This past week's reading was about the topic of talent development. Once you have identified talent what types of environments and activities maximize it?
There are many considerations to take into account when developing athletes, especially at the youth level and today I am not going to go down that particular rabbit hole. For this post I want to focus a bit more on environment design and practice design. Specifically Part 3 of the Routledge Handbook. This part focuses on developing optimal training environments.
A first step for approaching this subject is identification of scale. There are different scales of analysis we are working with. On one side we have the scale to which we consider the athlete's personal life and context. The second scale is time.
One of the first chapters in part 3 discusses the different scales of an individual athletes life. First, a breakdown of the "Athletic Talent Development Environment"
Picture 2 different levels to an athletes life:
_Macro Environment_ - Things that are more systemic in nature. The National Culture, Youth Culture, Specific Sport Culture, and Educational System that are acting on and influencing the individual in question
_Micro Environment_ - Things that are more directly part of the athletes community. Their school. Their family, their friends, and their genetics. And the coaching staff they interact with.
A takeaway here is that coaches should consider the athlete beyond the individual. Think of the world around the athlete and how it influences them. To whatever depth seems practical. This will help build a strong relationship to best identify needs to inform training.
A few months ago I had an example of this happen with one of my own athletes. They had approached me after training with some questions. Soon the conversation had turned to concerns about training. They felt things were not clicking. That they weren't feeling good in training and felt they were not performing well. After prodding a little further the athlete revealed to me that his wife was pregnant and due at any moment. His mental stress was affecting his training! Identifying that helped me reset expectations with them. We had pinpointed a huge point of stress outside the training. But this was having effects in the training room. Instead of giving them some technical prescription, I was able to comfort them. By redirecting the athletes focus I was able to help them through their issue. They needed some help aligning their expectations for training. Based on the relationship I had with the athlete I was able to help them navigate their training.
We should consider the individual athlete and their macro and micro environments. Doing this we can be positioned to help deliver value as a coach. This type of work that can help us move from assuming we are providing value as a coach, to actually providing value. As I had mentioned in my last post, the coach can influence athletes' beliefs about themselves, how we set up the training environment can too. Mental Health and physical skill are both things great coaches need to develop and work with.
After considering the athlete and the world the athlete exists in. We can finally get to what most people think of when they think of "coaching". The actual practical "on the field" work of sports practice. In many contexts and sports coaches are usually volunteers or former athletes. Chapter 22 in the handbook outlines that this can lead to a gap between what coaches are doing and the state of research and theory. This has effects on the second scale of analysis I mentioned above, the scale of time. How fast or slow should an athlete be improving? On what timescale should different skills or techniques improve. Progress at a rapid timescale can have negative effects on athlete's mental and physical health. Focus on too long of a timescale and affect athlete motivation. How do you go about measuring development. What type of progress, and over what timescale? Being familiar with modern research, evidence, and theory, can help coaches run more effective practice.
This chapter lays out 3 major observations for development and training. I think all coaches and athletes will find these familiar.
1. An athlete is talented (or inexperienced), but is missing tactical and technical knowledge to some degree
2. An athlete performs well, but has deficiencies in their movement and decision making preventing success at a higher level
3. An athlete performs well in stable and familiar environments (in the training room). But their performance doesn't transfer well to competitions or high pressure contexts
With these 3 broad issues in mind, a coach should identify which category the athlete is in to begin. A coach can then identify specific underlying issues the athlete has. Finally the coach can design training interventions for those specific problems. Today I don't want to get into specific training methodologies. I do want to spend the rest of this post talking about a specific guiding framework for practice called "Deliberate Practice".
Deliberate Practice is likely a term many people have heard. Coined by researcher Anders Ericson. Made even more popular by Malcolm Gladwell in his book "Outliers" with the name "The 10000 hour rule". This concept is something that is familiar to people in and outside of sport. There is a lot of info about Deliberate Practice. Even some entertaining detours of Ericsson responding to Gladwell's (mis)interpretation of his work
From Ericsson's original '93 paper, a useful general definition for deliberate practice is given.
