The HAM Plan

Cueing and Correcting: Acknowledgment

Acknowledgment of improvement or effort is a crucial teaching tool that can be just as useful as correcting.

What can acknowledgment do? What pitfalls appear when we misuse acknowledgment while coaching?

🎯 Make your acknowledgments specific. What improved and by how much?

🥪 Use half of the constructive criticism sandwich. “That was better, but try to jump a little higher.”

🕵️‍♂️ Pay attention to your athlete’s effort. “I liked how hard you pushed on that last set of pull-ups, great work.”

🎉 Avoid gratuitous acknowledgment or using acknowledgment terms like filler words. Saying “good” to every rep doesn’t help.

🏆 Use specific acknowledgment when assessing your best movers and athletes to reinforce sound movement patterns.

🗺 Specifically, acknowledge more than movement. Acknowledge how well an athlete paced, how they handled a set, or what you thought of their effort.

👥 Balance individual acknowledgment with “global” acknowledgment. Global acknowledgment addresses a group of athletes as a whole. Continue working on keeping global acknowledgment specific and direct. “I like what I saw on everyone’s squat depth, but I want to practice a few more reps before moving on.

Partner Workouts

We’ve added more partner workouts and partner workout options to our Affiliate programming. Partner workouts can add an exciting twist to regular group classes, but we want to keep a few things in mind.

We need to balance the individual needs of each athlete while understanding that some athletes don’t want to let a partner dictate their daily fitness routine.

📣 Communicate the intent of your programming clearly and constantly keep your athletes updated on upcoming unique workouts.

📏Use partner workouts sparingly and try to give your athletes as much lead time as possible, so they know when the partner workout is coming.

💪Occasionally provide a partner option for an individual workout. Again, AMRAPs work while in these cases because the partner option won’t overrun your class timeline.

📆 Saturday’s and Sunday’s work well for partner workouts due to reduced class schedules and athlete’s work schedules.

🧮 Consider workouts that easily partition into equal reps for partners. For example, sets of 5’s, 10’s, and 15’s allow athletes to maintain intensity without creating too much downtime for the resting partner.

👥 Use the specific warm-up to test out a “prove-it” round to ensure that partners have similar fitness capacities.

⏱ If you have a mismatched pair, have them alternate work in time-bound intervals instead of reps. This way, both athletes work relative to their ability without causing disproportionate rest intervals.

🎟 Don’t ostracize athletes who don’t want to participate in partner workouts. Have a plan for individual workout options