HOW TO WIN

Issue No. 23

Congratulations to those of you who ran in the London Marathon. Give your legs a well-earned rest — put your feet up and enjoy the read.

This week's issue contains some very interesting extracts from the hot-off-the-press Peak Performance Coaching Special Report, including:

Technical proficiency is not enough

“Technical proficiency is one thing,” says former National Athletics Coach Tom McNab, “ but coaches and teachers ignore the basics at their peril”. The source of this warning: the realisation that, for all the increases in our knowledge base and the professionalisation of coaching that has accompanied it, our young athletes are being badly served by those whose job it is to induct them in the basic track and field techniques.

Coaching, says McNab, is the language of priorities. A coach who is working successfully with a shot-putter launching the 16lb ball to over 20m may have little idea of how to introduce the event to 12-year-old novices. This is because he has given little thought to the essential technical priorities or presentation methods at this level. Thus, he will often use the standard shot and attempt a backward shift across the circle or rear-facing standing puts – approaches that are doomed to failure.

So what might the coaching priorities be in such a situation? McNab lists them as follows:

1. to use light shots (or stones) which children should be able to launch to respectable distances;
2. to use simple standing putts, preferably frontal ones
3. to secure the largest possible number of putts in the time available.

The aim of the coach must always be to work from success – from things that children can actually do. Anyone can put a light shot (elbow out, left side high) from a kneeling or standing frontal position with minimum technical errors, which guarantees instant success and rapid improvement. All that needs to be done in the first session is to make small increases in movement range and the shot will automatically travel further. Mission accomplished!

The priorities in such sessions with groups of children are quite different from those applying to mature throwers. The first aim is to allow the novices to experience the sheer enjoyment of launching a shot a fair distance into space; the second is to establish some essential basic techniques, such as hold, elbow position and driving up over a high left side. It will take many repetitions before there is any point in trying to go further.

Being technically correct is the easy part of the equation, but unless the technically correct information can be passed through the “sieve of contextual experience” it is virtually worthless. Knowledge can be divided up into four categories:

1. Basic information;
2. Knowledge
3. Applied knowledge;
4. Knowledge in reflection.

The coaching world is drowning in basic information and knowledge – the type that describes and analyses training techniques and methods; indeed this type of material accounts for much of the available technical literature.

“What we lack are the fruits of applied knowledge, when the coach has deployed this basic information in practical situations and derived something workable from that experience. Even rarer is knowledge in reflection, when the coach has reflected upon the practical application of his knowledge and come up with fresh reworked ideas.”

This can be blamed on the development of formal coach education in the second part of the last century in which the people versed in the theory have held sway over coaches with practical experience. As an example of this “practical experience” consider the case of the decathlete – the athlete who must assimilate virtually every skill in the athletic lexicon. Why is it that the techniques adopted by the world’s best decathletes are often surprisingly ordinary?

Answer: “Because they don’t have the time to develop sophisticated technical models and therefore opt for less ambitious techniques that confer competence rather than brilliance.”

Athletics coaches need to decide what are the true core skills appropriate to youngsters if they are not to be scared away from the sport; and the people in charge of the curriculum in schools need to realize that the concept of annual technical progression is a myth. “While it is true that a girl of 13 is fairly likely to be able to throw a javelin further than she could at 12, her performance will not necessarily be technically superior.” And yet the school syllabus makes exactly this assumption, while devoting less and less time to the acquisition of skills. To read this article in full and receive the Peak Performance Coaching Special for FREE, click here.

Performance Analysis

Performance Analysis (PA) is a relatively new discipline which Dan Bishop describes as creating a valid and reliable record of performance by means of systematic observations that can be analysed with a view to facilitating change.

The process relies on two distinct sports science disciplines:

The two disciplines use similar methods to collect data and both rely on IT for data analysis. But the main thing they have in common is the use of measured observation during or after an event to quantify performance in an accurate, reliable and valid way.

