The sailor goes to do another tack, trying to remember what their coach said, what they felt last time, and what they’re feeling now.

This feedback method relies on:

1. Opinion (the coach’s)

2. Feeling (the sailor’s)

3. Memory (the sailor’s and coach’s)

Memory is a big one here. Memory is limited to what we were paying attention to in the moment. A sailor may have oversteered coming out of a tack, but in the moment, they were paying attention to where their head was in relation to the boom or where their boat was in relation to a competitor. As a result, they’re not fully aware of where their hands and tiller were in space at that moment.

Likewise, a coach is limited by their point of view. If you’re coaching from a coach boat, your point of view is limited by distance. If you’re coaching from the boat, you have 7 other sailors to pay attention to simultaneously (plus other boats on the course, plus yourself–it’s awkward if the coach falls overboard).

Video takes the reliance off of memory, and it takes the opinion out of the equation because it presents the sailor with facts. Most importantly it marries what the sailor felt in the moment with these facts. Tuning the sailor’s feeling to the facts is an essential part of their skills development.

Coaching Powerhouse

We may have grown up with a more traditional teaching style from our coaches, with the coach standing at the front of the room, doing most of the talking and the sailors sitting in neat rows (or not so neat) listening. This top-down teaching method risks the sailors checking out of the debrief and not being fully engaged in their training.

When you incorporate technology into your coaching, you can engage your sailors so they become active participants in their own learning. Video allows the sailors to see for themselves what happened–without relying on memory or the coach’s opinion. Together, you and the sailor can discuss what happened, why they did what they did and what they need to do to improve the maneuver. You and the sailor can set clear goals for the next training session, and then the sailor can practice those objectives with a complete understanding of what they’re working on and why.

As a coach, you want to create a cycle of learning for your sailors that looks something like this:

In this model of teaching, the coach acts as a guide to help the sailors articulate what they observe and understand the why. When the sailors become equal participants in the debrief conversation, their level of understanding and rate of retention skyrockets. When you review together the video and GPS tracks with the synchronized boat data, sailors can see clearly and understand why they oversteered, why they decelerated, or why one side of the course paid off over the other. When sailors feel engaged in their training, understand the why, and are empowered to be active participants in their own training, they can find deeper wells of motivation to push in practice and on the race course. This is how you as a coach can kickstart your sailors’ progress into high gear.

Learn from the Pros

Watch the full interview with Grant to learn how he’s used technology to train and empower his sailors.

Want to level up your coaching with technology? Schedule an appointment to learn more about Kinetix AI.

הפוסט Technology + Coaching is Powerful Tool for Sailors – Coaches Conversation with Grant Spanhake הופיע לראשונה ב-Kinetix AI.

Using Analytics in Sailing – Coaches Conversation with Cyrille Douillet

Anne Popolizio — Mon, 01 Aug 2022 16:26:48 +0000

Data-Driven Sailing

For a long time, data analysis was relegated to the highest levels of our sport. Given how much time and money, the top pro teams put into data collection, hiring professional analysts and hanging out in wind tunnels, it’s no secret that data analysis is the secret to performance improvement. But how can we, the regular folks, incorporate data analysis into our own sailing?

Sailors looking to improve their performance face a lot of challenges. For one, it’s very hard to get accurate, moment-to-moment wind data and that makes it difficult for us to identify causality. Was that acceleration because of your sail trim or did you just hit a puff no one called?

Two, every boat sails a little differently. What are the “shoulds” for your boat in particular? How much twist should your sail have? How deep should you sail downwind? What’s the lowest speed you should tolerate as you soak down before you head back up?

We recently sat down with Cyrille Douillet, one of the top sailing analysts in our sport, to answer this question. He’s worked on 3 America’s Cup campaigns and 4 Volvo Ocean Races, winning 3 of them. When it comes to sailing performance improvement, this man is among the best.

In this interview, Cyrille lays out his process for analyzing and improving sailing performance. As he points out, sailing analysis is part science, part art. You have to marry what the numbers say with what the sailors experience on the water.

What’s his best solution for connecting feel with the data? Video.

Video Keeps It Real

Video gives you objective feedback. It lets you see clearly the parts of your performance that are within your control, i.e. the way you drive, the weight placement, the sail trim.

We were recently analyzing a race with a group of sailors–on the GPS track, you could see clearly that the boat had come out of the tack way too low. The question was why. Did the driver just oversteer?

It turned out no. In looking at the video, it was plain as day – the jib trimmer was a couple seconds too late on the release, which caused the jib to backwind. As soon as it did the boat kicked hard downwind and accelerated. The delayed release wasn’t long, but it was enough to cost the team valuable seconds.

Without the video, relying just on the GPS, the team first assumed that the driver was at fault. But the GPS track merely alerted them to a moment that needed deeper analysis. With the objective feedback of video, the team could see clearly where the issue lay, and now the trimmer has a better understanding of what their timing needs to be in the maneuver.

The added bonus of this: when a sailor understands why they’re doing something a certain way, they will be able to continue to improve their performance on their own.

Learn from the Pros

Watch the full interview with Cyrille to learn how he approaches data analysis with his teams and how you can apply his methods to your own sailing.

Want to step start using video and data to step up your sailing game? Schedule an appointment to learn more about Kinetix AI.

הפוסט Using Analytics in Sailing – Coaches Conversation with Cyrille Douillet הופיע לראשונה ב-Kinetix AI.