Optional: Understanding, spotting and rectifying the typical mistakes your clients will make is a fundamental aspect of teaching beginners.
If you’ve already been teaching for a while you’ll probably have seen all these mistakes already, many many times! So if you think you’ve already seen everything there is to see, and can spot (and fix) anything your average beginner can throw at you, and you know which ones are the most serious, then all good – feel free to move on to the next lesson. However, if you’d like to do a bit of refreshing on the subject, there is 35 minutes of very good revision material here that it will do you no harm to refresh on.
We’ll start by looking at the more serious mistakes, that need to be rectified straight away. This section of the lesson will take about 15 minutes to view.
Now we need to consider the less significant errors that you’ll encounter, and what to do about them. This video will take about 25 minutes to complete.
Hopefully you now have a good overall feel for the sort of beginner errors you’re going to be dealing with, and what you need to do about them.
The important take-aways from this are:
- Beginners makes LOTS of mistakes!
- Not all are of equal significance or importance.
Some mistakes need correcting immediately, because
- They are likely to cause the client to fall
- They are likely to cause injury to the client
- They will cause that client to be very slow in comparison to everyone else
Others are less serious but, depending on how badly they are being displayed, may
- prevent the client ever improving or developing
- cause early fatigue
To give another view on the most common mistakes, here’s a quick vid from Supboarder mag showing their ‘top 9 paddling’ mistakes, which aligns pretty much with our own descriptions above. (However, note the awful duck/asymmetric stance of the person in the vid! Let’s not be doing any of that!)