“Truth” in beach volleyball is never set in stone, and it should be possible to discuss everything. If I ever teach something that you do not agree with, please voice it so that we can discuss it. Probably the only reason I would not want to discuss the topic, is if there is not enough time for the discussion right then and there. In this case please write down the disagreement topic in our group-chat for the future instead.

It’s OK to tell the coach to shut up - especially if you are working on one thing and I end up giving feedback about something else at the same time. Our mutual job here is your learning, if that requires me to sometimes shut up or not give you my feedback, then that is exactly what should happen at that moment in time, I will not take it personally.

Example: We are in the middle of a drill of doing spiking reps, and you are putting your full attention and focus into noticing how you are doing the transition footwork between passing and approaching to hit. If I during this process would start giving you feedback about your contact point or armswing while hitting, this can work as a distractor from the work you are actually doing during that drill.

“Inner coach” = internal awareness of a movement or skill you are trying to learn, meaning you yourself know whether you succeeded with performing the skill or not, even without receiving feedback from another person.

In coaching, my job is basically to give you accurate information about how you can play beach volleyball better (avoiding “false advice” that often makes players worse instead of better), and then to facilitate experiences (drills, games, discussions, etc) that help you apply these techniques/strategies/mental strategies (“the information”) into your game, and in the long run into your subconscious mind so that the skills become “automatic” (they happen without conscious thought even in the middle of a heated game.)

One of the most crucial steps in the process of automating the new skills is to build your own “inner coach” that is able to be aware of whether you just did something (for example your attack approach steps if that is what you are trying to change) in your old or new way. 

If you have a functioning “inner coach”, it means that you can for example immediately after your attack tell someone if you did your steps in the new way that you are trying to learn, or in the way you used to do it before.

Once we have a functioning inner coach, the chances of truly learning the skill is much bigger, because you will be able to get reps of it also during games, etc, when no coach is present to give you feedback, which inevitably will be the case sooner or later. There is nearly no point in training skills that even in the long run only work when I can be there to remind you as a coach, but disappear when you play on your own in the future.

The process to creating your “inner coach” is to first receive information from me or some other coach, then learn to apply it (sometimes step by step) in a game situation. After you can apply the skill in a game situation with the help of my feedback, the next step is to start creating the “inner coach” which will give you the same knowledge as my feedback, but without me giving the feedback. This is the goal. This also means that there will be a part of this process where my job is actually to gradually stop giving you feedback.

However, if you ever notice that I stops giving you feedback around a particular skill you are trying to build before your “inner coach” is built yet, you should let me know that you are not yet ready for this no-feedback phase, so I can give you reminders and feedback again for a period. Basically going through these phases becomes a collaboration between me as coach and you as player, and sometimes you will know better than I will which phase you are in, so you can therefore communicate that to me so that I can do a better suited job for the current phase of your learning.

In general, when we practice for beach volleyball, we are not competing for prize money, or anything else that will change our lives depending on today’s performance when it comes to our playing results.

At the same time, becoming better at the sport, by definition means doing things differently than before, and whenever someone does something differently from before, chances are high that there will be some mistakes at first.

So I like to try to get all my players into the mindset that practice is a space where we are allowed to experiment a bit, try some new things, and make mistakes. If we always have to perform, we will easily be stuck in our old “safe” ways of doing things. If you want to change your serve receive technique to a better one, there is a high chance that you will shank a few balls out of the court during that process - it is important in these moments to stay focused on the task of discovering the new technique rather than getting “embarrassed” by those shanked balls if we actually want to be able to change the technique.

It might look weird to some people, but I also think that sometimes, a valuable way to spend practice time, is to just “fool around” and “try some stuff”, even weird stuff. This kind of “practice” sometimes shows you something that works (that you can then start using), and sometimes shows you more clearly what doesn’t work, so that it becomes easier to avoid this in the future.

If you want to go into “experiment mode” while the drill itself is more performance based (maybe we are playing some games in the end of the practice), it might be helpful to tell your partner (and maybe me as a coach, and maybe the opponents) what you are up to, so that we understand what you are doing, rather than starting to wonder why you suddenly became a different kind of player.

If you’d learn to love this kind of “experimentation practice”, let me and the group know - it is quite easy to make sure that those who want it, can get more of it, without it effecting the rest of the group negatively.

There is a chance that over the weeks that we work together, we will go over many topics.

For some players, for example the topic of week 1 might end up being something they really see the value in, and really want to master (let’s as an example say that it is some technical detail they want to work on when it comes to serve receive), even if the group continues exploring other topics during the weeks after.

