By Michael Zweifel
As an S&C professional, I’ve always been impressed with big “numbers” – a huge vertical jump, a crisp 5-10-5, or a heavy and deep back squat. But, the longer I work with athletes; the less and less I feel the need to push higher outputs in these physical capacities.
Don’t get me wrong, improving the physical capacity of athletes is important, but
I’ve pushed athletes far too hard in the physical capacity realm, at the expense of skill and movement development, only to see these physical capacities not utilized in the heat of a game.
We’ve all seen the weight room warrior that can’t put it together on the field. We’ve also all seen the athlete shouldn’t be successful because they lack what we perceive as adequate strength, size, and/or speed; yet they dominate the game.
Understand that strength and speed in sport is contextual and complex, not as simple as – sprinting fast in a straight line = better player. Instead, it’s a complex interaction of physical, perceptual, cognitive, technical, and tactical components (Jeffreys, 2018).
This is especially true for most team sports, where movement and its development is king. The literature has tended to support this view as well – strength, COD, and sprint speed are not great indicators of actual on-field performance, ESPECIALLY as the qualification of athlete increases. (Baker, 2008; Buckner, 2018; Gabbett, 2007; Gabbett, 2008; Haycraft, 2017; Young, 2006; Young, 2015; Young, 2015).
You can find plenty of players in college or third-string professionals that have just as good, if not, better physical outputs as the starters, yet are nowhere near as good at the sport. Heck, I have HS athletes that could throw down respectable combine numbers, yet they’ll never play DI or in the NFL.
Improvement in sport performance is not as simple as: get faster running in a straight line equals you are a better player
So as an S&C coach, I refuse to see my job as purely improving the physical capacities and leave skill acquisition and sport movement attunement to the sport coaches. As a profession, we do a great job of building the physical abilities of athletes, but I feel we can do so much better at improving the perceptual, cognitive, technical, tactical, and psychological abilities as well.
A change I’ve made is to push these “other” abilities to the forefront and have less concern of pushing max strength or power.
This is NOT saying I don’t value the weight room. A huge misconception of “movement specialists” is we don’t value the weight room.
False.
We don’t disagree with strength training, rather, we disagree with the perceived simplistic causal effects of – strength training = increased performance.
There is not doubt resistance training has tremendous benefit of helping make an athlete more robust, build tissue resiliency, and improve body composition, BUT I see more value in how these physical outputs are applied in a complex setting. I see more value in the “soft” skills of movement like rhythm, timing, coordination, feel, and ownership. I see more value in perception-action coupling and developing adaptable, dexterous, and creative athletes.
Dan Pfaff recently had a great quote at an ALTIS poolside chat. He said something along these lines – “Ask an S&C coach for their weight room program, and they’ll hand you a book. Ask an S&C coach for their speed and movement program, and they’ll hand you a paragraph”.
This sums up the evolution of my coaching approach – just in the opposite manner.
It was Charles Darwin that said – “It’s not the strongest nor the most intelligent of species that survives, rather the most adaptable”.
So the following, in no particular order, are thoughts that have evolved my coaching and hopefully spark deep thought and conversation.
I welcome all feedback, critical or positive, from coaches on these thoughts, as professional discussion will help all in our field.
Use Practice/Training to LEARN
The main objective for training should be to push athletes to the edge of learning. Learning transfers, learning is retained, learning is adaptable – memorizing robotic movements doesn’t.
It was Yuri Verkhoshansky that said, “Sport is a problem solving activity, where movements are used to produce the necessary solutions”.
Learning is not about memorizing a solution, but rather, learning how to solve problems.
Karl Newell infers that learning is continuously shaped by interaction of task, environmental & individual constraints (Newell, 1986).
What does this mean?
It means we want our athletes to gain exposure and experience in various environments and by manipulating constraints that push learning to the forefront.
It means our training is messy, involves plenty of perceptual and cognitive aspects, and inevitably involves mistakes. Performing tasks that require decision-making ensures a high cognitive involvement and thus have greater learning effects (Vickers, 2007).
Interestingly, skill acquisition and motor learning is an on-going process and it truly never ends. Araujo and Davids suggested that athletes might not actually ever acquire anything; rather athletes gain experience of skills that lead to the emergence of an adaptive, functional relationship between the athlete, specific task, and environment. A better term may actually be ‘skill adaptation’ or ‘skill attunement’ to describe this process (Araujo & Davids, 2011).
