Firstly let us remind the main benefit of hiking flat out. IT IS FASTER, you might ask yourself how much faster, below you can see a graph of a boat hiking flat out periodically, the peaks are top speed while hiking flat out, the rest is regular hiking, the average speed difference can reach as much as 2 knots which accumulates to over 20% in boat speed. (This boat has been doing a 30 seconds flat out 30 seconds regular hiking)
Symmetric Pumping
Though we have been discussing much about downwind sailing and ways to go fast, based on our experience the big money in sailing is on the runs, so there is always room for more gains to be made.
Recognising Shifts
It is truly incredible the number of projects we have worked on where the sailors do not know how to recognise headers and lifts. When we ask them what happened to the wind during a training run, they can get it very wrong, and when we ask them what happened during a race, their impression is often at odds with reality, and completely wrong.
Team Work
We have recently completed the national games in Taiwan with a huge success. Our team won 7 out of 8 gold medals and a total of 16 medals out of 21 in the entire event.
Coaching to Win
We've been engaged in several interesting projects lately. We are writing this blog to illustrate the effects of prioritising the right aspects of sailing when coaching, and also to contrast the position of a sailor when subject to a "reactive" coach, when they coach according to conditions and squad behaviour, rather than a proactive coach who coach with certain minimum expectations. We will neither name the class nor the country, because that's irrelevant. What we will do is tell the story.
Training Camp Methods, Goals and Philosophies
Operating a Coaching Business such as ours is a widespread business. Our operational services include Coaching, Coach Training, Consultancy, Design input, and running training camps. In everything that we do, our goals are to be the best that we can, and certainly the best in the business. Essentially we are competitive people, but we are also fun loving people. Combining the two facets is essential to gain success - as soon as we can get positive people hungry to succeed, anything is possible!
Aggression Pays, Sometimes
We have all read copious amounts of wisdom about sailing being a matter of coaxing the boat through various conditions, listening to what she wants to do and then using some kind of gentle psychic powers to magically steam ahead of all the opposition and win. This blog is about the brutal truth. Understanding... Continue Reading →
The Diamond
A major source of beginning to understand tactics is dealt with by Toplevel sailing as tactics for the first half of the beat (when the boats are diverging into a wider area, as against tactics when the boats are converging into the tiny area around the mark.
Shifts and Compass
In order to sail the beat as quickly as we can we need to keep the best average VMG that we can. In this blog we will discuss the influence of shifts on our VMG and the use of a compass to improve our tactical decision making
Squad or not?
Top sailors spend a lot of time practicing and training on their own. This is against so many “words of wisdom” that the former ISAF give to emerging nations. In fact we can see that young sailors who spend a lot of time training alone are often successful.
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