Our sport is in his essence probably one of the widest ever possible : you fly in 4D, you can’t stop the action, you are in a continuous flow, you have to be ahead of this flow. This richness turns it also difficult to train.
There is no evidence like “do 10 repetitions of this movement, rest for 20 seconds, repeat…” to make you better as “our repetition” is in a complex environment, changing, evolving, and I don’t dare about introducing the other pilots in it to make it even more complex…
Make it simple bricks?
“Yes, we have IGC log files”...
So, can we divide our sport in simple bricks we could train and evaluate? Let’s say we focus on climbing skills for today. You get your nice glider and want to train your climbing capacities. Go fly? For sure you can’t train your legs if you don’t walk or run! But do we have a kind of chronometer to get an idea about our performance and its evolution? “Yes, we have IGC log files”, yeah ok but from one to another lift your performance will be different! So how do you get any idea of your capacities and their evolution? You need a reference and I know only 2 ways :
- 1 : Fly as team (or during competition) with always the same gliders and pilots : you will get a “best climber” in this “team” and figure out easily the evolution of your skills compared to him directly from the cockpit flight after flight!
- 2 : Fly in a double seater with this “best climber”: this will help you gather experience from another point of view, perhaps correct or polish your technic (we all deviate gently from what should be the technic hours after hours alone in a cockpit…), now you have a coach!
For solution 1 you will miss the “what do they do in the cockpit to make it better” but with a simple smartphone to record their actions on the stick you will get a nice comparison. I suggest camera to record from far right to front left so you will get stick moves, use of flaps if any, and information on speedometer, and a glimpse about use of rudder pedals. This would fill up and enrich a nice typical debrief evening “glider pilots blabla” around some rounds of beers with your friends with long debates around the usual question “is less better?” i.e. using the least the controls makes better efficiency at the end? And do we have to talk about efficiency…. or efficacity?
Both for sure...
First you need to enter the thermal, so efficacity is the goal, but always with efficiency in your deep reptile brain as basis to avoid loss of too much total energy in this move. And generally speaking I see too much actions on controls sometimes, and many more times too fast moves, or even worse fast moves to make it too much and then too less, sort of move and “contra-move”… and a glider is still a big ship full of inertia, so “too fast or too much”, then “too less”, then “...” is a total waste of energy! You can play on speed of movement, but people forget about intensity on the movement : do I go to maximum range of deviation of this rudder or not? What will be the best angle of bank combined to the best speed to exploit this lift? Weak lift does really mean slow speed / minimal bank technic? Entering the thermal and pulling hard then banking hard is the best for today? You follow my mind with all these choices : you need a broad range of technics to ADAPT it to the day, to the moment, to THIS thermal, to THE glider you have. Keeping the same technic will make you good for one kind of lift/glider combination, lucky you if it is your day! But, definitely, technics are quite different when I fly an ask13 and a Discus-2a in same weather conditions…
How to train?
But if you fly alone, you can train too!
Yes, let’s back to this first ever question! Basically, I told you 2 ways to compare to the others as you need a reference to compare. But if you fly alone, you can train too! Any minute, any second… if you are making your mind as “now I train!”, which means YOU WANT to OPTIMISE each instant NOW, focussed, banking how much, speed how much, controls how much? If you apply this on different days / thermals you will train in this broad range of kind of thermals, you will develop your sensations combined to your technic, learn about sensations you create (the famous G coming from diverse orientations because you deviate the glider from its usual linear path) to the sensations made by the couple thermal/glider, and you need to understand these feedbacks the glider gives you way ahead of any variometer to OPTIMISE IN REAL TIME. You want to develop this sensitivity?
- 1 : Fly in weak conditions : fly early, fly late, fly when nobody wants to fly, be the last to land
- 2 : Fly in heavy loaded glider : fill ballast tanks, you will get a heavy glider, full of inertia, giving you very thin feedbacks, then you train!
- 3 : Fly double seater front seat : you will be far away from the combination CofG and CofL which are one of the basis couple of the feedbacks you get in a glider. Ask the pilot on back seat to comment what he feels to enrich your brain and discover these thinner feedbacks to build your sensors.
Have fun, fly safe!
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