Skill acquisition and motor learning is an ongoing process and it never truly ends.
So learning means we want to create adaptable athletes that become attuned to their unique environments. We want creative thinkers, explorers, and question askers –NOT robots.
This leads me to the next point…
Be Information Based
How do you maximize learning in athletes?
You maximize the information they receive.
JJ Gibson said – “Movement and action is NOT controlled by the brain, but by information”
The information provided by the environment, the task, the opponent, the current situation, all provide rich information that afford athletes movement options.
You don’t teach someone by giving them the answers, instead providing the tools and guiding the environment that allows them to find the answer themselves.
Everything you do provides information. When a ladder or cone is laid out, information is still present, albeit very poor information that doesn’t allow for creative thought and problem solving.
The goal of our training environment should be to maximize the information given to our athletes. This means less of knowing where to go and what to do; instead building a problem with rich information and allowing the athlete to a solution.
Athletes learn by becoming attuned to the information provided.
So ask yourself, what information does your training provide?
Learning Is Non-Linear
The most difficult aspect of designing training with the hopes to enhance learning is the nonlinear nature of learning – sometimes quick for athletes, other times slow. The nature of non-linear pedagogy is that athletes learn at different rates (Renshaw, 2015).
This is difficult because many athletes, parents, and coaches expect to see results in a predictable manner.
This is the wrong approach and instead we need to accept that learning is continuous and the learning process truly never ends.
This also means athletes do not follow some predictable model or should follow some linear progression.
This has been very difficult for me as a coach because we all have been taught progressions/regressions.
An athlete needs to start with A before going to B, then on to C.
Athletes need to go from easy to hard, simple to complex.
Unfortunately, that’s a far too simplified approach that doesn’t really hold true.
Adaptive, skilled movement takes time, a different amount of time for each athlete. All athletes don’t need to start at the same place, nor progress at the same rate.
I just had an NFL player text me that he felt all the things we worked on and talked about – finally connect.
This is weeks since our last on-field session – this encapsulates the nature of non-linear pedagogy – learning isn’t linear or predictable.
Don’t Force Biomechanics On ALL Athletes
I’ve said this before, but when it comes to complex sport movement, there is no “textbook” technique. So don’t force athletes into what you may deem “perfect” form.
While it’s interesting to look at detailed biomechanic and kinematic descriptions of a certain athlete and think – I need my athletes to look like this – understand these analysis ONLY tell what the athlete produced, they do not tell us HOW the athlete produced those movements.
Ask yourself, and truly think deeply about this…
- Does getting better at a pre-planned cone drill lead to increased technique that will help the athlete in a game?
- Does getting better at a bag drill help in the heat of the battle?
- Is the athlete just increasing performance in that single drill while not really learning anything that can be used during competition?
Sport is not like math or English – it isn’t about declarative knowledge.
2+2 doesn’t always equal 4 in sport like it does in math. There is no learning the alphabet of movement. So thinking athletes have to “learn” a movement in a closed setting before progressing to an open setting doesn’t hold water.
Players must learn to adapt their movements to the various situations encountered on the field.
Most research focuses on biomechanics and forgets the brain and behavior.
They all interact and influence each other; so it is unwise to study or try to force a biomechanical model without consideration of the others.
Now there is fine line with this as certain movements are more closed and have greater defined mechanics.
For example, linear speed has more defined mechanics than agility. Thus we will work much harder at giving our team sport athletes the understanding and grasp of linear mechanics.
In reference to the differences of track mechanics and team sport sprint mechanics, Stuart McMillian has said, “Team sport athletes need to know the rules, before they can break them”.
Accordingly, we teach our athletes the rules of acceleration and top-end sprinting speed with a more nuanced biomechanical rule book, but then put them in various scenarios, situations, and stances to let them “break” the rules.
When you look at cutting mechanics, and every possible cut or break an athlete can make – these same principles cannot be applied.
Unlike sprinting, most movements that occur in sport have a short list of universal mechanics athletes must follow.
Study the “Problems” of Sport
A pet peeve of mine is I feel coaches don’t do enough to truly and deeply understand the sport(s) they prepare their athletes for.
