# How to Stop Wasting Hours Building Training Material
You're a coach. You've found the perfect example. A Sicilian position where the student always goes wrong. A pawn endgame that teaches precision. A tactical pattern that shows up every week in blitz. So you spend two hours copying it into ChessBase, adding annotations, creating a quiz, formatting it for your students.
Stop.
ChessBase 26 has already solved this problem. You don't need books spread across your desk. You don't need a scanner. You don't need to manually diagram positions and type move sequences by hand. The software handles it all. What took you a full afternoon now takes twenty minutes.
This matters because time is your scarcest resource as a chess instructor or serious trainer. Every hour spent on administrative busywork is an hour you're not spending on actual analysis, on understanding why a position works, on preparing the conceptual framework that makes a lesson stick.
The second part of ChessBase 26's training workflow focuses on turning raw material into teachable exercises. The database functions do the heavy lifting. You identify positions. You tag them. The software extracts them. Then you transform those positions into actual training problems your students solve.
Here's what changes. Instead of copying games one by one, you search your database for specific positions. A rook endgame where the stronger side must know the Lucena position. A middlegame where a knight move wins material. A defensive sequence where the weaker player held the draw. Filter by Elo, by era, by opening, by any parameter you want. The database spits out hundreds of examples at once.
Now you curate. You pick the clearest examples. You add your own commentary if needed. The tool lets you turn any position into an exercise with a few clicks. Your student sees the board. They play the right move. The engine confirms it or explains where they went wrong. No more "trust me, this is the correct move." They learn by doing.
This workflow eliminates the didactic friction that kills training programs. A student is bored by your explanation? They're engaging with positions instead. They're thinking. They're failing safely, away from tournament pressure. They're building intuition through repetition and immediate feedback.
For club players building their own training regimen, this matters just as much. You want to study the Ruy Lopez. You don't need to buy fifteen books. You search the database for every major line from the past five years. You filter for games by Caruana, Vachier-Lagrave, and Svidler. Suddenly you have structured material. You turn it into exercises. You play through positions until the moves feel natural.
The time savings compound. Most coaches spend more time on preparation than actual instruction. They're doing work that software should handle. ChessBase 26 pushes that boundary. The software becomes your assistant editor. It does the mechanical work. You focus on pedagogy.
One more benefit that rarely gets mentioned. When your training material comes directly from a searchable database, it stays dynamic. A new tournament ends. New games flood the database. You update your search. Suddenly your training material reflects modern chess. You're not teaching from thirty-year-old games. You're teaching from positions your students will actually see.
For serious players, this is the core of how you build deliberate practice. You identify your weak positions. You mine games for examples. You create problems where you solve the position before seeing the answer. You do this weekly. Your rating climbs because you're training smarter, not just harder.
The barrier to entry for good training material has collapsed. That's the real story here. You no longer need expensive coaching software or publishing resources or a shelf full of books. You need the database and the time to think about what you're teaching. ChessBase handles the rest.