With the start of the new year, it is important that you take time to prepare for the year ahead.
Whatever sport you follow., be it soccer, rugby league, rugby union, netball, basketball or Australian Rules football, pre-season training is essential in preparations for the next season.
Before starting the preseason training, you need to have a plan in place to guide you and to help get the best out of each individual and the team as a whole. This requires buy in from not only the players but also the coaches and management.
Every team needs to be at peak fitness for the season ahead, as they become involved in ongoing matches. Preseason training allows teams to build solid fitness foundations, improve technical ability, and ultimately ensure optimum performance.
Running your own AFSL is like running a sporting team and it is important that you utilise the preseason to build solid business foundations, improve the team’s technical ability, and ultimately ensure optimum business performance.
Prepare your business for demanding games
If you don’t engage in pre-season training, it would be like playing your first game of rugby league after not having played for five years. You would wake up the next morning after the game all stiff and sore.
In the same vein, if you don’t conduct some pre-season training for your AFSL, you will be going into the business year without a plan and playing catch up on your responsibilities.
Any athlete needs to be fully prepared for the physical demands of competitive sport and so to Licensees need to be fully prepared for the Legislative and Regulatory obligations of running their licence.
Strength and flexibility training helps to prevent injury
A pre-season training programme encompasses strength and flexibility training. Strength training builds muscle strength and improves overall fitness. Flexibility training allows joints to move through a full range of motion and improves physical performance. These body conditioning exercises also help to prevent future injury.
If we compare this to running an AFSL, strength training is about ensuring your AFSL’s frameworks are strong enough to meet your obligations and flexibility training is ensuring your policies are robust enough, but also commercial, to meet the day-to-day business needs.
Initially the preseason allows for general preparation of the whole body whilst not focussing on sport-specific skills to acquire a base level of fitness, regain the strength the sport demands, and to build cardiovascular endurance.
An AFSL preseason allows you to take stock of the year just passed and prepare for the year ahead.
Time to improve your technical ability
Preseason training allows time to spend working on weaknesses, increasing tactical skills, and improving technical ability. For example, in basketball you may practice drills including ball control, dribbling, passing, and shooting.
This work is performed within the boundaries of physical ability. You can fine-tune training and work towards specific goals.
It is no different when you are running your AFSL, you take the time over the preseason to work on the business’ weaknesses, improve the client skills of your advisers and improve technical capabilities.
This can be achieved by running training sessions with all advisers in the licence early in the year.
Early diagnosis of injuries may prevent further or permanent damage
Most athletes often think they can play through their pain and ignore the signs of injury. Pain is produced by the body to let you know something is wrong. It can either be acute (short-lived) or chronic (long term pain). Ignoring these pain signals can result in:
- escalating the damage to muscles, joints, and tendons, and
- moving from an easily treatable injury to a chronic condition that could lead to permanent damage.
Early diagnosis of advice issues is also key to prevent further damage to the licence. Doing regular reviews of advice, you can assess if an “injury” or advice issue before it leads to something more serious for your business or your licence.
How can we help?
At Your Compliance Coach, we have years of specialist experience. We offer rapid access to convenient coaching sessions where you will receive a full assessment of your AFSL. Our coaches can provide you with education and mentoring to ensure your licence is at peak performance.