- Are you sitting in on sport staff meetings?
- Are you studying the movement and informational problems that accompany sport?
- Do you truly know the ins and outs of your teams playing style?
- Are you studying the nuances of sport as much as you’re studying periodization models?
To truly help our athletes the best that we can, we need to know our sport intimately.
- What is perceived?
- What is the stimulus?
- What is the information from that?
- What are common problems each athlete, at each position, are confronted with? What are the stresses, not just physical, but perceptual, cognitive, and psychological?
- What are the technical and tactical requirements?
When you answer these questions, you’ll find the opposite of what we’re typically told.
We’re often told that every error in sport is due to a physical limitation – too weak, too slow, too small – and that S&C coaches must fix these physical issues. Rather many issues are actually perceptual, psychological, and/or tactical errors.
Having a deeper appreciation for these things will go a long way in helping your athlete’s preparation.
In addition to that, I seek to know my athletes better and really study their movement strategies. This means watching film of my athletes and recording sessions to view closer. Do you know the default strategies of your athletes when they are confronted with certain problems or under pressure? What do they revert to when fatigue sets in? Do they exhibit dexterous movement or stuck in a single strategy?
Know the sport and your athletes deeper than the weight room.
Build Representation
Once we know the sport and our athletes more deeply, we can now build representative learning environments for our athletes.
Representation means trying to keep the fidelity, feel, and information of sport. Shawn Myszka likes to say – “Does the environment look, feel, and act like sport?”
This is representation.
Our goal should be to place athletes in representative environments where they are now exposed to specific stimuli, tasks, and structures of sport and they must discover appropriate movement solutions.
Ecological dynamics states that skilled performance arises from performer-environment interaction. So analysis of sport movement and subsequent improvement of performance needs to include both the environment and performer TOGETHER not separately (Gibson, 2000).
My goal is to build perceptual monsters and the acquisition of perceptual-motor skills is highly task-specific, thus why we need to have a deeper understanding of the sport(s) we coach and build representation.
Perception and Decision-Making Are High Priority
In all of our movement training, we ensure that we make perception and decision-making our #1 priority.
Perceptual information and movement are interlinked – and it is unwise to separate the two.
Even though they may look alike, Change of direction (COD) and agility are independent skills (Coh, 2018). Putting athletes through closed drills to work on movement “technique” and try to reduce movement errors is a poor investment.
Why?
What we perceive, we act upon – so if we make a perceptual error, we will likely make a movement error. “Poor” movement in sport is just as much a perceptual problem as a physical or technical problem.
It has been suggested that improvements in performance are only achieved when perception/cognition and physical training occur in concert – aka keep things coupled (Vickers, 2007)
Shift the coaching narrative away from guiding the learner towards a predetermined optimal technique that he/she can reproduce at will, towards developing an adaptive performer.
On the cover of The Playmaker’s Advantage, a book about perception and decision-making, Mike Sullivan, head coach of the Pittsburgh Penguins, says, “Any coach that isn’t tuned into this stuff (perception and decision-making) is going to fall behind”.
Encourage Exploration and Creativity
A popular term as of late is variability.
Previously, variability has been thought to be bad in athletes – we want our athletes to have consistent, repeatable actions without much fluctuation.
The reality is, when it comes to field/court-based movements, this isn’t necessarily true.
What is true is that better performers have low outcome variability (the end result is the same), but have a large library of execution variability (how they get there). This has been termed functional variability (Hamacher & Zech, 2018).
What does this mean?
We should encourage our athletes to explore and be creative to find multiple, authentic movement solutions. This exploration and creativity helps gain functional variability rather than limit athletes to some specific movement we deem necessary.
Strive to vary constraints on the athlete – manipulate the task, the environment, the time, the opponent, the difficulty, etc. Athletes are most creative when they are under various constraints that change rep to rep.
I force my athletes to explore – to not repeat a previous movement, to give the body and brain exposure to a variety of movements. This also applies to the weight room. Our athletes vary stances, depths, grips, angles of our strength movements – rep-to-rep and set-to-set.
This is the essence of Bernstein’s repetition without repetition – It’s not the outcome that differs, rather the process of the solution.
Understand that athletes will exhibit a certain amount of functional variability in their movements. This is why we ensure our training encourages exploration and creativity to ensure certain amounts of variability is inherently present.
