Being alone sucks.
My fiance has been gone all week visiting family in Vermont and she took our dog with her. It’s just me and the cat, and she’s not much for conversation besides demanding food at 5 a.m. and 8 p.m. So I’m a bit lonely.
Speaking of being alone, an interesting conversation during our Cressey Sports Performance in-service on Wednesday prompted the topic of how much feedback is appropriate to give clients on the training floor and why feedback dependency is a serious roadblock to successful learning. With a fresh batch of interns, everyone is eager to coach their asses of, so naturally, they want to say everything to everyone all the time.
This is NOT the best way to coach. I was guilty of it too. Luckily I had some great mentors to reel me in. As Eric Cressey put it eloquently…
“Sometimes the best thing you can do for your athletes is to shut up.”
That really got me thinking. As I prepare for my Fall Seminar topic, “Creating Context for More Efficient Coaching,” I’ve been reading lots of Nick Winkleman’s articles about coaching and learning. One constant fact I’ve discovered is a bit shocking:
We don’t learn better with more instruction. We learn better with less instruction.
This sounds ridiculous. We need instruction to learn new tasks. But what research shows again and again is that beyond the beginning stages of learning a task, more instruction is not better and may even be worse for retaining that task. Better instruction is better.
So why as clients and athletes are we so desperate for constant feedback?
Why as coaches and trainers are we so eager to give constant feedback?
Because we’re all asking the wrong questions.
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
Eric made a great point that most athletes are visual, auditory or kinesthetic learners – but probably not all three at once. If you talk about an exercise, then demonstrate it, and then poke and prod the athlete into position, you’re inducing a sensory overload that virtually kills any ability for that athlete to learn.
Basically, we’re giving answers to questions that haven’t been asked.
The athlete didn’t ask you how this exercise improves apical expansion or synergistically creates upward rotation of the scapula. So don’t tell them. Information overload won’t improve performance.
Coaches shouldn’t ask, “How did that feel?” or “Did you feel that in your [insert correct muscle]?”
The answers will almost always be “good” and “yes,” both of which are entirely useless to giving constructive feedback, and are often an outright lie in an attempt to satisfy the coach.
And often, athletes ask the wrong questions too: “Was that right?” or “Did that look OK?”
A “yes” or “no” response does little to internalize good technique or help the athlete focus on the most important aspects of the task.
Instead the coach should ask better questions: “Where did you feel that?” or “How do you think you did?”
That last question is my favorite. Nothing makes an athlete take ownership of their performance faster than self-evaluation. It can be jarring at first, but makes everyone’s lives easier down the road toward independence.
FOR THE ATHLETE
If you’re an athlete (a term I’ll use in place of client, lifter, trainee, etc.), you seek coaching because you want to improve your performance, and the coach you hire allegedly knows more than you about how to increase performance.
That coach gives you instructions to perform certain tasks, and theoretically, you get better at those tasks with coaching than you’d get without coaching.
Don’t get me wrong. Eagerness to learn is extremely important. I wrote about that after the most recent Optimizing the Big 3 seminar. But there’s a huge difference between being eager and being needy.
Needy may be a strong word, but an over-reliance upon constant feedback won’t make you better. Maybe you’ll perform in the gym, but once we let you off the leash, your chances of performing well decrease dramatically.
At some point, you have to step up to the plate and do it yourself.
What happens when you go on vacation and your nutrition coach isn’t there to say “no” to the booze and fried food?
What happens when you get a new job, move to a different gym and part ways with your personal trainer?
Have you developed the independence needed to continue toward your goals by yourself?
As coaches, our goal is to make complex tasks become automatic. This goes for lifting, baseball, body building, learning to swim, driving a stick shift, doing algebra, whatever. The training wheels have to come off, and after that, feedback must be very selective on the part of the coach to keep making you better. The less noise, the fewer meaningless tidbits of feedback, the more progress you’ll make.
FOR THE COACHES
Perhaps an athlete’s feedback dependence is the fault of us as coaches for enabling them. In our defense, it’s incredibly challenging to deny an athlete’s request for helping when we’re being paid to coach.
The idea of not coaching as the best way to coach is admittedly strange. But much like raising a child who gets whatever he or she wants (I’m not a parent yet, so I’m just guessing here), sometimes character and discipline is built through denial.
More and more I find myself saying, “You know this exercise, so go do it,” or “I know you can do this, I’ve seen you do it before.” Sometimes the athlete doesn’t realize what they can do and need affirmation that someone has confidence in them. That will do more for their progress than constant hand-holding.
To be clear, you absolutely must be hands-on and thorough when coaching someone through a new exercise. But beyond the beginner stages, less is more. Don’t let your need to feel smart or important block your athlete’s progress.
Are you confident that your athletes can get it done in the gym, on the field or on the platform if you’re not there? If the answer is “no,” it’s not because you’re indispensable as a coach – it’s because you haven’t done your job.
LONELY AT THE TOP
To reach the highest levels of success, at some point, you must be OK with standing alone.
As a coach, you must be OK with unhooking the leash and letting your athletes develop independence.
When it’s time to be alone, are you confident that you’ll succeed?