Reading your student

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

Two students arrive with the same jump numbers and the same tunnel hours. One needs the drill broken into three pieces and the other needs to be left alone. Working out which is which, quickly, is most of coaching.

The instinct is to sort people into types. It is worth resisting, because a type tells you what somebody supposedly is and gives you nothing to change. Two questions do more work.

Question one: how far into this skill are they, today?

Skill learning moves through stages, and the stage is a property of the skill in front of you, not of the person.

• Early. They are still working out what the movement even is. Attention is fully occupied. They cannot watch anybody else, hold a heading and think about their legs at once.
• Middle. The shape is there and they are refining it. They can take a correction and apply it in the same jump.
• Automatic. It happens without conscious attention, which means they finally have capacity spare for something else.

The reason this matters more than any personality read: a flyer can be automatic head-up and early head-down in the same jump. The same person, ten seconds apart. Ask the stage question about the skill, not about the student.

It also gives you a hard rule for group flying. Proximity, leadership and a second concurrent task all require spare attention, and spare attention is exactly what the automatic stage means. A skill that is not yet automatic should not be flown near other people, because that is the skill that will fall apart when the pressure arrives.

Question two: how loaded are they today?

Independent of stage, the same student varies day to day. Three things load them:

• Anxiety, whether about the jump or about being watched.
• Low confidence in this specific task, which is different from general confidence.
• Too many objectives, which is usually the coach’s fault.

Any one of these means the same response: reduce the demand and increase the structure today. Not cancel, and not push through. Reduce.

What you can actually see

Stress in a novice shows up physically before it shows up in what they say. Fidgeting. Changes in breathing. Yawning or stretching that does not match how tired they are. Going quiet when they were talkative, or talkative when they were quiet.

None of these is proof on its own, and all of them are worth noticing. Ask a question when you see them, rather than deciding what they mean.

That last point has evidence behind it. Researchers who interviewed gymnasts and coaches about the same frightening episode found the two told materially different stories about it. Your read of what is going on inside your student is not reliable. Asking is not soft, it is the accurate method.

Too much adrenaline has a specific effect

Push a novice past a certain level of adrenaline and they hit sensory overload. They stop absorbing information, and anything you add makes it worse rather than better.

This is why the brief before a nervous student’s jump should be shorter than the brief before a settled one, which is the opposite of what most coaches do.

What the fear is actually about

Worth being clear, because it changes what helps.

Most freefly students are not frightened of the ground. They are anxious about performing badly in a group, on camera, with a debrief coming. It is closer to dancing in front of an audience than to standing on a cliff.

That is a well-described situation with a well-described mechanism. A movement that is not yet automatic, performed while being watched and evaluated, gets consciously monitored, and conscious monitoring is what breaks a movement that should run by itself. The student who flies it fine alone and loses it in the group is not weak. They are experiencing the predictable result of doing a not-yet-automatic thing under observation.

Things that help, and they are cheap:

• Name the adrenaline as fuel. Reframing the door spike as useful rather than dangerous changes how it is interpreted, which is more achievable than making it go away.
• A fixed ground routine before boarding. It occupies the mind that would otherwise be rehearsing failure.
• Talk about the process, not the outcome. “Get the level first” rather than “don’t stuff up the dock”.
• Let them speak first in the debrief. It reduces the feeling of being judged from outside.
• Consider debriefing the weakest performance privately. A group review is efficient and it concentrates the evaluative load on whoever flew worst.

Reassurance is not on that list. Telling a nervous flyer they will be fine does very little. Confidence in a specific task is built from specific past successes at that task, which means the useful intervention is usually to give them something they can succeed at.

Readiness is a judgement, not a jump count

A student is ready for something harder when the difficulty sits just above what they can currently handle. The important part is that difficulty is not a property of the jump alone. It is the jump combined with the conditions, the group, the partner, their currency and their state today.

So the same nominal jump is a different task on a windy day with an unfamiliar partner. Jump-count guides in a syllabus are a proxy for a judgement you should be making directly.

This gives you a third option between pressing on and standing down. Hold the skill and reduce the difficulty: smaller group, more altitude, a familiar partner, one objective, a lower fall rate. The student still gets the rep, at a difficulty they can absorb.

Four patterns you will meet

The folk taxonomy of students is useful as a set of patterns to recognise, as long as it does not become a label filed against a person. Recast as what to do:

The one who picks things up quickly. Usually has a body-awareness background and can recall the jump accurately. Give them less instruction and more range. The risk is that they progress faster than their recovery skills.

The one who wants to know how it works. Needs the mechanism, and does better with one focus point at a time. Watch for them getting stuck inside their own head, which is the explicit-monitoring problem again. An analogy usually helps more than another explanation.

The apprehensive one. Better in small groups or one to one, more likely to bail on a jump, and will take more time and money to progress because pressure is hard to manage. Treat that as information about the plan rather than about their potential.

The one who overestimates themselves. Takes on jumps beyond their capability, talks up their performance and plays down their weaknesses, and is hard to give feedback to. This is the pattern with real safety consequences, and the handling is specific: your observation outranks their self-report. Do not negotiate the standard, use the video, and be willing to cap them. Self-assessment is least accurate exactly where skill is lowest.

The question to ask yourself before each jump

Not what type is this person. Rather: which stage is this skill at for them, how loaded are they right now, and what is the functional difficulty of what I am about to send them to do?

Three answers, and between them they tell you what to change.

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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.