Speakers
Description
Studying Bodybuilding and Fitness as a sport discipline involves an individual and actual approach (Bunsell, 2012), as most practitioners of these disciplines prefer personal contact and rely on the trust of their coaches and immediate community. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, most of the coaches and their athletes had limited personal engagement in terms of training and many coaches and athletes had to rely on online platforms. As physique and fitness sports involve total connection between coach and athlete, it is important to see the different dynamics of an athlete being self-coached, coached by their immediate partners, or hiring a professional coach. The relationships on the manner of coaching is worthy of interest as there are only few studies that focus on bodybuilding and fitness. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relations of different types of coaching especially on online platforms and how the relationship of the athlete and coach were affected by shifting to online connection. Through qualitative methods such as interviews and field observations, the paper will discuss three different perspectives of coaching: self-coached, coached by their immediate partners, or another professional coach and how the similarities and differences of these relationships matter. We aspire from this study to add to the body of knowledge in terms of sport coaching experiences in physique and fitness disciplines and assess the kinds of dynamics between athletes and coaches, and how this can be connected in propagating better practices for coaching and coach education.
