In my daily coaching practice, I try to apply a coaching style the enhances implicit learning to the athletes.
Some of the challenges I encounter are that often athletes are used to be explicit coached either from their previous coach’s parents or other people of influence. It is a lot easier to have everything explained along the way rather than finding it out themselves.
I also find that when parents are involved they want to see the coach to do a more explicit approach since this is what they expect from a traditional coach and feel if they pay for the service that’s what they should get from the practice.
Over the last season I have experimented with a new approach to one of the workouts where I went to the extreme of implicit learning and let the athletes do a free play workout. Every Sunday I would let them just do whatever they wanted as long as they got at least 45 minutes of pushing the race chair in. The athletes really liked it at first and they embraced the freedom of doing whatever they came up on the day. However, after about 2 months the workouts became less focused and all the athletes did was a 45-minute jog. After about 4 months some of the athletes did not even show up anymore since it was not seen as a valuable practice session to them.
This was very frustrating to me to watch and made me realize that they might have not been ready to be so free to decide and got lost with not having any direction or meaning to the practice although I explained to them that it was meant to be a fun workout.
I do wonder how to give minimal direction for the program but still keep them challenged so they think there is purpose to the practice or if I just have to rethink the whole program and restate our goals?
I will explore the free play practice in a different setting and maybe have the athletes write out a program that they will stick to rather than just show up and do whatever they feel on the day since they are so used to have a program for all the other workouts.
Hey Ueli,
In the first portion of your blog, you address concerns with integrating implicit learning into your DTE. Since the parents are the ones flipping the bill, which usually aligns with a certain level of expectation, it would be important to share methodology to the parents before training begins. For example, you could say that your approach may seem unorthodox from an outside perspective but in actuality, research supports that this method shows increased retention of the skill in later test or something along those lines.
In second portion of your blog, you share the experience of how free-play practice has impacted the program. From what I understand, practice on Sunday, is maybe an hour long but 45mins must be spent pushing the race car?
From what I remember about implicit learning is that this approach yields better results later on while more mistake are experience during practice when learning or acquiring a new skill. They did discuss about relearning a skill, implicitly but I’m not sure of those results.
I think there is a lot to learn from that four month span. Noticing that attendance/engagement shifted from fun – slow jog – undervalued practice, you can go back to what made practice fun on Sundays. The fun element is freedom of play but maybe change some of the parameters. Meaning, 15mins of long distance pushes, 15mins spent on most limiting performance factor (i.e. starts), 15mins spent on developing their best performance factor, and 15mins exploring/developing any area that they choose.
I think the idea is to provide some options or creating a criteria that fosters choice and by that same measure, you will also increase engagement. As that begins to takeoff, you can adapt the parameters to meet the level of your players. Meaning, as they begin to see the value in free play, you can then remove a restricting factor and allow them to further explore that area/domain.
I think the idea of having the athletes you work with, write their own plan for Sunday, is a great idea. This way, expectations by coach and athlete are shared and known. Additionally, the athletes have also selected specific skills or areas they feel need to be further developed or improved. I believe, by taking this approach, you can work in blocks of free play when the desired behavior is elicited and the value of free play translates to moving closer to said goals.
This also reminds of some practices that I had in college when playing lacrosse. The day before a game was usually pretty light and spent 45mins going over plays and tactics for the upcoming opponent. Once the 45mins was up, it ended up turning into a Captains practice. At first, not everyone would stay but through the season our team would spend time developing different parts of their game. There may be one group working on face-offs or another 2 or 3 guys working on bad angle shots. It wasn’t planned for us to stay at practice but their was this energy where we all feed off one another and we wouldn’t go in until it was dark. I still have found memories of those experiences and those practices won’t be forgotten.
-Albie
Ueli, nice blog. Some good comments from Albie as well. My feeling is that all practice must have an intention or purpose regardless of who is leading the session. I like the idea of giving athletes the opportunity to lead their own practice and have done this on many occasions in rugby. The challenge is that many athletes don’t understand the purpose or have an intention (goal) in their training. While this flies in the face of deliberate practice, which is more implicit, I do think that we need to guide athletes toward a purpose or intention. I believe that this stems from the lack of Deliberate play in the early years where many athletes miss out on self directed opportunities to just play. I often observe my own children in our backyard (8 and 5 years) and am amazed at how they are able to come up with their own games and rules. I am a great believer that this is foundational to athletic success later on. In your situation I wonder whether you could provide a bit more context to the athlete regarding the purpose of the sessions, or even better, have them come to the training with a self determined plan.