This issue features:
Embrace the Chaos, Episode 176 of The Sport Psych Show by Dan Abrahams with Ed Coughlan.
‘Embracing turbulent waters’: Enhancing athlete self-regulation using the ‘PoST’ framework for performance preparation at the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games by Morris, Otte, Rothwell & Davids (2022).
Embrace the Chaos
Earlier this year, Dan Abrahams interviewed Ed Coughlan on The Sport Psych Show podcast. Dr Coughlan is well versed in the area of deliberate practice, and does a remarkable job of dispelling misinterpretations.
The definition of deliberate practice is, in essence, “effortful, not particularly enjoyable, not immediately rewarding, requires feedback and relevant to overall performance.” This differs from many other forms of practice in the first few words: not particularly enjoyable. It’s the ‘hard work’, the ‘extra mile’, and difficult to truly achieve in a team sport setting.
If you run a training scenario many times in one session, it is unlikely that this scenario will specifically be deliberate practice for all players, because they all require something unique from the practice.
But deliberate practice is not synonymous with monotonous, isolated drills which focus on technical practice in decontextualised environments. Such practice design may occasionally meet the deliberate practice definition, but the skills developed wholly in absence of the key information sources available for use on game day may not be suitable for the performance environment.
The plight of the practitioner then is to balance the time spent in deliberate practice and representative practice, the comfortable and the uncomfortable. This is where the chaos comes in.
In the podcast, Ed Coughlan speaks about holding on too tight to something that is near and dear to us once we find it. In sport, this translates to when we find a movement pattern that we really like, and for a while, it works. We start to hold on tightly and in return, our degrees of freedom, all the different ways our body can move, also get tighter. Instead of becoming more relaxed and open, we cling to that one moment where we ‘find something’.
We should be approaching our skill and movement development less like there is something to find or unlock or acquire and more like an ongoing process of exploration, of calibrating and re-calibrating. It will take some time to become comfortable with the notion that you didn’t really find something today, but that you’ve stumbled upon an interesting feeling or way of moving, part of your evolution rather than its end point.
This is perfectly summarised by a Ric Shuttleworth quote that Ed included:
Learning movement skills is not a process of repeating a solution, it’s repeating the process of finding a solution.
If we can create chaotic environments that encourage athletes to embrace this process, to know that their best feeling now is part of the journey instead of the end goal, then the exploration of movement becomes a source of joy for a lifetime. It may take some bravery, and humility, but being open to this experience will often serve you far better than holding onto your one solution so tightly that it closes you off from exploring further.
Embracing turbulent waters
No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man. - Heraclitus
This paper by Olympic canoe coach Craig Morris is one of my favourite reads as a practitioner. It provides a very open discussion about the real-world experience of applying skill acquisition, and gives coaches from any sport a wonderful foundation of understanding skill acquisition periodisation.
The Periodisation of Skills Training (PoST) framework has five key principles of practice design:
Representative learning design
Developing relevant information-movement couplings
Manipulation of constraints
Functional movement variability
Reducing conscious control of movement by directing attentional focus
(Correia et al., 2019).
In other words, practice should represent the competition environment by providing similar information sources, opportunities to move and act (affordances), and their ever evolving relationship; moving gives you knew information to perceive, information informs how you might move next. When done well, practice experiences provide embedded value (affordances) and meaning (information).
Constraint manipulation is the mechanism for embedding affordances and information into practice experiences, and it takes a keen practitioner to identify what to manipulate. In this context, constraints are framed as “action-facilitating features of the environment, individual and task” which invite actions that shape the athlete’s learning and behaviours.
If you adjust the course design during practice for paddlers, as done in this paper, the preferred self-regulation tendencies of the athletes are destabilised, and they are exposed to the unpredictable nature of competition while training. This could be achieved by adjusting the number of gates, the distances between them, the difficulty of navigating from one gate to the next, or even how points are awarded for navigating the course. Each manipulation can reshape the athlete’s behaviour and learning, sometimes in predictable ways and often in unpredictable ways.
It is the reflexivity of this approach to skills training and periodisation that I feel is most important for practitioners, which is seen in the consistent co-creation throughout the program. This starts with the intentions of the framework with the canoe athletes: to invite athletes self-regulation in collaboration with the support team, clear communication of wants and needs in terms of challenge and support at pivotal times.
Applying the five key principles to intentionally destabilise the athletes can, understandably, be very overwhelming as an athlete. This conscious intent to support and co-create should underpin any approach to skill acquisition, especially when it challenges traditional approaches to coaching and training.
There are three practice phases in the PoST framework as well:
Coordination training - focusing on self-organisation and stabilisation of movement patterns.
Skill adaptability training - perceptual attunement to most relevant sources of information coupled with functional actions, (over)challenging athletes to enhance problem solving skills, movement variability and skill robustness.
Performance training - direct preparation for competition, high representativeness with athlete-led and coach-supported approach to training.
This paper does an incredible job of detailing the changes in practice across these phases, which I will summarise for you.
The coordination phase invested in attuning perceptual systems to a new environment, particularly while being on the water. By providing a rich environment, athletes were able to explore and discover (un)stable features and lines for different speeds. The relatively high variability and specific ecology of being on the water allows athletes to sense what movements and sequences have to offer.
The skill adaptability phase shifts towards a higher representativeness in practice, with more focus on adaptation and learning by enhancing the performance solutions athletes use under the challenge of more realistic race contexts. More gates and more complexity provides athletes with more relevant information sources to actively search for in their surroundings while reassuring them that there is an open invitation to ‘safely fail’. Failing, exploring and adapting to the over-simulated race conditions are inherent in this state to ensure race performance becomes another challenge to solve, one the athletes are ready to rise to.
The performance phase then becomes about exploiting ‘learning in development’ by optimising and stabilising performance. This is the most representative training design, evenly balanced with unstructured play and discovery to manage psychological load. With a ‘race real’ design, physical loading is tapered as competition approaches and athlete discussion to prepare the sessions are emphasised. Everything from preparation time, course designed by external coaches and invitational competitions encourages athletes to act upon race-day decision philosophy, balancing perception of risk and reward for tactical choices.
So what does this all really mean? Well, anyone who is looking to apply skill acquisition principles to their skills training will benefit from this periodisation framework. The scaffolded approach to introducing representative learning design, more complexity, more challenges and more variability allows athletes to come along for the ride, to have a say in the design of tasks, and to feel supported enough to embrace failure and chaos. Many sports have highly competitive performance environments, but how many sports actively equip their athletes with the skills to rise to the challenge? Do you?