Cycle Coaching

bradman

I'm interested in learning more about cycle coaching for various reasons including:
a) From a personal point of view, to increase my fitness
b) As a possible way of supplementing income, by training others.

That being the case, please can anyone assist me by answering the following questions:
a) What options/qualifications are there? What are the pros and cons of each?
b) What job opportunities are there?

Regards.

synchronicity

Aren't most coaches fat cause they never actually participate in the training regime?
Seems to be the only difference between them & personal trainers. :P

BeaconRuth

bradman wrote:

a) What options/qualifications are there? What are the pros and cons of each?
b) What job opportunities are there?

If you are talking about cycle coaching specifically as opposed to any general academic sports-science type courses or generalist personal trainer courses then there are very few options in the UK. You are limited to the coaching courses run by British Cycling or those run by the Association of British Cycle Coaches.

On the BC coaching courses you must start at 'Level 2' which concerns coaching youngsters on school playing fields and has nothing to do with performance coaching of individuals (whether children or adults). You are obliged to complete two Level 2 courses (which will probably take a year as a minimum) before progressing to the Level 3 where you can start getting into performance coaching on a one to one basis.

The ABCC course is a correspondence course with a few practical elements thrown in which covers all the basics. You can find out more from the ABCC website.

I think it's fair to say that unless you're going to be employed by BC as a cycling coach (and there probably are some paid opportunities to get involved with things like Go-Ride and the talent team coaching although coaching Olympic champions might be a little more demanding!) then you make your own 'job opportunities'. What it boils down to is you find people who will pay you to coach them.

The other thing you might want to look at is becoming a Bikeability instructor. There seems to be quite some demand for people prepared to help roll out this type of road-safety training to school children. If my understanding is correct this is mainly in the hands of local authorities so it might be worth enquiring of your local education or sport and leisure departments.

Ruth

Alex_Simmons/RST

Nice answer.

It's sort of similar here in Australia - the cycle coaching courses are run by Cycling Australia but all are ultimately funded by the Federal Govt and as such there are a lot of specific elements included for due diligence purposes - like code of conduct, awareness of doping etc. The actual "coaching" element is relatively minor and the courses serve really as an introduction only. The US seem to be reasonably organised and have developed, for instance, a specific module for power based training.

So unless you score a job with a sports institute, for the most part coaching is like most other personal service small businesses. You run the business.

synchronicity

Two really great replies to offset my initially dumb reply.

I can advise you though that starting a business is extremely difficult. It'll take 1-3 years to get the ball rolling.