Ask an owner how often they train their staff and the answer comes back fast. Once a week, every week. Then you watch the session, and it is an hour of the owner talking about the trunk or treat while six coaches nod with their arms crossed. Nobody broke a sweat, and everybody agreed it went well.

No student ever threw a great round kick because you described one well. They threw it after thousands of reps, a correction on the pivot, another on the chamber, and enough repetition that the kick stopped being a thought. Every owner reading this knows that in their bones.

Then Saturday comes and the same owner stands in front of six coaches for an hour and talks. Upcoming events. The new belt display. A story about a parent complaint. That is the instructor training at most of the schools I visit. Owners tell me they train weekly, and when I watch it, nobody moved. That hour could have been a Slack message.

Instructor training means coaches on the floor doing reps of the skills they use to run a room, plus reps of the exact drills they are teaching next week. Would you board a plane flown by somebody who had mostly been told about flying? Your parents board that plane every night at 4:30.

Most owners only coach their staff after a bad class. The damage is already done, the correction lands as criticism, and after enough of those the coach decides you nitpick everything they do. Confidence drops, and conviction on the floor drops right behind it. You built that by only showing up with feedback when something broke.

The other pattern is the guest trainer spike. Dave Kovar or Roland Osborne comes to town, the team is fired up for two weeks, the skill level jumps, and then everything drifts back to where it was. The owner gets frustrated with the team, even though the only training the team ever got came from somebody else's plane ticket.

Then there is the expectation gap. You have twenty five years on the mat. Your newest assistant is seventeen and has been teaching for six months. Expecting them to run a class like you is a math problem you keep getting wrong.

Write down how many hours you spent last month making your head coach a better teacher. Good head coaches still need it. A pro basketball player who fixes his jump shot usually finds his free throw drifting a month later, so the work moves to the free throw. Coaching skill slips the same way, one area at a time, while you are watching a different one.

At MUV we have one rule for every meeting and every training. If whoever is running it shows up without a written agenda, everyone can leave, and nobody gets in trouble for walking out. We call this, “No Agenda, No Attenda” (shout out to Camron Herald for the term). I have been guilty of winging instructor training because the week got away from me. Now that I can talk into Claude for three minutes and get a full agenda back, I am out of excuses, and so are you.

Our Saturday boot camp runs 12:30 to 2:30 and attendance is a job requirement. Owners push back on this with teenage staff. Teenagers work at Starbucks and Chick-fil-A, and they show up to training there too. If a coach can't make Saturdays, they can't coach. When I reset this at a school I was managing, it meant I taught more classes for a while until the pipeline filled back up. That trade was worth every hour. Anyone in our instructor certification program attends as well, so by the time they get hired, Saturday is already a habit.

Start on the minute. The first time you start ten minutes late, your staff learns that ten minutes late is the real start time.

Owners ask me all the time for a 52 week instructor training plan. I could write one. It would be playing darts blindfolded, because a plan written in advance has no idea what is happening on your floor. You could spend a month drilling a skill your team already owns while the real gap keeps costing you students.

The first hour targets the weakness you actually saw. You find it by being on the mat with your team, by scoring classes yourself with an internal scorecard, and by handing parents an anonymous scorecard with a request to be brutal instead of polite. When my score and the parents' score disagree, I learn something about my own blind spots too.

Last week my coaches were managing classes well and hitting the curriculum. What was missing was energy as a tool. Two teaching voices, all class long. So this Saturday we are running a drill called Energy Conductor. One coach runs a drill from next week's plan while I stand in the back and call out a number from one to five. One is I haven't slept in four days. Three is I showed up but I'm not on my A game. Five is the locker room before the Super Bowl. The coach has to hit that level on the spot. Then during the week, I can walk past a coach mid class and whisper that I need a four, and he knows exactly what that means.

Every coach leaves Saturday with one focus for the week, and that focus came straight off the floor.

We put next week's class plans on the TVs and rep every drill. I run each one for a minute to set the standard, then five coaches rotate through, one minute each, while everyone else plays students and actually does the drill. I time them and yell switch. If a coach hasn't finished explaining in a minute, they are overexplaining, and the students should be moving while the coach talks anyway. Each coach gets one quick note and we move on. About five minutes per drill.

By the end, every coach has run every drill, so anyone can sub any class and the assistants know every setup before Monday. This week our classes broke into four stations. The team had all four built before I finished the explanation, and we flowed from one station to the next without a single kid standing around waiting. The goal is zero downtime.

