Our Top 5 Athlete Blogs of 2025

2025 was all about transformation for athletes. From mastering the mental game to perfecting technique (and so much more), our athletes blogs covered it all. 

If you missed any of these deep dives, we've rounded up and summarized our top 5 athlete-focused blogs from the year. Whether you're looking to level up your game, maintain motivation, or understand the relationship between mental health and training, these posts have you covered.

Let’s dive in.

How to use Periodization to Reach Your Goals

Most athletes focus on constant technical tweaks instead of stepping back to see the bigger picture. They're missing periodization, the systematic planning of athletic training that separates good athletes from great ones.

Periodization breaks training into four critical phases, each building toward peak performance at the right time.

Technical Phase: Lay your foundation here. Perfect the right techniques before ramping up intensity. 

Pre-Competition Phase: As competition approaches, training becomes specialized. A runner focuses on specific distances; a basketball player emphasizes tactical play and teamwork, etc.

Competition Phase: It's showtime. You apply refined skills and strategies in actual competitive scenarios. Mental training here is also crucial.

Rest and Reflection Phase: Often overlooked, but just as important to your growth. Rest, recover, and reflect on your performance before you start chasing the next goal. Give yourself time to refocus before the next cycle begins.

This holistic approach prevents burnout, ensures systematic progress, and builds long-term excellence.

Monitor your Progress with these 3 Simple Steps

When you practice without feedback, you're actually getting worse each time. To keep progressing, you need intentional practice. Here are three easy ways to track progress and transform your training.

Tags

Organize your training content with tags and find exactly what you're looking for, whether it's a specific drill or workout, instantly. Create custom tags for drills, strategy, or practice plans.

Frequency

How often you practice matters as much as how you practice. Every athlete needs an individualized cadence based on what works for them. The key to excelling is finding what works best for your body and adapting accordingly.

Angles

Most athletes fall into the trap of "feeling" like they're moving correctly when they’re actually not. This is where angles save the day. CoachNow's Skeleton Tracking and Automatic Angle Detection take the guesswork out completely. 

Tap any joint to view its angle and analyze your movements in granular detail. Stay hyper-aware of your form and reach your goals faster than you thought possible.

Implement these three strategies and you'll track progress more effectively while accelerating your growth.

Best Practices for Recording Sports Video

Recording yourself is essential for improving technique, but how you film matters just as much as filming itself. Here's how to nail the two most important angles: face-on and down-the-line.

Face On: Head-On View

Position the camera directly in front of you. Keep the camera at hand height to maintain accurate proportions and avoid distortion. Landscape mode typically works best.

Use a tripod or stable setup to keep shots clean and consistent, and make sure your equipment stays in frame throughout the entire movement.

Down the Line: Side View

Capturing this angle from behind and slightly to the side reveals your swing path and body alignment. Again, position the camera at hand height. The tricky part? Alignment. 

Line the camera up parallel to your target line, and use visual references like alignment sticks or a drawn target line to give you and your coach clear reference points.

Stay Consistent

Regardless of what angle you’re filming at, consistency beats perfection. Keep the camera at the same distance, height, and angle across sessions. Jumping between different setups creates confusion and makes progress harder to track. 

When in doubt, check with your coach or compare your setup to examples online. The more reps you get, the easier capturing quality footage becomes.

Why Frame Rates Matter

Frame rates determine how smoothly motion is captured on video and for sports analysis, they make all the difference.

Standard video runs at 30fps, but for sports, higher frame rates are game-changers. Lower frame rates cause motion blur and miss critical details. Higher frame rates deliver smoother playback and better slow-motion analysis, letting you break down technique frame-by-frame.

The Frame Rate Breakdown

30 fps: Standard for most video. Good for general footage and speaking clips, but misses high-speed action details. Use this only when you're not analyzing movement.

60 fps: Reduces blur and smooths slow-motion. Great for fast-paced sports like basketball, soccer, and tennis.

120 fps: Excellent for sprint mechanics, golf swings, and precision movements. Most modern smartphones support this. 

240 fps+: Capture every micro-movement with minimal blur. Perfect for AI features like Skeleton Tracking and Angle Detection. Files get large fast, so resolution may drop to 1080p (use cloud storage if needed).

High-speed sports happen in milliseconds. Standard 30fps misses the exact moment a foot strikes, a ball releases, or a club face angles. Higher frame rates reveal what actually happens versus what it looks like. The right frame rate turns fuzzy analysis into crystal-clear feedback. 

Channeling Simone Biles’ Olympic Mindset

When Simone Biles stepped back from the 2020 Olympics to prioritize her mental health, the backlash was fierce.

Athletes train day in and day out fixated on winning. But mental health isn't secondary to performance, it's foundational. Without feeling well mentally, your technical skills are useless.

Simone's case is extreme but telling. In advanced gymnastics, one wrong move can be lethal. She wasn't lacking skill; her brain was so overloaded it couldn't communicate with her body. That mind-body connection matters everywhere, from elite sports to your local court or field.

Traditionally, coaches prioritized performance over wellbeing. Athletes would compete with broken ankles, their bodies destroyed by overtraining and neglect. Simone changed that story. She showed the world that sometimes the strongest thing an athlete can do is take a step back.

Protect your mental health by:

• Listening to your body

• Journaling often throughout training to track how you're feeling and to remember all of the progress you’re making

• Asking for help when you need it

Use CoachNow to document your practice and your thoughts and feelings. Monitor both your technical progress and your mental state - mental resilience is what separates the good from the great.

There's nothing that makes you a stronger athlete than admitting when you need to step back.

If there’s one takeaway from these blogs, it’s that athletic excellence isn't just about one thing. It’s a recipe made up of consistency, intention, and the ability to look inward. 

It's about tracking progress when it's invisible, staying organized when things get chaotic, and understanding that your mental health is just as important as your technical skills.

Ready to put these strategies into action? Start with one. Tag your next session. Film from the right angle. Journal how you felt. Let us know which of these tips are your favorite.