If this would be the case for you, (so in a hypothetical case, you want to continue working on a serve receive detail from week 1 even if it is now week 4 and we are working on attacking), please just let me know during the practice.

Then I know to look for (and give you feedback on) for example serve receive rather than attacking the times the ball is coming to you.

Together we can collaborate like this to make the best learning experience for you, and it is often possible to physically be at the same practice as the rest of the group, but actually internally practice a different skill than what the rest of the group might be focusing on. Especially if you let me know that this is what you’d like to do, so I can maybe tweak the drills just a little bit when you are playing, and I can give you feedback on the topic you actually want feedback on.

This is a little bit of a “hack” as a player who goes to group lessons, and wants feedback from the coach.

I teach this “hack” so that you can get more helpful feedback from other coaches, but I am as a coach also in no way immune to this trick, so I actually like it when players use it “against me” as well, even if it was I who taught them about it.

As a coach looking at a player, there is often an overload of information one would want to tell the player. 10 things that could be fixed technically, 10 things they could try strategically with their partner, and 10 drills that might be a good idea to try.

But looking at for example 6 players at a 1.5 hour group practice, well, there simply isn’t time enough to talk about all these things. Also, the coach often doesn’t really know what type of information a player is receptive to right then and there, so choosing which of the 30+ potential pieces of feedback one should give a player, isn’t always an easy task.

However, all of this uncertainty collapses when a player asks a question. A player asking a specific question, let’s the coach know exactly what type of information and feedback the player is most receptive to, and most curious about, right now. It gives the coach a way in, a way to fully start teaching the sport instead of spending 50% of their energy into deciding how to teach the sport and only 50% of their energy into actually teaching the sport.

And don’t worry, even if you ask a specific question, you can still get broad answers that will give you a “bigger picture” piece of feedback as well (look at the question examples below, especially example number 2.)

I happened to discover this “trick” accidentally by myself attending a group lesson with a very knowledgeable coach, that, however, was known to not give super much feedback in group coaching. I was just very curious during the training session and asked a lot of questions, and after the practice the other players asked me how I had managed to get so much feedback from this coach that normally didn’t give much of it..

After a few seconds of thinking, I realized how i had done it, and the answer was: “Whoever asks the most questions, receives the most answers.”

It was only afterwards when I sort of reverse engineered the concept and actually started to teach the concept to my players that I coach, and I realized that it is actually easier to be a good coach (making everyone happy) when you have players that feel encouraged to ask questions.

Some example questions for inspiration:

So how high is really the perfect set? I am a bit confused, because it seems like you want us to set specific heights, but it’s not the same all the time.. Why does it change?

It seems to me like my biggest problem in beach volleyball is receiving balls that float high up into my chest. Do you have any tips for that? And actually, do you agree that this is my biggest problem, or do you think I have other problems that might be bigger?

This seems like a cool drill, but I don’t understand exactly what I am supposed to learn in it, and you went a bit fast and skipped that information this time, and it’s really helpful for me to know the reasons why for a drill before doing it.. So could you just explain before we start?

There is an excellent book/concept (Start With Why) by Simon Sinek that I can in general recommend people to look into, what I write below is based off of this concept.

There is always a reason behind every single drill I will ever ask you to do. I also always try to apply this “Start With Why”-concept from Simon Sinek to my coaching, which means that I aim to always have my players understand the reason why they are doing for example a drill, before actually doing it. Knowing the reasons for a drill makes it both more interesting and rewarding to do, increases the learning from it, and just causes less confusion and frustration during a practice in general.

However, there is also another aspect of group coaching, which is to make explanations efficient, and not too long and drawn out.

Those two things (aiming to always explain the “why”, and aiming to keep explanations short) are unfortunately in direct conflict with each other.

So therefore, there are times when I skip the “why” part, especially if weather is cold (standing around too long will make players cold), and if I think that the players will get the reason for the drill even if i don’t explain it.

If I ever ask you to do a drill that you do not understand the reason behind, please tell me. I might be in this situation where I am trying to save time by shortening my explanations and hoping everyone will get it anyway, but if that fails, it’s better you tell me and I explain to you why we are doing it, rather than you needing to go through the frustration that might happen if doing a drill that seems pointless to you, or you not learning as much as you could from the drill because you do not understand why we are doing it.

According to me, there are a few different ways to play high level beach volleyball, and these different ways actually differ in what for example the optimal technique looks like.

