The Science of Coaching: Interview with Saskia Giebl
To act without reason is to walk blindly in the night hoping to reach your destination. And for me, hope has never been enough, especially in coaching. I am inquisitive by nature and I constantly need to know ‘Why’. When I begin to ask why, I embark on a journey where I can act and decide based on sound reason. Over the years, my search for reason led my coaching down the path of science, specifically the science of learning.
How people learn has puzzled psychologists for millenia, and thanks to decades of research, cognitive scientists know more than ever before. However, what researchers know about how we learn doesn’t always reach the coaching world. This leads to coaches working from intuition and blindly walking in the night hoping to be on the right track. I know from experience that it can be hard to find science that is easily-digestible and practical enough to use.
Saskia Giebl is a Human Learning and Performance Scientist at UCLA's Bjork Learning Lab. More importantly, she’s passionate about sports and how we can improve our methods to coach sports. When she first approached me, she told me that she was aware of the disconnect between the world of science and the coaching world. She felt that researchers needed to do a better job to bring what we know about learning to the practitioners in ways that could be helpful and effective. She wants her research to lay the foundation for good, sound coaching methodologies.
This is Part 1 of her interview.
Saskia’s responses were edited for written purposes.
COACHING RED FLAGS
Certainty
Saskia - If you go onto a training field and training looks good, all your players are in line, everybody's waiting for the next kid, the coach is letting players know in advance the objective for that day, this is our mission, this is what we will be doing, communication is very clear. There is removed uncertainty.
Immediate Feedback
Saskia - Immediate feedback for example, so you stop the practice. You pull the player aside and talk to the group, tell the player what they need to adjust, etc.
The common assumption among coaches, or most coaches, is that providing immediate, accurate, and completed feedback during a training fosters long-term, lasting learning, whereas the opposite is often true. So delaying, reducing, summarizing feedback, having the player try to first generate and think about what has worked and what hasn't worked, having the trainer be more of a listener, observer, maybe nudging. Sometimes you have to nudge the player into the right direction or ask open-ended questions, “Hey, have you thought about this or have you wondered about this?” it's much better for long-term learning, and the reason why is because a lot of times when you stop the game, when you give immediate feedback, you are often treating the symptom but not the actual problem. So you have these really maladaptive short-term corrections.
If you think about it during an actual game, the coach has no input, apart from the little break, but the coach is not there. The coach doesn't tell you, the coach doesn't guide you on the actual game field. So, in a sense, once the crutch is removed, what are you basing your decisions upon? So if you don't understand the game, the strategy, decisions ahead of time, if you cannot come up with predictions about the next steps ahead, if you cannot read the environment, scan the environment, read bodily cues, use visual and motor experience to come up with those predictions very fast in a game where you are surrounded by moving objects, these are all the things that you have to learn during training. So immediate feedback is a big red flag.
So another problem with interrupting players constantly is if you provide immediate feedback and interrupt the actual game, it prevents the learner from establishing a stable performance. If you think of an actual game, players are never interrupted. Endurance wise, thinking wise, decision making wise, you have to keep on going and going. Doesn't matter if you are fatigued, if you're frustrated, your goal is to keep on going and going. If you're emulating a game situation in practice and you interrupt them, what does it even do to the body? So you’re running mode, you're attacking mode, you're in thinking mode, you're in scanning the environment mode. And then “Okay, come on. Stop, stop, stop.” This stop and go is not soccer.
Decisions or errors are often made after an entire sequence. It's not just one touch of the ball, but it's kind of like three or four sequences from the touch of the ball. So if you interrupt once the ball is touched and say there's something wrong there, you are missing this entire trajectory of understanding. The player doesn't even see out the error. You can hit the ball wrong with your tennis racket, or with your foot in soccer, and then go “Okay, that’s it. Stop, stop, and try again.” The player doesn't even visually see that the ball would go in a completely different direction than they wanted to.
So let them see out their error. Let them see out the consequence, as opposed to already these immediate quick, correction.
Repetition
Saskia - Another thing is repetition.
In the moment, the more reps you get in, the more rapid gains you see in players performing very well. But we've also shown from research - decades and decades of research, this is not new stuff - it has really shown that repetition of execution leads to short-term performance gains or increases in performance, but does not necessarily translate to long-term learning. And with long-term learning, we mean, can you actually retain what you have learned? But can you more so apply it to the game settings where certain parameters are different. When it's a dynamic situation, where there's a lot of uncertainty and how can you transfer that? And we know that repetition is a big no-no. Of course, you have to repeat and revisit certain concepts that you want to teach your players, but that needs to be spaced out.
So when you see players practicing in basketball 20-30 free throws, or penalty kicks. You hear, ”Let's get 20 to 30 in. Yeah, well done! Wonderful! You’re minimizing your errors! You're getting better!” In a sense, we're robbing these players of really important learning opportunities. Making mistakes is important for learning. Your brain is like this predictive mathematical algorithm and a model that the more you actually let your players experience errors during practice - of course, desirable - the more they learn. The errors have to be related to what the outcome should be.
The more you can get your players out of structure and certainty, and have them be familiar and comfortable with making quick decisions. Maybe throw in a couple of rule changes throughout the game. So if you have set up a little game - 2v2 or 4v4 or whatever it is - with constraints change up the rules halfway through the game or throw in another movable opponent. Instead of keeping things constant, predictable, certain and structured with immediate feedback because we are afraid that errors will persist, instead we want to create every training session to be somewhat of a version of an actual game.