Feedback
Ericsson purposed that deliberate practice (practice that maximizes learning) requires certain elements, one of those elements is – Immediate Feedback.
This doesn’t mean we have to give verbal feedback. Feedback can come from a well-designed environment and task that gives feedback to the athlete and allows for implicit learning.
In fact, it has been suggested the more verbal feedback from a coach doesn’t equate to increased performance or learning. Less frequent verbal feedback increases learning transfer and retention (Schmidt, 1991).
As a coach, we should say less, but our training environment, should say more.
My goal is to design an environment/task that has a clear intention. Intention is an aim or plan, so when we set intent we give a clearly formulated plan to act.
Increasing intention directs attention; so clearly indicating the goals of the activity will direct attention to specific information, thus also specifying the feedback.
Create an environment that maximizes feedback.
The other major area of feedback I’ve worked on is making my athletes give feedback and get used to having self-reflection.
Why?
As coaches we can NEVER see or feel what the athlete does. Only the athlete can experience the problem from their perspective, so in a way, it’s inappropriate for coaches to give explicit feedback without input from the athlete.
Sorry to beat a dead horse, but remember that an athlete’s movement is the result of what they sensed and perceived in that moment. They selected a movement solution they thought would be correct, even if you as a coach think it is wrong. So you must ask how they arrived at that solution.
So, while many of the videos you see in this article show some aspects of our movement training – what you don’t see on the video is the athletes analyzing each rep, talking about how they’d do it differently, what they were thinking, and formulating a game plan for the next rep.
So while, one could argue that some of the drills lacks representation and that these tag games aren’t’ guaranteed to transfer – those interactions and feedback between each rep make it all worthwhile for me.
I have no doubt this process of self-evaluation, communication, and teammate feedback will carry over to games when athletes are on the sideline or huddle, and communication of what they saw, felt, and perceived is vitally important for success.
In addition, this has lead to the following…
Change the Narrative of Training
Many athletes that we work with struggle, initially, with our environment. The reason for this is because we try to change the narrative of how we coach.
Athletes are used to being told what to do and how to do it. In our environment, we give them the microphone and allow them to define many of those questions.
We reduce amount of telling – Do this, don’t do that. Instead, what did you feel? Why did you do that? What did you see there?
We give our athletes a voice – We give power to change/control certain variables of drills. I ask my athletes to create drills to bring to training that they feel addresses an area of need or weakness for them.
We give our athletes choice – They are allowed to choose what mobility drill we do during warm-ups. They are allowed to choose what squat variation they want to do. They are allowed to choose aspects of the environment – duration, distances, angles, obstacles, number of players, etc.
We ask our athletes to coach – How would you coach this? What words or cues come to mind when YOU perform this movement?
I’ve changed my tune on this over the years when I first started to ask my athletes for feedback. For example, I would ask 10 athletes what they think during acceleration. The responses I received included: power, extend, explode, launch, patience, project, push, and slow rise.
Taken aback some, I then asked what they think when I cue things like project, push, rhythm, sink, etc. I was surprised that many of my athletes visualize something completely different than I visualize.
It was here I realized I needed to put the ball in their court, and make sure I wasn’t falling back on what I perceived as a magical cue or analogy.
This goes hand in hand with what’s next…
Give Ownership/Opportunity
Our job as coaches is to facilitate the learning process of our athletes – NOT be a dictator in this process.
The days of being a dictator are over. It’s no longer coaching to the athlete, instead we need to coach with the athlete. It is, after all, their performance we are talking about, and so they should have some say in the process.
Anytime athletes are allowed some autonomy and given a voice over any part of the training process, it automatically increases their personal ownership over the process. It makes the training a partnership, not a dictatorship.
Giving the athlete ownership/control over practice variables increases both learning and motivation.
Ask for their input; let them choose spacing, angles, size of environment, number of players, difficulty, and when they receive feedback.
I’ve been amazed at the creativity and ingenuity of what my athletes create when I give them ownership.
And I know I’ve talked about transfer and representative environments, but I’m fine with allowing them to create environments that may not transfer or specifically represent their sport.
There is something to be said about allowing athletes ownership and doing things they enjoy. Heck, I throw in bicep circuits into all of our training programs because athletes like them.
