Tuesday 10 February 2015

The devil in me...


Coaching and training someone in my opinion are separate.

In Paraclimbing, you coach, mindful of the climber's condition or disability. But to train and push someone physically, you have to clearly separate current inability from disability and have the courage to communicate that to the climber.

Like any climber looking to increase their climbing performance, paraclimbers need to improve through hard work with a clear focus on what's going on. Seems obvious?

Try giving a lovely woman with MS a motivational prompt (bollocking) for not pulling hard enough on a boulder problem or for confusing her condition and ligitimate fear of MS induced fatigue with the same feeling of training fatigue at a busy climbing wall with onlookers looking over pitifully at your client and then at you as if your the devil!

"I pity the fool that pity has fooled..."

Working with disabilities teaches you to quickly "see the person, not the disability" and that's obvious, but remembering to train the athlete with integrity and pushing them for change or to risk for improvement is the hard part.

Coaching someone to risk for success who has lost a lot, a part of their body, requires empathy of the highest level with an understanding that to risk losing again could just end them. But this is separate from training them.

Anyway...


Referrals from clients:



"...This training season I decided to get all the help I can to speed up my improvement. I needed guidance to work towards my goals in long term. I also needed more vision and opinions about my exercises and weak links. I am glad I can share my training with Mark..." (Ville Mustonen, Finland)


" I met Mark in Glen Nevis on his return to climbing to check out some lines he had in mind for me, I wasn't really training at this point but after a day or two talking and training with him I had a much more structured idea of what to do to improve and I did" (Kev Shields)