Climbing Coach

I have been busy trying to put more content on Snowdonia Mountain Guides website in the form of articles that I think will be of help to climbers. I have started off with a variety of basic articles on trad climbing which are available on the resources pages of the site.

These now include:

Buying Your First Climbing Rack

Rock Climbing in Snowdonia

Beginners Rock Climbing Article: Placing Wires

Beginners Rock Climbing Article: Placing Hexes

Beginners Rock Climbing Article: Placing Camming Devices

I have also redesigned North Wales Rock, the idea is to offer links to courses from providers other than myself. I haven’t finished it but at the moment the site also links to all the courses I offer on Snowdonia Mountain Guides. If you run a coaching or climbing business in North Wales and would like to have some links to your site then contact via here. I am charging £50 a year for as many courses as you wish to advertise and I will be adding a banner advertisement as well. Your money will be spent on me adding more content on North Wales Rock Climbing destinations to help boost the site and help your SEO ranking in the process.

We have just gone mobile for logging indoor sessions. The new mobile app will work on the a variety of mobile devices iPhone, Andriod and a latest blackberry’s (See table here, green is for go and red is for no). The app works by caching the neccessary files and code and storing the data on the phone allowing you to update the database one session at a time via the upload page. For the time being the service is going to be free, however I might charge at some point in the future as I need to pay for my time to develop this app, iCoach online will always remain free.

To get the app working you need to visit this page when you have a good wifi reception and allow your phone a minute upload the pages it needs. You can then follow the on screen commands to set the device up with your username and password. You will also need to save the page to your home screen. On an Apple iOS device this is done by tapping on the share icon on the bottom of the browser screen and selecting and clicking on “add to home screen” button. Once you have done this the app will work online and offline. I have yet to put a logo online for your homescreen.

Logging sessions with the device is easy it will even count time for you and you can use other apps at the same time, the only thing you cannot do is close the browser once you haver started the session. As you will loose all the data already logged. It is still in BETA stage so expect a few bugs but I think I have ironed out all the major problems. If you use the app please email me as it would be great to hear how it worked for you or not!

Having nearly finished the iCoach Climbing mobile logbook app, I took some time to put together the ePub/Kindle version of my Effective Coaching: The Coaching Process for Climbing Instructors. Which is now happily online there is a link to a full run down of the book here.

You can see the kindle version on Amazon which cost £8.04 on Kindle and for iPad it cost £7.99.

I have been busy working on the iCoach mobile app and now need some people to test it out on different mobile devices. You first off need to be a registered user on iCoach Climbing secondly the device has to be compatible with webSQL, there is a handy table here (Green denotes support).

I have already tested the device on iPhone and iPad, so Andriod and Blackberry is what I am interested in exploring. Get in contact with me here.

I have written a full review on my new eBook, Effective Coaching: The Coaching Process for Climbing Instructors. My full run down on the book is on my life in the vertical blog rather than this coaching one.

If you are a coach I am sure there are things in this book that will help you improve your coaching game. Its a perfect companion for my first book How To Climb Harder.

As well as launching my new book on Effective Coaching for climbing Instructors. I also decided to put together a coaching wiki that should be of use to climbers, coaches and instructors alike. The hope is that it will grow like a wiki through user generated content.

I am off trying to climb in the South West for a few days, but put it on line although at present I have only just started writing the Mental Skill section. If you are a coach and have some subject you want to share your ideas and thoughts about than hopefully you’ll get involved.

The site is found here iCoach Climbing Coaching Wiki.

I have also started tinkering with some code to make an offline icoach logging app for Andriod, Blackberry and iOS devices. Hopefully in a month I should be able to release this as a beta. However I am going to charge for this service, maybe £2. If you think you’d be interested in this then please get in touch. I think I need to charge as it is a site add on and I’d like to recoup some of the development costs.

As well as having a rewarding day getting a girl in a wheelchair to climb up a wall at work this morning. I also managed to get my new book, Effective Coaching: The Coaching Process for Climbing Instructors to go live in the iBookstore. So it is now available for iPad’s.

Really chuffed with it, hopefully you like it too. If you do buy the book as either an iBook or kindle edition when it comes out, it really helps to sell the books if you can take the time to write a review when you have finished.

I have over the years written on many coaching related subjects on this blog. However I have always looked for the enxt thing in terms of technology and ways to help people get hold of the information. I am also a business owner fighting the good fight against google rankings and as they say content is king.

As such I have decided to write a few more article length article over on my Snowdonia Mountain Guides website. I have also been using various photos and images from How to Climd Harder to illustrate them after all Pesda and I have the copyright.

So the first two articles are on totally different subjects, the first is one for walkers and is a Beginners Guide to Climbing/Walking up Snowdon. The second is one on what to consider when you are buying your first climbing rack.

I am also working on another resource for iCoach, when I get hte bare bones together I will share it with the world but for now if you’d like a magazine format feed reader for climbing related blogs. It works like a newspaper in that the stories only stay for 24 hours and then are gone. If you have an ipad or tablet I’d be keen to see what you think of Vertical life magazine.

I have been very busy over these winter months tapping away on the computer to put the finishing touches to another eBook I am working on about the coaching process for climbing instructors. In a way it is aimed at being a resource for climbing coaches when it comes to skill acquisition and general processes for coaching. It covers many models for both UKCC coaching and some of the things taught in US instructor/guide courses in particular WEA programme that I delivered when in South America a few years back.

The books main themes are:

1. What is Coaching
2. Understanding How We Learn
3. How Anxiety can disrupt Learning
4. Teaching Models: How to Effectively Coach a Skill
5. Advanced Coaching – Communication, Developing Teams, Leadership, Cohesion, Coach-Athlete interactions, Legal and Moral issues and Child protection.
6. Reflective Practice.

Hopefully the book will come out next month. Although there is a potential problem in that I have shown the document to the Mountain Training Boards to see if they would wish to endorse the book for their new coaching awards due out later this year. If they do then this might delay the publication, as the cogs of power tend to turn slowly.

I am very lucky with my work I get to help all sorts of people try and reach their own goals. A few months back I started offering advice to a friend via facebook in the main where we exchanged regular messages and she would ask for help with specific aspects of her climbing. As she lives away from north wales it made facebook and phone conversations some of the most useful.

What was really exciting for me is that she was involved with high level competition and has been getting invloved with the GB team training. When she comes to me I often have to think outside my normal box and find ways for her to focus her training on specific weaknesses. The first was her pressing out a long way to a hold. So I got her using a theraband to work out her shoulders.

I met with her at the beacon today and was glad to hear that the shoulder work has really helped her out with this specific weakness. Her next problem was developing and using power, so after a bit of a warm up we look at ways she can practice powerful moves. In particualr she had to work on the fluidity, turning it into on long flowing movement. I also suggested that she anticipates the next move by getting her to hold a position close to where her foot needs to be on the next move rather than let her body swing out having made the move.

I look forward to hearing back from her in a couple of weeks to see how its gone. It is a very informal coaching relationship but one that is interesting for me and hopefully helpful for her. She also had this finger massage device, although it was more like some medieval object of torture, but it seems to work.

A finger massager or something out of 50 shades?