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Your Role as a Coach
As a coach, you play a variety of roles in your athletes’ lives, but no matter how good you are at choreographing routines, motivating your athletes or mentoring them, you will not be successful if you do not understand the process of motor learning. Knowing the process of how athletes obtain new skills, maintain their current skill level or even improve an already mastered skill will allow you to provide the appropriate feedback during training and run your practices in a way that suits the learning stage of each athlete.
What is Motor Learning?
Motor learning is a process that occurs within the body’s central nervous system that directly relates to the amount of practice or experience an athlete has in doing a particular skill. As an athlete performs more and more repetitions of a skill, relatively permanent changes in skill capability will occur. This isn’t always a good thing though. Practice does not make perfect.
To make perfect, athletes must practice perfect and have every intention of doing the skill correctly while they practice. This means that if your athletes have bent legs during their warm up stretches and are loose during back handspring jump back drills, you are guaranteed to see the same issues pop up when they actually do an entire back handspring. On the other hand, if they focus on having straight legs and being tight in everything they do, those actions will naturally transfer to any skill.
Whatever movement imperfections you observe during warm up, conditioning and tumbling/stunting drills must be corrected and practiced before an attempt to do an entire skill is made. If it takes 1000 overhead presses with a weight for bases to develop the right coordination, strength and body positioning to perform a correct extension with a flyer, then let them take the time to do the 1000. That way, a foundation is set for all future skills involving the same movement and it will likely never have to be revisited.
Since these motor learning processes happen internally, you are not able to observe exactly what changes are occurring at all times. Despite this, an athlete’s performance and behaviour can be monitored, which will allow you to draw conclusions about where they are in the learning process.
The 3 Phases of Motor Learning
The motor learning process can be divided into 3 phases: Cognitive Phase, Associative Phase and Autonomous Phase. Each phase tends to blend into the next, so there is no clear definitive point at the start or end of any one of them. They may even be overlapped in some cases, and athletes will most likely be in different phases for different skills at once.
The Cognitive Phase
- Athlete’s focus is on gaining a better understanding of how the skill is performed
- Based on coach’s explanation and demonstrations, athlete starts to develop a motor program for the skill (Motor Program = internal representation of the skill, like a computer program with instructions on how to do the movement)
- Attention is focused on details of the movement, so athletes are unable to be aware of external distractions or surroundings
- Movement will be uncoordinated, inconsistent and erroneous
- Athlete is unable to determine cause of error or the appropriate correction
- Dominant sensory system is vision
- May last a few minutes or require a longer period of time if skill is complex
- Phase is complete when athlete can execute the skill the way it was demonstrated
Coach’s Role
- Describe the skill’s key elements or parts
- Demonstrate, show videos/pictures of the skill, etc. to help the athlete picture the skill
- Short, concise verbal cues during demonstrations to tell the athlete specifically what to look for (ex: arm and shoulder reach during a back tuck set)
- Designing practice time for initial motor program development – allow for a high number of repetitions where athlete will focus on details and discover effective performance techniques
- Provide feedback to reinforce, motivate and guide athlete on the adjustments needed
The Associative Phase
- Focus is on skill refinement
- Athlete goes from having a general idea of how to perform the skill to being able to do it accurately and consistently
- Frequency and size of errors are reduced
- Speed, accuracy, coordination and consistency improve
- Movement becomes more automated, awareness of surroundings begins to develop
- Reliance on visual senses decreases and proprioceptive sense increases (Proprioception = awareness of the body’s position just by feel)
- Much longer period than cognitive phase – takes a few hours to a few years
Coach’s Role
- Assist athlete in consistently and accurately replicating the skill in a variety of settings, on various surfaces, facing different directions, etc.
- Give feedback to improve skill even more
- Assist athlete in developing their own error detection and correction capabilities by teaching them to relate feelings associated with a movement to the subsequent performance outcome
The Autonomous Phase
- Athlete can perform skill at maximal proficiency
- Automatic movement, requires extremely little conscious thought or attention to perform skill
- Athlete can concentrate on things other than technique, such as their surroundings
Coach’s Role
- Help athlete maintain their skill level
- Motivate athlete to want to continue improving – use goal setting and reinforcement techniques
How Your Athletes Should Practice
Now that you are familiar with the phases of motor skill learning, I will tell you how your athletes should practice their skills. Depending on the skill being trained and its complexity, they can either use a “whole” method or a “part” method.
Whole Method
- Practicing a skill in its entirety
- Should be used when a skill is not too complex, is not dangerous and can be practiced with a decent level of success
- Athlete should be capable, very motivated, experienced and have an attention span long enough to perform the skill as a whole
- Skills containing components that are interdependent should be practiced as a whole
Part Method
- Practicing each component of a skill separately, eventually putting the components together
- Should be used when a skill is complex and involves separate parts (ex: stunt sequence, a long tumbling line, an entire routine)
- Use this method if athlete is having trouble with one specific part or phase of a skill
Blocked Practice
There are also different patterns in which you can train skills, each causing different outcomes in the short-term and long-term. Since cheerleaders are often working on multiple skills at once, you, as a coach, may use a “blocked practice” approach during training. This means all trials of a given skill are completed before going on to the next.
For example, an athlete is working on a round off back handspring, a toe touch back handspring and a cartwheel back handspring step-out. In a 1 hour tumbling class, giving the athlete 20 consecutive minutes to work on their round off back handspring, then 20 consecutive minutes to work on toe touch back handsprings, then the last 20 consecutive minutes to do cartwheel back handspring step-outs would be an example of blocked practice.
During the early stages of skill acquisition, this style of practice is most appropriate because the athlete is just getting the idea of the movement.
Random Practice
Later on, when the athlete can perform the basic movement pattern, a “random practice” method is actually more effective. During random practice, the athlete would now perform 1 round off back handspring, then 1 toe touch back handspring, followed by 1 cartwheel back handspring step-out. This pattern of alternating skills would be repeated for the entire hour of tumbling class, allowing the athlete to get the same number of repetitions in as they would have during the hour of blocked practice.
If a random practice approach is used, you may notice that your athletes seem to be performing the skills worse than they usually do. This is normal! By making the practice environment more difficult for the athlete, as done in random practice, the end result is better learning, even though performance in that moment is poor.
This may be due to a couple things:
- When an athlete has to think about multiple tasks at once, they use more complex processing strategies in order to separate each skill, resulting in a better memory representation of each task.
- When not performing the same skill back-to-back, athletes may forget some of the solutions or corrections that they need to do in order to fix errors. This forces them to come up with a greater number of solutions, causing better memory retrieval when trying to figure out what is required during the movement.
Repeated Blocked Practice
Since random practice can sometimes be inefficient and tricky to do in a busy cheer gym with athletes working on a wide range of skills, “repeated blocked practice” may give you the best of both worlds. Using the example mentioned previously, a repeated blocked practice would have athletes doing round off back handsprings for 5 minutes, then toe touch back handsprings for 5 minutes, followed by cartwheel back handspring step-outs for 5 minutes. This 5 minute interval cycle would be repeated a few times, allowing athletes to obtain benefits from both the blocked and random practice methods.
Although more research in a variety of sports is needed to fully decide which method of skill training is most effective, especially for cheerleading, the points above should at least make you consider incorporating these new training techniques and nontraditional coaching methods into your practices now.
Williams, J. M. (2014). Applied sport psychology: Personal growth to peak performance (7th ed.). New York: McGraw Hill.
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