Then on Monday, I teach every class. A while back I stopped doing that, and in a one on one my head coach told me the thing he missed most was watching me run the plan, because he could see the standard instead of guessing at it. Mondays went back on my calendar. He gets to be a great assistant again and watch how I direct the room, and the whole team spends the rest of the week trying to out teach me.

The last ten to twenty minutes is fun on purpose. Last week it was a guard control game, one coach holding guard while the other tried to escape. Some weeks it is dodgeball. Most of the team stayed after and kept playing, which is exactly the culture I want, coaches who would rather stay on the mat than go home.

They also get to see you sweat with them instead of supervising from the edge. Coaches who trust each other start anticipating each other mid class, the assistant pulling the next setup before anyone asks, and you will never get that out of a staff meeting.

A coach who has only heard about the standard will teach the version they imagined, and your students pay for the difference every night.

No agenda, no meeting only works if building the agenda takes less time than skipping it. This prompt turns your floor notes and next week's class plans into a printable two hour boot camp agenda in about five minutes. If you keep a drill library or a Claude project with your school's files, upload your drills first so it pulls from your own material.

Paste it into Claude or ChatGPT and answer each question as it comes.

COPY EVERYTHING IN THIS BOX

Run it Friday night after your last class while the floor is still fresh in your head. Print the one pager and post it on the wall before the session starts. Keep the coach's notes, because they tell you exactly what to watch for when you teach on Monday.

Adam Kifer shows the check-in system MUV built for its Trunk or Treat in about five minutes with Claude Code and Lovable. Families type in the phone number they registered with, confirm their name, and the screen goes straight to a one night offer: 21 days of classes plus a free MUV shirt for $10 per child, normally $21. Nobody fills out a clipboard, and nobody on staff spends the following week chasing families who have already forgotten your name. Most schools still treat a community event as a candy budget with a banner on it.

Watch the reel →

Master Chim says there is zero value in a school owner mopping his own mats, and that when he did it as an owner it was because he had not led anyone well enough to do it for him. The comments are full of owners defending the mop as humility. Most of them are probably also teaching every class because nobody on staff has been trained to run one. Same problem, different bucket.

Watch the reel →

Backstreet Dojo in Hanworth is selling 30 second ads on the screen of its lobby coffee machine for £50 a month, pitched to barbers, restaurants and tradespeople, on the claim of 200 to 600 visitors a day. Your lobby sees the same parents four nights a week and you have been giving that attention away for free. The post is loud and covered in emojis. The idea underneath it is quietly smarter than most retail walls in this industry.

Read the full post →

Spotted something worth featuring? Send it to [email protected]

Training professionals from 150 organizations, surveyed by Alan Saks and Monica Belcourt for a 2006 study in Human Resource Management, estimated that 34 percent of trainees were still applying what they had learned one year after training.

The same respondents put the figure at 62 percent right after training and 44 percent at six months. The skill does not collapse on day one. It leaks out steadily over the year. And those numbers came from the people who ran the training, which means the real figure is unlikely to be kinder. On your mat, the drill your coaches nailed in a single Saturday session is probably still showing up next week. By next fall, about a third of them are still running it the way you taught it.

If 34 sounds bad, the number most trainers quote is worse. For decades the training world repeated that only 10 percent of training ever transfers to the job. It traces back to a 1982 Training and Development Journal article by D. L. Georgenson, where it appeared as a hypothetical training director's estimate with no data behind it. J. Kevin Ford, Stephen Yelon and Abigail Billington called it the 10% delusion in a 2011 paper in Performance Improvement Quarterly. An invented number survived thirty years because it let everyone off the hook. If training barely works anyway, nobody has to run it every week.

Open your calendar and find the last time your head coach ran a drill in front of you and you corrected it on the spot. Count the months. Whatever that coach learned that day is somewhere on that curve right now, and the session that would reset it is the one you stopped holding.

Sources: Saks, A. M., & Belcourt, M. (2006). An investigation of training activities and transfer of training in organizations. Human Resource Management, 45(4); Georgenson, D. L. (1982). The problem of transfer calls for partnership. Training and Development Journal, 36(10); Ford, Yelon & Billington, Performance Improvement Quarterly (2011)

A while back my head coach told me the one thing he missed was watching me run the class plan on Mondays. He said it once, in a one on one, and moved on to his next point. Good coaches rarely ask to be trained. They mention what they used to get, then quietly teach the version they remember, and every week that version drifts a little further from yours. Somewhere on your staff right now is a coach who would say the same thing if you asked. Most owners never ask, and eventually the coach stops thinking it is worth bringing up.