How to film a coaching course
on your phone

Coaches routinely spend months not filming because they think they need better equipment. They don't. A phone from the last few years shoots better video than television did a decade ago.

Here's what actually matters, in order of how much it affects the finished thing.

The kit list, ranked honestly

• Audio. A £20–£40 lapel mic is the single highest-impact purchase. Viewers forgive soft footage and quit instantly on echoey, windy or distant sound. If you buy one thing, buy this.
• Light. Free, if you film in the right place at the right time. Face a window indoors. Outdoors, shoot on an overcast day or in shade — direct midday sun is the worst light there is.
• Something to hold the phone still. A cheap tripod, or a gym bag on a bench. Handheld footage reads as amateur faster than anything else.
• The camera itself. Last on the list, and it should be.

Write the shot list first

Non-negotiable. Before filming day, for every video in the course, write three things:

• The one point this video makes
• The first sentence out of your mouth
• What has to be in frame (you, a player, a racket, a bag, the net)

A course with 20 videos gives you a 20-row list. That list is the difference between a focused three-hour session and a lost weekend of footage you'll never cut.

Film in blocks, not weekly

Set up once, film everything that shares a location and a setup. Talking-head pieces in one block. Court or gym demonstrations in another. Close-up technique in a third.

Weekly filming fails for a boring reason: your clothes, the light and your energy don't match across weeks, and the course looks disjointed even when the content is good.

The ten rules that prevent re-shoots

• Wear the same thing across a block, and avoid thin stripes and busy logos.
• Say the point in the first five seconds. No intros, no "hi guys, welcome back".
• Frame yourself off-centre with head room, camera at roughly eye height.
• Shoot horizontal for the course, and grab a few vertical takes for social while you're set up.
• Clap once at the start of each take — it gives an editor a visual cue.
• Mess up? Pause, then say the whole sentence again from the start. Don't patch mid-sentence.
• Leave two seconds of silence at the start and end of every take.
• Lock exposure and focus so the shot doesn't breathe mid-take.
• Check the first take back with headphones before filming another nineteen.
• Film more demonstration footage than you think you need. Cutaways are what rescue an edit.

Slow motion is your unfair advantage

For technique, film demonstrations at a high frame rate so they can be slowed down cleanly. Being able to stop and step through a movement is the thing that genuinely can't be done in a live session — it's where an online course beats being there in person, and most coaches never use it.

Then hand it over, or block out the weeks

Editing is where the hours go. Twenty short videos is realistically 20–40 hours of cutting, captioning and exporting if you're not fast at it, on top of the platform build.

That's the part we take off coaches: you film to the shot list, we do everything after. If you'd rather do it all yourself, just budget those hours honestly rather than discovering them.