How to train athletes remotely using TRAQ

TRAQ gives coaches an all-in-one resource to to run their facility from a data driven perspective. Quickly see the programming athletes have left and how many are scheduled for a type of workout each day.

If you are new to TRAQ, don’t worry.

We’ll cover the basics of remote training here, but you may also find our introductory blog post on TRAQ helpful.

Biggest hurdles

According to Dean Jackson, Manager of Online Training at Driveline’s perspective, the biggest obstacle to training remotely is very simple:

“The biggest advantage to in-gym vs. online is the environment,” Jackson said. “We can add in their programming, we can make sure that they’re doing it with them checking it off, they can upload videos, we can analyze those, we can chat [with] them. Literally, everything except for the environment can be done online.”

It is, of course, always preferable to be with your athletes when you are training them, but there are plenty of extenuating circumstances that may necessitate training athletes remotely.

“From a facility perspective, it basically just continues what you’re already doing,” Jackson said. “You can make sure that your athletes are still training how you want them to be training and they’re not lost. You still have all the benefits of programming a whole bunch of people at once. The ease of the programming itself, you still have that even if they’re not with you.”

TRAQ eases that training transition and allows you to be more adaptable.

TRAQ Media Tab

Certain features of TRAQ are used more often by our online trainers, with the media tab being most popular.

If an athlete is away from your facility for a while, you can assign them a series of workouts and task them with uploading a video of each drill. If you leave a place to input data, you can see that the athlete completed the workout, watch the videos that they put in the Media tab, and then leave detailed notes inside his/her workout that would then show up in the Tracking Sheets.

Both athletes and trainers can add videos and long-form documents into TRAQ, as it works very similarly to how you would attach something to an email.

“In-gym, you can sit there and watch [the athletes], but obviously [remotely] that’s not possible. We have them take video regularly and upload it to the media tab,” Jackson explained. “Once it is uploaded to the media tab, our trainers can watch it through TRAQ or download it to analyze it. Being able to get eyes on them to make sure they are doing the drills correctly is key to what our online trainers do. We can then upload videos for them to see as well, whether it is pointers or encouragement.” 

You can also comment and chat directly with an athlete, leaving feedback in the same place as their progress is tracked.

Collecting Data Remotely

Collecting data from remote athletes can be difficult. So, how can you use TRAQ to help collect data?

“It depends on what you want,” Dean explained. “With Motus, Pocket Radar, or Diamond Kinetics, you can link those to TRAQ and have them upload automatically. The problem there, and the big one we have run into, is that not every athlete has a Motus or Pocket Radar, and in fact most don’t. So, if we want something, what we do is we specifically make a workout that has an input for that.” 

Jackson and our online training team create custom data inputs designed to collect whatever information they need. The athlete gets assigned a customized workout and is able to fill it out for the trainers to analyze. This is crucial to our online training because, the vast majority of athletes don’t have access to the tech that is in the gym. TRAQ helps to bridge that gap.

“Everything that we do in the gym, we do almost identically online,” Jackson said. “TRAQ allows us to do that.”