Further articles on skills

Insights from elite orienteers and coaches to help you follow their success

The structured material on Better Orienteering has been designed to get you from a beginner or improver to a higher level of orienteering skills in manageable steps. There is of course much more that can be said and much more to learn and build into your orienteering skills base.

This section includes articles on a range of orienteering skills and strategies to help you keep developing. I hope that this section will keep growing with other contributions being offered.

What has happened to maps since 1965?

This presentation is a summary of some key points and also detailed map extracts from a discussion by Mats Troeng with Simon Eklov of O-Ringen TV called What has happened to maps since 1965?

1965-to-2019-v2 Download

Articles at On The Red Line

Preparing for a single race. Alasdair McLeod

Discusses the preparation process before you get to race day

https://www.ontheredline.org.uk/articles/preparing-single-race

Let’s Start Well. Alasdair McLeod

Looking at race day routine

https://www.ontheredline.org.uk/articles/lets-start

Building the basics

https://www.ontheredline.org.uk/articles/building-the-basics

A Process Model of orienteering developed by Kris Jones

In this article Kris Jones discusses the analysis of orienteering navigation that led to a Process model of orienteering that has been incorporated into Better Orienteering. This discussion will be of most interest to orienteers wanting to develop their ideas further on orienteering analysis and coaching. This version of the article is published here in 2019.

Plan, Picture, Direction is a simplified version of this model developed by Duncan Bayliss to use across skill levels on BetterOrienteering.org

kris-jones-performance-analysis Download

World of O articles on Thierry Guergiou’s orienteering technique

These articles are also linked to in the Beyond Advanced section

http://news.worldofo.com/2007/11/27/gueorgious-story-part-i/

http://news.worldofo.com/2007/12/10/gueorgious-story-part-ii/

An article by Martin Lerjen responding to Thierry’s technique.

http://news.worldofo.com/2007/12/17/follow-up-of-gueorgiou-part-ii-analyze-your-map-reading/

British Orienteering – advice to experienced and elite competitors on improving performance

The Coaching and Training advice by Goran Andersson is aimed at elite competitors, covering a range of factors that affect performance including nutrition, psychology and planning training.

https://www.britishorienteering.org.uk/page/improving_performance

Systematic Orienteering. A top-down approach to navigation by Mark Nixon

2017-systematic-orienteering-mark-nixon Download

https://www.britishorienteering.org.uk/coachingconference2021

Scientific Journal of Orienteering

The back catalogue of the journal is available on the IOF website. It covers every aspect of the sport. There are scholarly articles on skills and navigation. Unfortunately it has been published less regularly in recent years.

https://orienteering.sport/iof/communication/publications/scientific-journal-of-orienteering/

Using Better Orienteering in club training – BASOC

Badenoch and Strathspey Orienteering Club (Scotland) run a regular training series. They have used Better Orienteering alongside training exercises to help orienteers of a wide range of abilities. See link to an article by Lynne Walker:

https://www.basoc.org.uk/info/improving-your-orienteering-technique