For example, a team that wants to play in one style, should also use a setting technique and attacking timing that works well with that style of play, while another team that wants to play another style, should play in a different way also technically to maximize the potential of that playing style.

Because of this, I will want to know which style you are aiming for before I can fully coach you with confidence that I am leading you in the direction you want to go towards.

The two “styles” I want you to choose between first and foremost is the styles that I call “playing indoor volleyball on the beach”, and playing with the “body language predictable way”.

More info on the basic difference in how these styles work can be found in this 4 minute video, but you can also ask me during a group lesson to explain it more: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DcLzga1o1JQ/?igsi=aHYyOWc3anFxeHpt

So after you have decided which one you want to aim for, you should let me know your decision. Some people might wonder whether it is a good idea to learn both styles, and yes I think so, but this can take quite a while, so I’d first go with one, and then later once that is mastered, possibly decide to add “even more tools into the toolbox.”

However, here are some important details that might influence your decision-making process:

1. For many people, learning predictable handsetting (the type of handsetting that is required for the “body language predictable” style) is a fairly big project if one wants to learn it fully. We will do this in group lessons ONLY if the whole group is fully committed to this work and ready to sacrifice quite a lot of other training, in order to make space for predictable handsetting. I can of course give you some pointers here and there that might be helpful if you’d want to go this direction without the whole group being ready to commit to the predictable handsetting path, but there is a big risk it won’t be enough to cover all the complexities of this setting style unfortunately (see the concept of “long term feedback”.)

2. Learning predictable bumpsetting is a much smaller project than learning predictable handsetting, and can easily be done in group lessons. Which, yes, in practical terms means that players who want to learn to play the “body language predictable”-style, but only want to take group lessons, I might recommend to for now stick to only bumpsetting. (Christian Sorum is a good example of how one can play world class beach volleyball with predictable bumpsetting and no handsetting at all.)

3. My general opinion is that everyone (except maybe if you have a fixed partner who can set in a predictable style) should learn to time their attacks (also) with an “indoor on the beach” style, because it makes you so much more flexible when it comes to choosing partners (because many also advanced players around the world don’t know how to set with the predictable style.) At the same time, I also believe that the best system for many reasons is the “body language predictable” system, which is used by many of the best teams in the world, so in certain cases it is a much better idea to fully commit to this system with your partner, especially if you see a big chance of you two playing together for a long time to come (no need to mix with all these advanced players who don’t know how to set in a “body language predictable” way.)

For players who’d want to spend some time to understand the “body language predictable” setting techniques better, you can watch these videos. Questions during our group sessions are welcomed.

Pro examples of body language predictable bumpsetting: https://www.loom.com/share/1b0945061b604ab9bf12bbcf807342a7?sid=5ee95e5b-2431-40f9-877a-858d8e7fc1d4

Characteristics of body language predictable handsetting: https://youtu.be/mfIZvq9NAJs

Pro (men) examples of body language predictable handsetting: https://www.loom.com/share/275fded7182947b98fb350f2ed444b10?sid=4d1873fb-8520-49c9-8d3e-b11b6c8f69b6

Pro (women) examples of body language predictable handsetting: https://www.loom.com/share/7786b4be63d248d08d68dc2056582a3b?sid=d683585c-0a10-46f0-b475-64da9f8d56bf

I am fully aware that this will not happen most of the time I coach group lessons through for example a club (because the culture in beach volleyball just isn’t so), but I still want to mention what I believe would be the best way for me to increase the overall skill level of your training group with the least amount of work - in other words in what way I could reach maximum efficiency in my work.

For advanced level groups (even more so for groups where the players themselves like to analyze and think about the game a lot), I believe that for the first 2 months of working together (assuming one session per week), we should have one group video analysis session per 2 practical training sessions in the sand. This means 1.5 hours of watching video clips (of professionals, and of you) combined with discussions as a group, per 3 hours of lessons in the sand. After the initial 2 months, maybe the ideal balance would go down to one group video analysis session per 4 practical training sessions in the sand.

This would be in the ideal world. But since this is unlikely to actually happen, I might from time to time send home study videos in our group chat instead, to partially compensate for the lack of video analysis.

There are basically 3 different categories of beach volleyball skills, when it comes to how complex they are to understand even just in theory, and how much work and dedication from the player they require to learn:

Easy stuff - These skills can easily be conveyed and taught to a group of players in a group lesson.

Medium difficult stuff - With some careful planning, a coach can usually teach these skills to most of the players in a group, just through group lessons.