Getting athletes to actually be aware, think, and have ownership of their training is far more important to me than just mindless repetition.
In the video below, the athletes controlled where the “gates” were, allotted time, starting locations, which “gate” to run through, and feedback.
Pressure, Stress, Fatigue
“Under pressure you don’t rise to the occasion, you sink to the level of your training.”
This quote is attributed to the Navy Seals, but sport movement can learn from it too.
When stress, anxiety, and fatigue are high, the decision-making process changes for athletes, and if never given the opportunity to experience this during training, they will crumble during competition.
“Rising” to the occasion under pressure is simply preserving one’s normal level of play while others falter under the pressure and stress.
Adding pressure/anxiety can also reveal movement dysfunction and breakdown. I’ve had plenty of athletes move well good under “safe” conditions only to lose it when the moment increases.
The closer I watch and evaluate my athletes, the more and more I realize – that an effective display of movement is one that can withstand pressure, anxiety, and fatigue.
How can you add pressure, anxiety?
- Have a winner and loser to each rep
- Put time constraints on reps
- Make reps meaningful
- Create context, situation
- Have consequences – NOT punishment
- Time reps
- Score drills so athletes get points for certain outcomes. This increases the cognitive aspects of the drill and makes it much more game like
- Have teammates watch – nothing more stressful than being watched by peers
- Have the athlete reflect and give feedback
- Do skilled movement under fatigue. Reduce mindless conditioning and instead condition movement and skill while fatigued. Breakdown in competition is not purely from a metabolic standpoint; it’s also from a perceptual, mental, emotional, and tactical standpoint, so your conditioning should strive to include these.
- Compete
Last Thoughts
I’m sure many of the aspects mentioned in this article may come off as too sport specific (football) or out of the realms of an S&C coach.
Football is different; basketball players are always playing their sport so they don’t need more agility work.
Baseball season is 9-months long; those athletes have plenty of exposure.
I work with HS athletes, many of whom play 3-sports, so they’re always in-season. They don’t need this type of work.
While all of those things are true, I still feel there are plenty of things to takeaway from this and be applied to each unique setting.
Adding representative perceptual and cognitive components doesn’t have to be super intense, taxing, or chaotic. We do plenty of these things in our warm-up.
This article isn’t just for S&C coaches, rather all coaches. With that said, I feel the biggest contribution S&C coaches can make towards their teams is to have conversations with their sport coaches about practice structure/design, motor learning & skill acquisition, cueing/communication/feedback strategies, perception-action coupling, ecological dynamics, stress management, etc.
Finally, while most of the things touched upon today talk about complex sport movement, many of the lessons can be applied to the weight room. We can still encourage exploration and creativity in the weight room. We can still include perceptual and cognitive aspects during strength training. All settings have room for allowing athlete autonomy and ownership.
With that said, all feedback – the good, the bad, and the ugly are welcome and I hope every coach could takeaway one aspect from this article.
About Michael Zwiefel
Michael Zweifel is the owner and head of sports performance for “Building Better Athletes” performance center in Dubuque, Iowa.
Michael is a CSCS, IYCA certified practitioner, and was the all time NCAA leading receiver with 463 receptions in his playing days at University of Dubuque.
Building Better Athletes (BBA) is committed to an evidence based practice towards sports performance, and attaching physical preparation from every angle possible – physical, mental, nutritional, soft-tissue, mobility. Our focus is building the athlete from the ground up by mastering the fundamentals of movement mastery, strength/power training, recovery modalities, and giving athletes ownership of the Other 23.
Using these methods and principles, BBA has been fortunate to help athletes to:
- 5 NFL Players
- 1 CFL Player
- 1 Gatorade State Player of the Year (Basketball)
- 7 Collegiate All-Americans
- 12 Conference Player of the Year
- 11 Division I Athletes
- 52 All-Conference Athletes
References:
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Baker, D. G., & Newton, R. U. (2008). Comparison of lower body strength, power, acceleration, speed, agility, and sprint momentum to describe and compare playing rank among professional rugby league players. The Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research, 22(1), 153-158.
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Young, W. B., Miller, I. R., & Talpey, S. W. (2015). Physical qualities predict change-of-direction speed but not defensive agility in Australian rules football. The Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research, 29(1), 206-212
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