Background: The constraints-led approach was first proposed to capture how movement solutions are shaped and organised without being prescribed. It has since been extended as a suitable framework for ...informing coaching practice. The contemporary view of the role of the coach in the constraints-led approach characterises them as a monitor and manipulator of constraints on the learner. In essence, the coach is a designer whose role is to shape constraints such that practice consistently improves the learner's capabilities to perform in a range of different contexts. This objective reflects what the coach aims to establish with the learner - an increased capability to adapt to new circumstances, such as improved performance in a competition or better learning in a training camp. Even if constraints manipulation performed by a coach is not necessarily prescriptive, this viewpoint suggests the effective coach acts as a change agent, who, through constraint manipulation, can orchestrate the learning process. Arguably, the conceptualisation of the coach as a constraints manipulator, has typically been misinterpreted as meaning that they are relatively disengaged (and at worst absented) in the learning process where their primary role is the gate keeper to variability in constraints and behaviour.
Aims: Our aim is to re-emphasise the role of the coach in the constraints-led approach by exploring the idea that the coach and the learner(s) together, situated in a learning environment, constitute a learning system. Here, the coach forms a co-adaptive relationship with the learner, making adjustments to constraints on practice based on emergent relation dependent information, where the learner and coach mutually constrain each other's behaviour. In doing so, the coach and athlete form temporary couplings from which new information and opportunities for action, learning, and creative behaviours can form. An important consequence of this reconceptualisation is that emergent, adaptive, and creative actions are somehow distributed across the coach-athlete social system.
Implications: It is neither the learner nor the coach, but, the processes shaping their interactions that should be at the heart of applying the constraints-led approach. For effective coaching, it is essential that the coach is tuned in to the learner's current capabilities and skill level and adapts practice accordingly. In doing so, setting up constraints to interact in a manner informed by representative design facilitates opportunities to learn to adapt skills that can support performance and learning. Hence, representative task design is not only crucial for athletes' learning, but for the coach's learning as well.
Coaches are a key influence of athletes’ body image, but often feel ill-equipped to address body image concerns and can perpetuate harmful body ideals. Limited research has investigated coaches’ ...attitudes and beliefs and few effective resources are available. The current study explored coaches’ perspectives of body image among girls in sport, as well as their preferences for body image interventions. Thirty-four coaches (41% women; Mage=31.6 yrs; SD=10.5) from France, India, Japan, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and the United States took part in semi-structured focus groups and completed an online survey. Template analysis of survey and focus group data resulted in eight first-order themes grouped under three categories: (1) perspectives of body image among girls in sport (objectification and surveillance, impact of puberty, the role of the coach); (2) preferences for intervention design (content of the intervention, accessibility of the intervention, incentives for taking part); and (3) cross-cultural considerations (acknowledging your privilege, cultural and societal norms). Two integrative themes were defined: (1) girls’ disengagement from sport and (2) the role of community. Coaches perceived body image to be a significant barrier for girls in sport and a need to address this in a formal and accessible intervention.
•Coaches are often underrepresented in research on body image in sport.•Thirty-four coaches from six countries were consulted via focus groups and mixed method surveys.•Coaches were partially aware of athletes’ body image concerns, but struggled to address them.•Coaches identified a need for an accessible intervention targeted at upskilling coaches.•Findings and existing literature will be used to develop a novel intervention for coaches.
Background: Coach education discourse has largely suppressed learners' involvement in learning. To address this, there have been calls for more humanistic approaches to form the basis of formal ...learning programmes. However, there remains a paucity of research that has investigated what works and why when it comes to the impact of these programmes.
Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact a theoretically informed learning programme had on coaches' ownership of, and feelings towards, being engaged in their learning, and how this impacted their subsequent practice. The significance of this work lies in providing evidence that extends current knowledge and understanding of how alternative forms of coach education can be effectively constructed and delivered.
Methods: Three coaches, who worked in recreational coaching contexts, agreed to take part in this study. There were two elements to the methods. First, the development and implementation of a coach education programme was reported in a series of stages. To capture data on programme impact, multiple and mixed data collection methods including interviews and observations were employed. Qualitative data were analysed abductively and quantitative data descriptively.
Findings: Three themes were identified related to the educational concepts espoused by Freire. These were (1) freedom to learn, (2) feeling cared for, and (3) becoming (or not becoming) more reflexive. Quantitative data highlighted where this led to changes in the observable aspects of coaches' practices.
Conclusion: The current study provides some initial evidence suggesting that when coaches are given freedom to learn, feel cared for, and in some cases, think reflexively about their practice, they have a positive learning experience. Further, and while we cannot say for certain, this approach does seem to lead to changes in coaches' behaviour and practice in line with the area of their coaching they had chosen to develop.