The actually complex stuff - Skills within beach volleyball that very rarely if ever can be taught to adult players through only group lessons. Learning these skills is much better suited for private 1-on-1 lessons where the coach actually has enough time to explain all the needed theory, and then teaching the skill step by step in the tempo that the learning process of the player needs it to be in. Another common way that (some) players learn these skills is through “obsession mode”, months and months of intense dedication, studying the sport, and self-organized practice. Attempting to learn these types of skills in a group lessons both very rarely works, but can also create very frustrating and slow moving practices, that in the worst case can even lower rather than raise the skill of players.

For reasons I won’t go into in this short version, many relatively advanced players are held back in their skills mostly by the actually complex stuff, but they only attend group lessons (and never private 1-on-1, and never go into “obsession mode”) in their attempts to become better at the sport. Therefore they practice under an environment that cannot fix their biggest problems, which often leads to them staying “stuck” for years on end in their skills.

I used to historically not really give feedback to players around these complex topics in group lessons. But since a change during 2026 and the birth of this document I will with some groups implement the concept of “long term feedback”, meaning I might inform a player that they have a problem that I can spot and describe, but won’t try to help the player fix during this particular session - simply because the topic is too big for this work to realistically be successful.

If “long term feedback” would be implemented in your group but you do not like to receive it (because being aware of problems without getting the solution to it might be annoying, or other reasons), you can always just tell me to not give you this kind of feedback to you.

This is basically the beach volleyball equivalent of having a mechanic doing a quick checkup on your car, and the mechanic realizing that the engine is severely broken, but doesn’t do anything about it (because even if the mechanic technically could fix the engine, the job would take several days, and this is just a 30 minute checkup) except inform the car owner about the situation with the broken engine and what it would take to fix it.

Another way to describe this concept is that there are so many players who have said the phrase “Yes I know, every coach has told me I need to do X instead of Y, but I just never seem to be able to do it.”, and we are about to find out the root cause for this.

So, here we go:

Often in a beach volleyball group lesson, the coach only has about 5-20 second snippets of time to deliver feedback to players without stopping the flow of the practice. These 5-20 seconds work excellently for delivering feedback around simpler things, and things that the coach and player has previously worked on together, so they share a “mutual understanding” of the topic already.

Example feedback around simple topic: “That set was too low for you to be able to take a full swing at it, but quite often in those low set situations you can instead see the court quite well in your peripheral vision, and still score with for example a pokey attack into an area that you see is empty.” (Takes less than 20 seconds to say.)

Example feedback “mutual understanding”: “Yes, there you did exactly what we talked about before, you waited long enough with the left step until you had information that you could actually rely on for your timing.” (Takes less than 20 seconds to say.)

However, what these 5-20 second opportunities to give feedback on the other hand are really horrible for, is feedback around complex and complicated topics that are impossible to understand fully in just 20 seconds, and very often get misunderstood and the opposite of helpful for the players if the coach even attempts to explain it in 20 seconds.

Simply, even just attempting to explain the topic shortly will have a high risk for misunderstandings, which will actually hurt more than help.

What kinds of topics are this complex, one might ask? How to generate a lot of power when spiking. How to have a high contact point and an ability to hit all angles while generating that power. How to handset well. How to deal with crazy float-serves in serve receive. How to time the ball better on a bad set. How to fix the setter-hitter connection between you and your teammate. How to fix the mental connection between you and your partner if playing together brings both of you down. And so on…

Notice that these are all topics that are basically super important for getting from a somewhat high level to a very high level, and basically topics that many fairly advanced players MOST wish some coach would give them the secret keys to. Also notice that these are topics that people often struggle with for years on end, without ever really finding solutions for them.

The reasons for people struggling with these skills are many, but one of them is that there in beach volleyball is a huge culture towards group coaching, and these skills, while being totally learnable, often require a few hours of tailor made 1-on-1 coaching (or group coaching where the coach uses many practices to step by step build up the understanding and skills necessary to in the end master the end goal skill) in order to be understood and learned. 

In other words (going back to the earlier car analogy), people who would need to tell the mechanic to go ahead with the engine shift, just repeatedly keep taking their car to 30-minute checkups, where the mechanic will always see that the engine needs to be shifted, but never has the time to do the actual job. At some level, this is roughly what a high level player who is kept back in their skills by some of these “bigger problems” do if they keep going to group lessons only, and never do any other type of beach volleyball training to overcome their problems.

