Coaching cues? Do they work? Who are they for, the visitors of the guru coach or the athlete? When is too much feedback. When is a sit down explanation useful? When is observation of a fellow athlete or film necessary? I don’t have the answers, but my questions are good ones as I am convinced that cues are often too complicated or vague. Many times you can’t coach something that is training or
Poetry in Motion
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Participant
In this regard, I always love reading Vern’s stuff. You take the demands of the event, know the technical model you are trying to achieve, and work from there. Cues are simply a means to an end. Some athletes you can tell them what to do, some need to be tricked.
I do agree that teaching 5th graders or below, not even necessarily PE, will force explanation at its finest because the obvious to us becomes a complication to them.
On sight advice is always tricky to pass along because it depends on the set up the entire program from beginning, middle and end. With most events, I tend to work backwards so the athlete always knows where they want to get regardless of how the process is going to happen. It is the same with planning a periodization model, you have to know where you are going then work towards the start.
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Participant
I used to be critical of myself for not being more verbose during training but now I’m okay with it. Why do coaches feel compelled to give intricate instructions after EVERY rep of a 10 x 20 workout?
Who cares about first derivative or second derivative when you have a chubby kid who can’t even do 10 solid push-ups?
Sometimes I think we make things way more complicated than they need to be.
To this day a friend still quotes the great Frank Gagliano of Georgetown from an MIAA clinic years ago, “Maaacro, miiicro, meeeso…we just run hard.”
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Participant
The Muse can you expand upon your post?
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Participant
[quote author="mattstranberg" date="1260416497"]The Muse can you expand upon your post?
“You will never know where your influence starts or when it will end”[/quote]
haha where the hell did you find that? apparently according to his profile About Me:
Fitness professional specializing in the training of athletes to create TONS of power. Known as The King of Core internationally, I am very fortunate to have worked with thousands of athletes from all over the world as well as teams and coaches in an effort to drastically improve ones athletic ability virtually overnight.
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Participant
I coach at a fairly affluent suburban school. The vast majority of my athletes have been “coached” from a young age in various sports. I am a verbose person, but I constantly have to tell the athletes to “just do it and we’ll talk about it later.” They are constantly begging for feedback…”am I doing it right?” “Can you watch my power clean?” “Did you see my last acceleration?” I often wonder if they could pass the drunk driving “touch your nose” test while stone cold sober, since they apparently don’t have enough kinesthetic awareness to tell if they are holding their own hand in front of their face with eyes closed. I’m kidding (somewhat), but I really think the lack of unstructured play and the desire to “get kids involved in sports” in a structured way at a young age makes them kinesthetically stupid, rather than advancing their coordination. They might learn certain skills, but unless those skills are sequenced properly and applied intermittently in unstructured situations, they won’t learn how to apply them in any way other than robotically.
There are kids on my team that I will refuse to talk to after a certain amount of input, because they will ask for unreasonable clarity if I let them. I often have to explain that I’m not rejecting them or valuing them less…they simply need to JUST DO THE THING and FEEL what is happening and SELF ASSESS. I’ll tell them whether they are right later, but if you never toilet train the child, expect to wipe ass when they are teenagers, right?
On the bright side, very few of them have received any real coaching feedback specifically in track and field, so I’ve got that going for me.
I think there are those who need to “feel” their way through an event and those that are capable of thinking their way through it, and there is every combination of the two in between. Most need to feel it, but we coaches assume we can reach them through language because it validates us. I constantly have to watch that I’m not falling in love with the awesome cues I’m giving…what matters is results, not how high I score on the SAT verbal.
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Member
Very good point – and a focus of my study this semester at uni. The answer as always is it depends….
To use Explicit or implicit instructions and their effect on performance/retention- alot of studies (Masters, 1992; Wulf 2007: Lam 2009) show that giving specific technical instructions builds performers who buckle under pressure – is this effective coaching?Or should we abandon ideas of a textbook technique at all and use guided discovery? When and how much feedback is effective – well some studies have shown that using feedback for 50% was just as effective as 100% of the reps/activity…
Lately I’ve come to the conclusion that too many coaches give feedback for the benefit of onlookers – or to unload their wealth of knowledge to improve their delusions of grandeur. a coaches job is to build good athletes who perform with ease – it’s about simplicity. Coaches guide an athlete to success, and sometime with-holding information is just as important as imparting it.
It’s not hard to make something seem complex – it’s a skill to make something complex seem simple.
The most important thing is athlete’s are individuals – and a good coach knows how to get through to the athlete in the most appropriate way for that athlete.
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