Briefing a coached jump

Study material for a developing coach. It confers no rating and no authority to assess.

The brief is where most coached jumps are won or lost, and the failure is almost never that the coach did not know enough. It is that the student could not carry what they were given into freefall.

Think about the actual conditions. Your student has somewhere around forty to sixty seconds of working time, adrenaline running high, a camera pointed at them, and the knowledge that everything they do will be reviewed afterwards. Working memory holds about four items on the ground and fewer than that in the door. A brief that assumes otherwise is a brief that gets forgotten.

The adrenaline is the part coaches consistently underestimate. Push a novice past a certain level of it and the result is sensory overload: they stop taking information in, and the detail you added walking to the aircraft crowds out what mattered.

Two practical rules follow. The brief should be lighter than feels right. And the last thing said before boarding should be the most important thing, not the newest thing you thought of.

Plan the breakoff first, then work backwards

This is the most portable habit in freefly coaching and it belongs at the start of every plan.

Decide the breakoff altitude, the separation plan, who goes where and what happens if it goes wrong. Then build the working part of the jump backwards from there until you reach the exit. The alternative, planning the fun bit and bolting a breakoff onto the end, produces jumps that run out of altitude in the middle of the interesting part, which is exactly when nobody wants to stop.

It also sets the student’s priorities correctly on the ground. The first thing they heard you plan was how the jump ends safely.

Triage before you write

Sort everything you could say into must know, should know and could know. Only must-know goes in the brief. Should-know belongs in ground school or the debrief; could-know belongs on the drive home.

Be ruthless here. Most over-long briefings are correct and unusable.

Chunk the dive into a few named phases

Do not give a flat list of movements. Give three or four named phases, each containing its movements.

The naming is not cosmetic. Movement sequences are stored hierarchically, and a name gives the student a re-entry point. A student who blanks mid-dive and has a flat list of eleven items has lost the jump. A student who blanks and remembers there are four phases can pick up at the start of the next one.

So: exit and set up, first working block, second working block, breakoff. Name them, brief them in order, and let the detail sit inside each name.

Tie cues to things they can see, not to counts

This is the single most useful piece of memory science for a coach.

Remembering to do something at the right future moment is its own kind of memory, and it works far better when the trigger is an event you will actually perceive than when it is a time you have to track. Vivid triggers retrieve better than subtle ones.

In practice, prefer cues like these:

• “When the coach turns to face you, start the approach.”
• “When you see level with my shoulders, stop closing.”
• “When the audible goes, you are already turning.”

Over cues like these:

• “About twenty seconds in, start the approach.”
• “Count to five, then stop.”

A count competes for the same attention the flying needs. A visible event does not.

Dirt dive it physically, and keep the whole pattern

The dirt dive is a memory intervention, not a warm-up. Dancers who physically rehearse choreography at low intensity, moving through the full spatial pattern rather than talking it through, perform better afterwards than dancers who do not. That is the closest thing in the research to what a dirt dive is, and it argues for keeping the movement and the geometry rather than letting it collapse into a conversation.

Which means: stand up, move, use the space, walk the exit, hold the positions, turn the way you will actually turn. Low intensity is fine. Skipping the movement is not.

Run it from climb-out to breakoff, three times. If anybody looks unsure, run it again. This is contributed practice from an experienced coach and it lines up with everything above, so treat the three-times habit as the floor rather than the target.

Use mental rehearsal properly

Mental rehearsal works, and it works better with a few specific conditions attached.

• Real speed. Rehearse at the pace the jump will happen, not in slow motion.
• Critical cues. Rehearse the cues that matter, not a general impression of the dive.
• As many senses as you can. What it will look like, what the air will feel like, the noise.
• Include the nerves. Rehearsing a calm version of a jump that will not feel calm builds the wrong expectation. Let them imagine the door as it will actually feel.
• Choose the viewpoint deliberately. First person for how something should feel, third person for how a position should look.

Video during the briefing helps here, and this is the part coaches often miss: footage in the brief improves the student’s ability to rehearse the movement mentally, which is a different job from footage in the debrief. Both are useful and they are not substitutes for one another.

Close the loop before boarding

Have the student brief it back to you, in their own words, without prompting.

Do it because what you said and what they heard are different sentences, and this is the cheapest way to find the gap while it is still fixable. Do it also because the act of retrieving the plan strengthens their memory of it more than hearing you repeat it would.

What they cannot tell you back is your finding. Fix that item, and consider whether the brief was carrying too much.

One objective

One declared objective per jump, with the success criteria stated. One movement skill or one transition family.

The reasoning is capacity again. A jump carrying three new objectives teaches none of them well and spends attention that altitude awareness needs. It also makes the debrief impossible to run cleanly, because nobody can tell which of the three things went wrong first.

Repetition across a day beats variety. Changing too much between jumps works against the settling that turns a movement into something automatic.

The shape of a coached jump

Pulling it together, the sequence that works:

1. State the aim of the day and the aim of this jump.
2. Plan the breakoff and work backwards.
3. Triage the material, then brief three or four named phases.
4. Give cues tied to visible events.
5. Dirt dive it physically, climb-out to breakoff, three times.
6. Mental rehearsal at real speed, with the nerves included.
7. Student briefs it back.
8. Gear checks, then board.

None of this is expensive. All of it is cheaper than a wasted jump.

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Advisory, educational content. Techniques and standards are guides, and the authority to train and assess belongs to your national federation and your drop zone. Some material on this page is drawn from coach-development notes contributed by freefly coach Elliot Ng.