Training Plans

I’ve said before that I’ll write up how to develop a training plan, including calendars and lesson plans. So here we go.

The first thing any club instructor has to do before they think of calendars or lesson plans is to figure out what exactly they want to do and when it has to be accomplished. Because I can’t give you all the possible variables, I’ll tell you what I did and why I did it that way.

My perspective is based on a lack of competitive opportunities within three hours of Roswell, NM. Since there aren’t very many, I’ve decided to concentrate on developing technical proficiency and knowledge with emphasis on developing instructor training for higher levels. I also have a very specific set of promotional requirements for both juniors and seniors (available at http://www.roswell-judo.org/promotion.html). We hold classes on an academic schedule at Roswell Judo Club because of the ease of scheduling for youth, parents, adults, and college students. The academic schedule and the promotional requirements provide the backbone for developing the class calendars.

Each level, from beginner to ikkyu, has a separate calendar because they each have different promotional requirements. Classes are held on specific days and only those days, so every promotional requirement must be covered on those days. While it makes for a lot of initial work for the instructor, it makes future planning and class planning very easy. All of my calendars are online at http://www.roswell-judo.org/promotion.html under each grade.

Once you have your calendar for your time frame, you must have some kind of lesson plan or guide to keep the class moving in the right direction. One thing about lesson plans, really quick, a lesson plan is a guide it should never be seen as a non-adjustable procedure. If you look at it as inflexible, you’ll either rush over something that needs more time or you’ll put too much time on something your students grasp quickly.

Here are the first six days of my lesson guides for my junior beginner class (I'll post those a little later) and my college class (http://roswell-judo.org/ENMUR_Begin_LessonGuide.pdf). As you can see, I identify what class, what level, what day, weekly goals. I further break it down into the three class elements: warm-ups, ukemi, and technical instruction. I like weekly goals because they give me an idea of what is really important for my students’ learning that week.

I use the warm-ups based on the activities to be covered and to develop my students’ conditioning. Ukemi, to me, is one of the most critical elements for judo players. My expectation for my students is that if they get into a tournament and they get into a very dangerous position, some position where the execution will result in bodily harm, I want them to be able to save themselves even if it means losing the match. With such an expectation, I place great emphasis on ukemi training.

Finally, the technical section is where I line out the general flow of technical instruction for the class. In this section I tend to break down the instruction into essential elements when I start teaching the project. Once students have learned the fundamentals of the technique, I tend to bring in greater drill practice and practical application to ensure that not only have the students learned the techniques but can also apply them in randori or shiai.

This is just a brief overview of developing calendars and lesson plans. I’ll put together something on developing lesson plans later on. Calendar programs are all over the place on the internet, but I tend to use http://www.pdfcalendar.com for my preliminary scheduling. After I have the preliminary done, I use Microsoft Publisher because they have an easy calendar creator and it produces a nice, printable calendar that I can print to PDF format which is then easily distributable. For my lesson plans, I use Microsoft Excel which allows me to set up a template that is protected from adjustment of the non-adjustable elements like the name of the class and the names of the segments. The inputable segments are not protected because they change with each class.

So those are the basics of how I create training schedules in the rough. What do you think?