Welcome to the Focus Lounge
We’re not trying to re-invent the wheel here, but we’d like to give you a structured tool to enhance a fundamental part of the sailing session of our athletes: the cooldown.
Let’s discover it.
As general speeching, the cool-down phase is the end of the training session -no matter the sport involved-, with the purpose of bringing back to normal many physiological parameters of our body.
During this phase, the athletes should slow down, performing a soft aerobic activity to gently reduce the heartbeat and faster the recovery of the cardiovascular system, while restoring other major functions of their bodies. At least, this is what decades of training methodology were telling us.
The effective benefit of the cool-down after exercise is, actually, a hot topic in sports science.
There is a conflicting body of evidence about this subject, with many factors affecting it (cool-down protocol, individual differences, nature of the prior exercise, and so on).
We’ll go deeper on this subject in an upcoming article soon.
Besides the uncertain physiological effects of a well-performed cooldown, though, we should consider the psychological aspect of it as well.
During the session on the water, our athletes have performed many technical gestures and applied different tactics.
At the end of this, their brains need a resume of what they did good or wrong, why they ended by doing it, and how they could do it better or differently. In one word, they need feedback. The very end of the training session results to be the best time for it.
As coaches, we all know how hard is to keep the guys a few minutes more at the end of the training to talk to them and explain our view.
Here is why we want to introduce you to the Focus Lounge concept.
First of all, the Focus Lounge is a place. In particular, the Focus lounge has to be a defined place where the athletes go after the storage of the boats.
It could be a room, a patio, or even a small grass field, as long as it is sheltered and isolated.
In this lounge, the athletes should meet the coach and start doing a proper cooldown by performing a soft aerobic exercise, a few breathing exercises, and a proper dynamic and static stretching routine.
In the meantime, the coach should give them her/his feedback, starting from an overview of the fleet’s behavior, and ending with specific feedback for each of the athletes.
The coach should end up highlighting the good things each athlete has performed, let her/him fix them in the memory before leaving the club.
This way to set up the cool-down phase achieves multiple results:
As any kind of training tool, we should set it up and use it as often as we can.
To introduce it properly, and get the most out of it, we should keep in mind these simple rules:
It could seem a lot to set up, but once we’ve found the right spot, we just need to organize it.
We need to stay consistent with this. Stick with it, and you’ll see the athletes looking for it soon!
The power of this habit will surprise you.
Not sure about the right cool-down routine your athletes should follow?
No problem, join our Academy, and we’ll give you the exact blueprint for it, besides so many more content.
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