Principles of instruction for freefly coaches

Study material for a developing coach. It confers no rating and no authority to assess. In Australia the Freefly Coach approval is made by the Australian Parachute Federation on a chief instructor’s recommendation, against the federation’s own assessment. Treat this as preparation for that, and for the judgement of the people who sign it.

Flying well and coaching well are different skills. A flyer who has never had to break a movement into pieces for somebody who cannot do it yet is starting from zero, and the fact that they fly beautifully is not much help on day one.

This page covers the instructional fundamentals. The Australian Parachute Federation’s coach assessment tests them in their own right, separately from flying skill and separately from regulations, which is a good signal that the sport treats them as real content rather than common sense.

Preparation is the first principle

Everything else rests on it. A coach who has planned the session knows what the objective is, what the student needs to know before boarding, what the failure modes are, and what they will do if the weather changes. A coach who has not planned improvises, and improvising is fine in a bar and poor in a discipline where the mistakes hurt.

Preparation is also visible to the student, and that matters more than it sounds. A student who sees a prepared coach relaxes, and a relaxed student learns faster.

Sort your material before you plan the session

Before designing any briefing, split what you could possibly say into three piles:

• Must know. Without this the jump is unsafe or pointless. It goes in the brief.
• Should know. Useful and relevant. It goes in ground school, or in the debrief, or on the drive home.
• Could know. True, interesting, and not today’s problem.

Most bad briefings are not wrong. They are a must-know brief with the should-know and could-know piles poured on top. The triage is what stops that, and it is the single most useful planning habit on this page.

The reason it matters has a number attached. Working memory holds roughly four items, not seven, and it shrinks further when somebody is keyed up. A student standing in the door has less capacity than the same student sitting on the grass. Anything past four things is decoration.

Learning happens by doing

For a novice acquiring a physical skill, doing beats watching, and watching beats being told. Being told is the weakest of the three and it is also the easiest for a coach, which is why so much coaching drifts towards it.

The practical consequence: get them moving on the ground. Walk the exit. Hold the position. Rehearse the transition standing up. A student who has physically rehearsed a movement arrives at the door with something in their body, and a student who has only heard it described arrives with a sentence they are trying to remember.

Talk less than you want to

Verbal instruction should be limited to the key phrases and cues the student actually needs in the air. Not a complete explanation, not every contingency, not everything you know about the position.

This is hard, because a coach who says more feels more useful. It is also counterproductive twice over. It spends the student’s limited capacity, and it gives them more explicit rules to consciously monitor under pressure, which is precisely the mechanism that makes a well-practised movement fall apart when someone is watching.

One vivid cue beats a paragraph. “Stand on the outside edge of that foot like you are tipping a surfboard” travels through a door. A four-part anatomical description of the same movement does not.

Get it right the first time

First learning sticks hardest, and a badly learned movement is genuinely difficult to remove later. The student will keep reverting to it under load for a long time after they have been told it is wrong.

So the order of operations matters. Demonstrate and rehearse the correct movement before letting them practise a rough version of it, and correct early rather than letting a fault consolidate over five jumps because it was not worth interrupting. This is also the argument against letting a student build a progression out of guesswork and video clips: unlearning is slower than learning.

Demonstrate to the standard, deliberately

A demonstration is planned and rehearsed, and it shows the accepted standard the movement is supposed to reach. It is not a chance to show what you can do, and combining several things into one demonstration to save time defeats the purpose.

Keep the talking to a minimum while demonstrating, because the student cannot watch and listen at full capacity at once. Show it, then talk about it, then show it again.

Use whatever helps them build an accurate picture. Video of the skill during the briefing genuinely improves their ability to rehearse it mentally, which is why it belongs in the briefing rather than only in the debrief. Appeal to as many senses as you reasonably can.

Training aids earn their place by doing three jobs at once: they cut the amount of spoken instruction a student has to absorb, they hold attention and aid understanding, and they give the student a more realistic model to rehearse against. Diagrams, a whiteboard, a creeper, models, hand positions and physical props all qualify. A prop that lets you stop talking is worth more than the same information said twice.

Ask, do not tell

Questioning a student does three jobs at once. It keeps them thinking, it checks what they have actually understood rather than what you hope they have, and it teaches, because retrieving an answer strengthens memory more than hearing it again does.

The habit worth building: before you explain, ask. Before you correct, ask. “Talk me through what you are going to do” surfaces the gap in ten seconds, and it surfaces it while there is still time to fix it.

What you say is not what they hear

Any instruction has three versions: what you think you said, what you actually said, and what the other person heard. They are rarely the same sentence.

The only reliable fix is to close the loop. Have the student say the plan back to you in their own words before boarding. If it comes back different, you found the problem on the ground rather than at breakoff.

Your conduct is part of the instruction

The strongest influence a coach has on a student’s learning and attitude is being a competent skydiver with a professional attitude. Not being flawless, and not being on all the best jumps. Competent, and behaving like it.

Junior jumpers copy senior behaviour closely, including the parts you did not intend to teach. How you handle a gear check, how you talk about other coaches, whether you own your own mistakes, and whether you stand down when you should are all being learned whether or not you meant to teach them.

A useful description of a good coach, and one worth measuring yourself against: competent and knowledgeable, resourceful and creative, analytical, and genuinely wanting to teach. The last one is not optional. A coach who does not want to teach produces students who do not want to learn.

One thing that is widely taught and does not hold

You will meet the idea that students have learning styles, visual or auditory or kinaesthetic, and that instruction should be matched to each student’s style. It is worth knowing that this has been tested and did not hold up.

Testing it properly means classifying learners, crossing that with matched and mismatched teaching, then looking for an interaction. Reviews that went hunting for such studies found almost none, and the few that exist show no effect.

What is true is that appealing to several senses helps everyone, that people differ in aptitude and prior experience, and that preferences are real. What does not follow is sorting students into types and teaching each type differently.

The better question to ask about a student in front of you is not what type they are. It is how far into this particular skill they currently are, and how loaded they are today. That is covered separately, in reading your student.

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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.