The power of analysis, coach reflections & more
Here's some Skill Acquisition content for you to explore over the weekend. I hope you enjoy it!
Sorry for the Saturday newsletter but I've had a busy week. Normal service will resume next week.
This week at a sconce:
Research Insight: The Environment Design Principles
Podcast Snip: How Analysis Can Inform Our Practice Design
Quote: Making their own decision
Resource: CLA Explained
Tweet: A Coaches Reflections
Research Insight:
Environment Design Principles
The environment design principles are from Chapter 5 of the The Constraints-Led Approach: Principles for Sports Coaching and Practice Design. The principles are designed to assist coaches in designing more effective learning environments. The principles are as follows
Session Intention
Constrain to Afford
Representative Learning Design
Repetition without Repetition
For each of the 4 principles I'm going to give one key insight that I thought was important.
Intention as a Guiding Constraint
1)Intentions are crucial in shaping coaching decisions and serve as a guiding constraint that influences performer and team cognitions. Ensuring that tasks are designed with clear, meaningful intentions helps align actions with desired outcomes.
Why it's important: When coaches clearly communicate the intention behind each task, it enhances the athletes' understanding and engagement. The intention will also as a constraint on the information that the players are searching for to inform their actions.
Constraining to Afford
2)The basic idea behind constraining to afford is that the performer needs to make the decision to act themselves and not be forced to do so. Just because an affordance is available doesn't mean it should be used; knowing when and how to use an affordance is equally important.
Why it's important: Encouraging athletes to make their own decisions fosters autonomy and improves their problem-solving skills. This approach helps athletes become more adaptable and confident in their ability to make effective decisions during competition.
Representative Learning Design
3)Designing Tasks with Clear Consequences
A crucial aspect of the design process is to ensure that the task outcome has a clear and meaningful intention, with clear consequences of success or failure, arising from the interactions between athletes and the environment.
Why it's important: Tasks with clear consequences provide immediate feedback, helping athletes understand the impact of their actions. This understanding is essential for learning and refining skills, as it promotes a deeper engagement with the practice and encourages continuous improvement.
Repetition without Repetition
4)The amount of variability in practice sessions should correspond to the performer's skill level. For those at the coordination stage, low task and environmental variability may be beneficial, guiding their search towards fewer functional solutions.
Why it's important: Tailoring variability to skill level helps optimise learning. For beginners, reducing variability (complexity) allows them to focus on exploration and developing their skills without becoming overwhelmed. As they progress, increasing variability challenges them to adapt and refine their skills in diverse scenarios. This ultimately helps us to develop adaptable and skillful players.
Podcast Snip:
Using Analytics to Inform Training Design for Tennis Players
This was a clip from a fantastic podcast episode with Anna Fitzpatrick. Even though this snip is about tennis, I think it gives a great insight into how we can use analytics to inform training design in any sport. The example is centred around an analysis from her PhD which showed that if a player won more ‘short points (these are points that lasted 1-4 shots) than their opponent they won the match 90% of the time. Therefore, there should probably be a lot more time spent on developing the skills to have success in the area-serve, serve return and being aggressive. A constraint manipulation that was used to get players to explore being aggressive was that they put another line just behind the baseline and players were not allowed to step behind this or they lost the point. There are other variations of the same manipulation that could be used such as -if you don’t step behind the line and win the point you get 3 points, or if you step behind the line and lose the point your opponent gets 3. (In tennis generally the closer you are to the baseline the more aggressive you are playing)
The analytics that we get can really help guide our manipulations of constraints in practice. Using the environment design principles above can then really help create the practice tasks to develop the necessary skills.
Quote
‘It was really important for them to make their own decisions and choices, because if it’s their decision they own that decision, they commit to that decision” -Judy Murray
This was a quote that I saw during the week and thought it was fitting to include the week her son Andy retired from tennis. Autonomy is a huge motivator for everyone. We all know how it feels when we are told we have to do something and have no choice in the matter. Even if it’s something we may want to do it anyway we may show some hesitation. Choices are a great way to introduce autonomy into sessions. I think it’s important to note that there may be occasions where we may have to tell people what to do, but to provide autonomy as much as possible.
Resource:
This is a brilliant video that introduces the Constraints-Led Approach. I think it’s really important that there are videos like this that explain some of the ideas behind the CLA in an accessible way. If you’re new to the CLA you should definitely check this out. If you are familiar with the approach already it’s a great resource that you could send/use when people ask you for resources around the CLA
Tweet
This was an amazing thread where Rikard shared some fantastic insights into how he approached coaching a youth team in Sweden over the last 3 years. Some of the things that he implemented in practice:
-90% of tasks had offensive and defensive players present
- Created representative tasks that were based on game scenarios
-Guided players towards the key information
-Feedback came from the practice tasks
-Suitably challenging tasks and provided room for autonomy
He also included some great examples at the end of the thread so be sure to check these out 🙌
https://x.com/RikardAspegren/status/1815873745950544006?t=WR3WQ8INLWpCTvPfHF3chQ&s=19