Advances in IT may have created new opportunities for PA to take hold, particularly in complex team games, but the fundamental need it addresses is not a new one: research has shown that even top coaches can only recall accurately 30-50% of key performance factors they had recently witnessed – even after special training in the art of observation.

Bishop recounts his experience with two local teams – one a UK professional Nationwide League soccer club. The club’s coaching staff wanted to improve the feedback to coaches and players on individual and team performances, initially concentrating on forwards, or strikers. A “sequential path of analysis” was created:

Ball Played to striker

How was the ball played to the striker?
(into feet, chest, or head)

What was the striker’s response?
(lost possession, held and distributed,
one touch, rolled defender or won a foul)

Where did the action occur?

Which permitted a rigorous analysis of who did what with the ball - and with what results.

The performance profiles which resulted “identified the personal strengths and weaknesses of the individual players, providing a technical focus for future training sessions. For example, it showed the coach needed to:

“The players were also given individual goal-setting plans aimed at overcoming their weaknesses. To establish the value of the whole process, another full game was analysed in the same way four weeks later. The results showed significant improvement by the strikers and substantial progress towards their individual goals.” To read this article in full and receive the Peak Performance Coaching Special for FREE, click here.

The Inner Game

The third and final major article in this issue is a “broadside against outmoded thinking and models” by Sir John Whitmore, the man responsible for introducing the Inner Game concept to the UK two decades ago. His argument is that most modern coaching is too reductionist – analysing everything down to its most basic components -and pays too little attention to “the innate, the instinctual and the intuitive”.

Whitmore summarises the Inner Game concept as follows:

“You start to play the Inner Game when you realise that the opponent within your own head is more daunting than the one on the other side of the net. The outer game is played with a racket and a ball against another player; the Inner Game is played against anxiety, self-criticism, tension, frustration, a lack of self-belief, fear and anger. Your potential is your performance minus your internal obstacles. The Inner Game process aims to eliminate these internal obstacles to performance, learning and enjoyment and thereby liberate your potential.”

Two vignettes from this fascinating review of modern coaching follow:

“I deliver programmes lasting 2-5 days for business managers on the topic of ‘coaching for performance in business’. I make the theoretical case for what I call ‘new coaching’, but at a certain point I show a seven-minute video (spontaneous and unscripted) of two beginners learning to hit a golf ball for the first time. One is being taught conventionally by means of technical instruction, and I am coaching the other without giving any instructions or even telling her how to hold the club!

“Comparing the two processes and their results always has a great impact on the course participants. They invariably ridicule the conventional instructor’s efforts, but often someone adds: ‘I had one lesson just like that. I hated it and gave up golf on my very first day’. Needless to say, the beginner with whom I used ‘new coaching’ was delighted and astounded by the results of her self-learning progress.”

While from the world of skiing, try this:

“A skier’s legs are his suspension, and flexible knees with sufficient free movement up or down would seem advisable. The most frequent technical instruction ski instructors give is ‘bend zee knees’, in response to which skiers tend to adopt a fixed bent position, which gives rise to stiff suspension and poor ski grip. The instruction was technically correct, but the effect of giving it was counterproductive. This paradox is often unrecognised by conventional sports coaches, who repeat their commands ever more fervently. The most effective way to achieve the desired soft suspension effect is to ask awareness-raising coaching questions, such as: how much do your knees bend; when do they bend most in a turn; what happens when they are most bent, etc?”

Whitmore concludes with the observation that plenty of people pay lip service to the idea that “it’s all in the mind”, but few put this revolutionary insight into practice. To read this article in full and receive the Peak Performance Coaching Special for FREE, click here.

Before leaving you, there follows some information about four different Peak Performance Special Reports. They all contain invaluable advice for all serious athletes and coaches interested in increasing performance and reaching their potential.

And the marketing chaps tell me that you can get them for free, not just one of them but all of them, when you take out a trial subscription to Peak Performance. Sounds like a good deal to me, click here for details.

Yours,

Sylvester Stein

Chairman
How To Win

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