"*...deliberate practice is a highly structured activity, the explicit goal of which is to improve performance. Specific tasks are invented to overcome weaknesses, and performance is carefully monitored to provide cues for ways to improve if further*"
This is very broad. Ericsson further fleshes the idea out in his book "Peak" by providing some extra guidelines. Here is a short list of other factors provided for identifying Deliberate Practice
- Develops skills other experts in the domain have already figured out, and training methodologies have been established for
- Pushes people just outside of their comfort zone
- Has well defined and specific goals
- Requires full attention and conscious actions, not just going through the motions
- Feedback and modification in response to that feedback
- Produces and improves mental representations
- Produces and improves existing abilities
I don't believe anyone will disagree on the points raised here (aside from mental representations which is another deep rabbit hole I wont be getting into here). The trouble begins when you try to apply the principles to something specific. As we have been given almost no way to identify specific tasks and skills we should be "deliberately practicing". There is also an assumption made. Top level performers are not sharing the specifics of their training regimen and methods. Given the scales of analysis mentioned above. Expert performers and professionals have very different micro and macro environments. For non expert's who have different levels of talent. Why should we expect the expert training methods to work the same. If we uncritically copy methods, should we expect the same results?
Before you can deliberately practice. You need to identify something to practice. To do this you will need to divide your sport into different categories of technique and skill. How do we go about "cutting up" our sport into pieces for practice?
Imagine you have an Ikea bookshelf. You want to disassemble this bookshelf to get an idea of how it is built. You have two options to do this. You could use the tools provided from building it, or you could use a sledgehammer. Depending on the tool you use, you will end up with a very different set of component pieces. Only one of the tools will allow you to fit the bookshelf back together again. This is similar to how we can think about sport practice. What tools are we using to break the sport down into component parts. How do we know the component parts will "fit" back together in the right way? Do certain pieces need to be in place before others? The analytical tool we use to break our activity down will have a direct influence on how we design our practices. How do those pieces interact with the athlete's micro and macro environments?
To take this analogy to grappling, imagine a student is having a hard time passing guard. If the coach views the process of guard passing as a collection of singular techniques, like knee cut or leg drag, then deliberate practice could be just drilling those movements. From another perspective, we can view the skill of guard passing not as a single technique but as multiple skills working at the same time. The ability to stay close to someone, to keep their hands and feet of you, to keep your balance, while reducing distance between your body and your opponent's .
With these new skills in mind we could design training differently. For a knee cut type movement, this could be having an athlete maintain a position splitting their opponent's legs with their leg for a set amount of time under resistance, this could help them work on those mentioned skills in a more controlled slice of the game. Once a student can hold that split leg position, modifying the difficulty by having them move closer to their opponent or switching legs, can let us push the athlete out of their comfort zone to further develop skills. this allows us to cut up those larger techniques into smaller skills that can be practiced in a way that fit back properly into the larger whole of grappling. Rather than trying to practice so much in one big chunk that the level of challenge is overwhelming.
Considering the 3 categories of athlete listed before. We can even more finely tune the type of practice we are designing.
1. An athlete is talented (or inexperienced), but is missing tactical and technical knowledge to some degree - *Does the athlete know why we want to pass guard and what that means?*
2. An athlete performs well, but has deficiencies in their movement and decision making preventing success at a higher level - *To what level has the athlete practicing the component skills of guard passing, and combining them in context?*
3. An athlete performs well in stable and familiar environments (in the training room). But their performance doesn't transfer well to competitions or high pressure contexts - *Can the athlete find success on differently skilled opponents? What about lighter or heavier ones? What about when they are very tired or under a set amount of time?*
Adding in our scales of analysis from before. The macro and micro environments will affect engagement and results from deliberate practice. An athlete, because of their upbringing, may be more willing to engage in difficult practice. The level of challenge for them to deliberately practice will be higher. Compare to an athlete who may not deal with difficulty well, they may need a more gradual increase in challenge or more frequent feedback to encourage them. An athlete's feelings about their training partners may also influence how you adjust the parameters of deliberate practice. Interpersonal frustration and team cohesion can have a big impact. All of this will influence what types of activities, and what duration, an athlete can fully engage in deliberate practice.
Next week my plan is to dive into some of the Deliberate Practice literature. To look for answers to some of these questions
until next time...