How We Say It Matters!
How important is communication within hockey or any sport for that matter?
I will tell you it is very important. How do I know this? Well, it is because I have been playing hockey for all of my life. And for the last seven years, it has been at the professional level. Since turning professional, I have had the privilege of being a part of some championship teams. With those winning teams, there was a great deal of communication. Since our coaches did a great job explaining their vision we (the team) were able to all work towards a common goal, with each player knowing their importance on the team.
Right now you might be thinking, “Well I know communication is important in sports, but how does it help me with my training?” When training with a strength and conditioning coach, it doesn’t matter how good the program is if the “coach” can’t explain how to execute the program properly. If the athlete is having problems with a certain movement pattern and the coach they are working with can’t correct the issue(s) properly, the athlete will develop poor habits. These poor movement patterns will transfer into their sport and possibly restrict them reaching their full potential. Luckily some research has been done on this issue to help us “coaches” maximize athletes’ full potential by proper communication.
There are two different ways we can communicate to get our point across. Whether we are trying to teach a new movement or correct an old one. We can either use verbal or visual instruction. And each of these two methods can be broken down once more. Visual instruction can be done one of two ways. An expert (hopefully the coach) can provide a demonstration of the movement or a novice (usually another athlete) demonstrator can show the movement pattern while the coach explains the proper cues during the example. Using both expert and novice demonstrators have been proven to enhance the learning capabilities of athletes.
When using only verbal cues to help improve an athlete’s performance, they are split into internal and external cues. An internal cue puts the focus on the body movement of the athlete while external cues are a direct result of the movement itself. An example of an internal cue is telling an athlete to “extend their legs” during a sprint and the external cue would be “drive the ground away”. Several studies were done testing the effectiveness of internal and external verbal cues. One of the studies looked a ski-simulator while the other study looked at a balance test. Both of these studies found greater improvement in the external cues group when re-testing the tasked learned.
Now that we are aware of what types of communication work the best, how much feedback should be said during each movement (exercise)? The answer seems simple, “we should give feedback on every set of every exercise”. There are a few problems with that answer. The first one is athletes will end up becoming dependent on the feedback. We as coaches should want to educate and prepare our athletes so they are able to train on their own one day. So if we give feedback to our athletes 100% of the time we are actually setting them up for failure because they will notice a decrease in performance once the feedback is removed.
Three experiments were done testing the different amount of feedback frequencies and they all came to the same conclusion. Providing feedback on 50% of trials was superior to providing feedback 100% of the time. The best way to only give feedback half the time is to start the first couple sets with 100% feedback and then reducing it to 33% of the time. This way the athlete doesn’t become dependent on the feedback and will see improvement with the small amount of advice they receive.
Remember:
- Communication is important
- Visual and Verbal Examples
- External Cues are better ie. Drive the ground away
- Feedback on 50% of exercises
As coaches, we must recognize that not only what we say is important but also how we say it and how much we say it. We are instructing our athletes with different coaching strategies to develop them to the best of their abilities. Showing movement patterns (exercises) ourselves so our athletes can learn by viewing an expert or having them watch a novice athlete and picking out the mistakes made. Using these types of visual examples allows the athletes to learn according to their unique style of learning.