So no drills but instead play-based. Instead of structure, unstructured. Instead of telling players what to expect and what to do, you let your players experience, figure out, try to correct themselves, try to understand and arrive at what is working and what may not be working, what is the solution. And then as a coach, you obviously step in and guide.
Developing Instinctive Players
Saskia - When we say instinctive, for me, I'm thinking of ‘in the moment’, being flexible, being adaptable, being able to read the room, scan the environment, make decisions in the moment, like an automatic response. A lot of times, when people think about instinctive, they probably think of something that comes natural, like it looks so easy. I think we often forget that to get to the point where you are able to do these things, it's probably based on lots and lots and lots of data. It's almost like how a machine learns, a computer, you put a lot of data, a lot of experience, over the years, over the time, and based on these experiences, you are able to predict and come up with internal representations of certain movements.
And we know from research that to create this anticipatory representation, or internal schema or understanding of human action, that comes from lots of visual experiences and especially motor stimulation. So there's great studies that have shown that both experienced players and experiences coaches are very good at making better predictions about, for example, where the ball is going or successful outcome or not, as compared to novices. But actually a difference between the coach and the athletes is that the athletes are actually looking at those visual cues or looking at the body, the movements of the player, whereas the coaches have to wait to look at the ball trajectory. This means that a professional athlete can already make some predictions before the ball has even left someone's foot and you wonder where this comes from? Is it an instinctual thing? Do they just know what to do next or where it’s going? It's actually tons and tons of visual experiences and motor stimulation, so prior experience.
And in that way, how do you build players’ repertoire of motor and visual processes? It's training that way. So again it goes back to no drills, no isolated drills, no repetition, no doing things over and over again, but instead having a lot of play-based settings with constraints - different rules of the game, changing up stuff, variable practice. But really these ‘instinctual decisions’ are driven by prior data, prior experiences. So it looks effortless, it looks like someone maybe has a certain talent, someone was born for having this instinct versus an ability acquired over time, but it's really just based on data and tons of experience. And obviously a type of practice will facilitate that. So again, play-based constrained games, lots of room for making errors. Even as a coach sometimes set up a game setting that players will experience mistakes so your brain is able to adjust those decisions and learn what's working and what's not working.
Unopposed vs. Opposed
Saskia - I (Saskia) get the appeal. It's kind of like in the moment, it seems that if you do these isolated technique based drills or activities, you're getting really good and we make the assumption that it becomes more automatic and easier to retrieve that in a more dynamic game setting. But we know from actual studies where we really looked at trends, we looked at how practice and long-term learning, in the moment looking good versus looking good in the game, and often there's this disconnect. It's a learning paradox.
If you are practicing an isolated technique based drill very well, in relation to what? How does it connect in terms of a whole sequence of drills, a whole sequence that is constantly changing that's constantly adapting? Depending on who your team is, where you're playing. So we are assuming that you can take this isolated drill or skill that you have learned and now put it into a dynamic setting, where all of a sudden now you have to plug it in and combine it with multiple different other skills. So we're putting a lot of assumptions on the players. We are assuming that learning the rules that govern one particular motor performance, we assume that now you can apply those rules in relation to the rules of other executions. That's a lot.
Actually, I (Saskia) would say that's actually very difficult. That's a huge assumption we put on young players. I don't think the answer should be one is better than the other one, I would just say both, I think both opposed and unopposed in mixing up varying degrees of complexity or difficulty. Research has shown that these isolated technique based drills are highly ineffective, however, when you use play-based or opposed settings, you can vary the degree of difficulty. As a coach, you can already have in mind one or two techniques or activities that we want to train today and you lower, let’s say, the pressing or you can lower the difficult influence of other factors and you can increase, and you want to vary that up from trading session to training session. So I actually would say that probably a bit of both is important when it comes to variable practice. I wouldn’t say one or the other one. I wouldn't say it's opposed versus unopposed, I would say opposed play-based but with varying degrees of difficulty.
It really gets back to the thing that I (Saskia) feel like these isolated techniques put a lot of assumption in those young players that they're able, just based on one task that they're now somehow able to hypothesize how this one task would work in a dynamic game situation where they’re not experiencing it. So if you frame it that way or phrase it that way, it almost seems more difficult for a player to make that big jump, as opposed to every single training session should emulate some version of a game. Sometimes it's an easier version, sometimes it's more difficult, sometimes it's an extremely difficult version of the game. But it should always have elements of dynamic, uncertainty, frustration. Your players need to learn how to feel.
So the other day I (Saskia) was talking to a football club. It was a top club in a major city. They lost a game the night before I came in and they were saying one of the biggest things was as a team they made a mistake, and for the next 20 minutes they couldn't move on from this mistake. So basically the lost because they got stuck on one bad decision and they could not move forward. And so that's another problem. If you don't allow your players to make mistakes, and then have them figure out how to overcome this mistake. We don't have to be like, “You got it wrong. Why did you do it wrong? Why are you not listening to the coach?” But instead say, “It's okay, continue playing. Now, how can you get out of your situation that you created and make an opportunity out of it?” So create that error, mistake, situation into an opportunity and move on. You cannot do this in isolated training because you do one task or one activity, you may get it wrong, but how is this one wrong thing that you've done informing your next decision if you’re just repeating and doing one thing over and over again.