The rapid increase of the aging population is pushing many national governments to reshape retirement legislation in order to extend older adults' working life. Once retired, older adults can be ...invaluable resources for the community as family carers, as volunteers, or by returning to work. Healthy aging is one of the main conditions for being able to work longer and being active after retirement. The latter, indeed, represents a very sensitive life transition, which can entail psychological and social difficulties. Interventions for promoting older workers' health and well-being and supporting the transition to retirement are on the top of the policy agenda of most European countries. Recently, computer-based and digital health interventions have been seen as promising means to reach this purpose.
This systematic literature review aimed to explore studies on digital health coaching programs for older workers that followed a user-centered design approach and evaluated their effectiveness in providing older adults with guidance for adopting a healthy lifestyle and being active in the community.
The search identified 1931 papers, and 2 relevant articles were selected by applying specific eligibility criteria.
To our knowledge, only few digital health coaching programs have targeted the population of older workers to date; there is an insufficient number of studies on the efficacy of such programs. The results show the difficulties of assessing the efficacy of digital coaching itself and with respect to older employees. The 2 studies suggest that digital health programs for workplaces can improve various aspects of older employees' well-being; however, they considered health mainly from a physical perspective and neglected contextual, social, psychological, and cultural factors that can influence older workers' health and general well-being. Future digital health coaching programs should adopt the healthy aging paradigm as a multidimensional lens for interpreting the impact of eHealth technology on aging and retirement. The literature around this issue remains at an embryonic state, and this gap needs to be filled by further investigations that apply a user-centered approach for designing the technology, test innovative research methodologies, and adopt new technical solutions for high-quality interaction design.
Further digital health coaching programs aimed at supporting healthy and active living for older workers and retirees are necessary. The user-centered design approach is recommended in order to fully address the users' health needs and the technological requirements throughout development. Moreover, the healthy aging perspective allows inclusion of physical, social, and psychological factors influencing the transition from work to retirement, as well as the experiences and interactions of individuals with the technology.
Large-scale coach education programmes have been developed in many countries, and are presented as playing a key role in the development of coaches and the promotion of high standards. Unfortunately, ...however, coaches often perceive that the current system of formal coach education fails to meet their needs. Perhaps as a result, the majority of their development is personally perceived to take place via informal and non-formal means. Appropriately, therefore, there has been an increasing focus within the coaching literature on the social aspects of learning, with social constructivist perspectives receiving particular attention. Reflecting this appropriate focus, this article explores some of the potential opportunities and threats that social learning methods, such as Communities of Practice (CoP), present for coach developers. In tandem, we outline how all coaches are influenced by a set of pre-existing beliefs, attitudes and dispositions, which are largely tempered by their experiences and interactions both with and within their social 'milieu'. We argue that, at the very least, we need to begin to understand these constructs and, if we do, the potential for coach developers to manipulate and exploit them is obvious. In conclusion, it is highlighted that whilst offering inherent challenges, CoPs and other social learning methods provide coach developers with a great opportunity and legitimate tool to change coach behaviour and raise coaching standards. Perhaps paradoxically, we also propose that formal coach education may still have a vital role to play in this process.
In part one of this paper, Stoszkowski and Collins showed that shared online blogs were a useful tool to structure and support the informal learning of a cohort of final year undergraduate sports ...coaching students. The aim of the present study was to offer insight into student coaches' perceptions of their use and experiences of structured group blogging for reflection and learning. Twenty-three student coaches (5 females, 18 males), purposely sampled from the original study, took part in four semi-structured focus group interviews. Interview data were inductively analysed. Student coaches were generally very positive about their learning experiences and the pedagogical approach employed. This was especially apparent in terms of perceived increases in levels of reflection, knowledge acquisition and improvements in coaching practice; changes corroborated by the data presented in part one. A range of reasons emerged for these outcomes, alongside several potential limiters of engagement in shared group blogging as a learning endeavour. Whilst these findings support recent, and growing proposals to systematically incorporate Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs into coach education pedagogy, several key considerations for the process of using such tools are outlined. Finally, the implications for coach educators are discussed.
The study explores how internal coaches working in the HE sector manage the interplay of individual change and organisational change, and the implications for undertaking a change agency role during ...the coaching process. It is a qualitative study using constructivist grounded theory. The context for the research is Higher Education institutions operating internal coaching and mentoring services. The research offers a conceptual framework for how internal coaching supports organisational change, integrating three models constructed from the findings: the wayfaring organisational change model, the coach as change mediator model, and the coaching fulcrum model.
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