In the technology press this week was the news that Facebook has suffered a drop in use in the UK, for the second month in succession. I use Facebook, mainly as a tool to stay in touch with friends and to distribute links to this blog, and I have to say that I too have experienced a little fatigue in using it. Not enough to stop though. I also use Twitter (@nwconditioning) and Linkedin, both of these I use more as a strength and conditioning coach/business owner and definitely find I get more from these two tools.
The strength and conditioning roundtable on Linkedin has been useful for coaches to share ideas and debate certain topics. Linkedin has a fairly large strength and conditioning community to connect with but I don’t find it’s format especially intuitive and so the major use I get from it is to post my blogs to it. I’m also not a huge fan the feature allowing you to see who’s viewed your page, it definitely restricts the amount I browse on there.
By far and away the tool I use most though is Twitter. If you pick your followers wisely, the content you can be directed to takes a lot of time out of browsing for it yourself. That’s what I use it for. There’s a of posts on there that I’m not fussed about reading but after using for a little while you can identify those who post things you find useful and use the list feature. I use it as a bit of a filter. In terms of tweets, I’m quite targeted about what I put on there, if I find something I think is useful for people to see then I’ll post it or retweet it. I also use it to get some advice such as info certain products or text books and to occasionally mention something I’m doing to maintain activity on the site.
To be honest though, I think you get more out of a 5 minute chat with another coach rather than from 140 characters at a time, which is one reason I’m looking forward to the UKSCA conference this weekend. I try to make sure that social networking via the internet doesn’t detract from actual face to face networking and try to meet up with a couple of other coaches each month to share ideas and grow my network. I also think Skype is a great tool that I’m hoping to use more for networking so if any coaches reading this fancy a Skype chat anytime just give me a shout (Skype name is neilwelch).
With the Vancouver winter olympics a matter of months away, British winter sports athletes are hard at work training and competing in preparation for a shot of a medal at the games. But with a lack of some of the weather and facilities necessary for many of the sports, it’s often a wonder how a team is put together. The British womens bobsleigh team is an off the beaten track example of how it is done.
Nicola Minichello is a former British heptathlete and driver of GB1 since the 2003/2004 season. Last summer she began a search to improve the strength of the national squad. A usual course of action in high profile professional sport would be to scout clubs and discuss with coaches regarding the potential of up and coming juniors or high performing competitors already within the sport. For obvious reasons this method is not possible in bobsleigh. Instead, Minichello created a list of athletes that she identified, from rankings within other sports and checked their stats using wikipedia and other profile pages, as potentially talented sledders. She then contacted many of those on her list using facebook. This show great ingenuity as a lot of the winter sports aren’t able to benefit from the talent ID schemes run by UKsport…it’s also successful. Minichello and brakewoman Gillian Cooke were crowned world champions in February and the squad are very hopeful of a medal in Vancouver.
Britain has an abundance of talented athletes and while in some sports many miss out on the world stage in their first choice sport by the narrowest of margins, they could foreseeably succeed in other sports they may not have previously considered. The education of athletes that there may be other sports at which they may excel, and the development of pathways to make the transition as smooth as possible may well see Britain become even more competitive in future winter olympics.
My first foray into the world of business and what an excellent one it was. This one day conference brought by IBM and the Telegraph business club offered an insight into future economic realities, communications and technology, all of which I think hold relevancy in the strength and conditioning industry. Presenters included Richard Farleigh of dragons den fame and Euan Semple a leading advisor on social computing for the business world, both of whom I was very impressed by.
Social media was probably the predominant discussion topic and the its’ benefits to business were highlighted by the majority of speakers. This led me to some research, I’m a regular Facebook and Twitter (follow me at nwconditioning) user, but I found limited evidence to suggest this is common in the UK S+C community. The UKSCA has a Facebook page but activity on there is limited, basically restricted to being an extension of the website.
The idea of real time learning was put forward as being a major benefit of social media and it is one coaches could really benefit from. Instead of trawling numerous journals looking for a particular piece of info, by posting to a coaches network someone who may be particularly strong in one field may be able to point you more easily in the right direction. I’m not for one minute suggesting that this should replace the need for coaches to read the literature for themselves, in the interest of evidence based practice this should always be the case. It could though make the process of searching for that one piece of information we know we read somewhere but can’t quite remember where that little bit easier. Either that or a little more work on short term memory is required.