The concept of “long term feedback” was born out of some problems when coaching higher level group lessons. When I asked for thoughts about how I could become better at coaching, one of the points I received was “it would be great to get more feedback.” 

I then realized that this lack of feedback I give to higher level players, is because at this level, very often the players already do the simpler things (that easily fit into a 20 second window to give feedback) well, and the things people really would need to level up to the next level, are these more complex topics… However, since trying to talk about these topics in 20 seconds (or even 5 minutes for example for the whole group in the end of a practice) is simply too little time for the topics, and will likely make the players more confused rather than being helpful, I as a result often decided to simply not give feedback around these topics in group lessons. They were instead topics that I’d only address in 1-on-1 training sessions that would allow enough time for the player to actually be able to understand the topic. However, the problem then was that players who didn’t understand this internal decision of not giving certain feedback that I’d made, instead got the perception that I’m a coach who doesn’t really give much feedback (which might come off as a coach who isn’t really engaged.)

So the “solution” to this dilemma is what I will call “long term feedback” where I inform the player about a problem that they have in their game, but without even going to attempt to explain the solution to it during the current group-lesson. Similar to the car mechanic informing the car owner about the broken engine without doing anything to it.

Examples of some “long term feedback”:

“Here’s some long term feedback for you - in that situation you were just in, in order to hit the ball as hard as I saw you wanted to do, you’d have to first learn how to do “core powered hits” where your arm can just stay relaxed and all the power comes from further down the chain. It’s entirely possible to learn, but unfortunately it’s a way too big of a topic for this practice. Maybe I’d tell you to just keep hitting the way you know works for you today, if winning this drill is important for you, and the deeper work of finding the power from the core we can discuss later if you want.”

“Here’s some long term feedback for you - When the serve suddenly floats up into your chest like that, you will need to receive it with this kind of special technique that allows your platform to get there and be angled the right way, super quickly. We don’t have time today to look into this technique because it’s somewhat complex, but I just wanted you to know that there is a solution to receiving also those serves with your platform (without needing to use the tomahawk), it’s just that nobody has explained to you yet how to do it.”

“Yes I agree you were “too under the ball” on that attack too to be able to attack it effectively. However, the solution to that is not super straightforward, and there’s many factors that come to it, the setting system you and your partner use, your approach steps and how you time them, your attacking technique, and even your mobility actually. If we’d actually want to solve this problem we would have to first investigate what the actually biggest root cause for you being “under the ball” is, and then start fixing things from there. Unfortunately though, we don’t have that kind of time here in this group lesson, so unfortunately this becomes a piece of long term feedback for you…”

Feedback like the examples above have often lived in my head without ever being delivered to the player, partially because I have felt that I might just come off as some sort of secretive and semi sneaky salesman who just wants to sell private coaching during group lessons if I actually went ahead and gave people this kind of feedback.

However, the feedback is still true, and players want feedback, and even “long term feedback” can be very helpful in the long run even if it might not help on the same day as it is received.. So therefore I have decided to start giving also “long term feedback” (in addition to the other feedback I already give) to players in certain groups, especially higher level groups where people have asked for more feedback in general.

Remember though, rule number 2 on this page is “It’s OK to tell the coach to shut up”, which is always true. If I would start giving you “long term feedback” and you would not appreciate it, you can just tell me this and I will stop, and go back to only giving you feedback that can realistically both be delivered, understood, and learned from, all under the realities of a group lesson.

There is a chance that “early vs late platform” in serve receive becomes a topic of discussion sooner or later during our sessions.

For whoever is interested and wants, you can watch these two videos regarding the topic:

Characteristics of the best serve receivers in the world (men’s examples): https://www.loom.com/share/b17d313e799a446c99edf9ca4f2effc7?sid=047a71ed-855b-431e-8ae0-a09d878deb2c

Characteristics of the best serve receivers in the world (women’s examples): https://www.loom.com/share/76bde6b272d84b42a68b270eceb7a2e0?sid=1defa3f7-2672-42b6-a27f-a2303c16e773

General ball control and serve receive in unpredictable chaotic situations

There is one “drill sequence” that I believe for many players would be one of the most powerful things they could do to raise their overall skill level in beach volleyball. I have at times ran groups where we dedicate a little bit of time every lesson to becoming better at these drills, but there is also a chance that I will not run this with your group. Anyway, if you want, all you need to do it on your own is a training partner and this video: https://youtu.be/BXbcrogALvA?si=gzhByZ4HAnA5JomT (In case you would be interested in the reasons I believe this drill progression is so powerful, check the video description below it on Youtube.)