Monday, June 14, 2010

Training Your Coaching Eye

A key skill for a sports performance coach is being able to analyze movements.  You have to watch an athlete move and make a mental comparison to the technical model in your head.  To do this effectively you have to develop your ability to watch for certain types of detail in relatively high speed movements.

So how do you develop this skill?  Your Coaching Eye.  You deliberately watch sports movements.  Not casual watching of the movement, but focused, and analytical observation.

Just as there is the concept of 10,000 hours in mastering a skill, the same applies here.  You have to watch movements tens of thousands of times.  If you are a performance coach this may means thousands of starts, accelerations, max velocity runs, cuts, jumps, stops to start.  Then add cleans, squats, snatches, Bulgarian split squats and on and on.  It's a long list.

It's easy to be disheartened by the volume. Don't be.

The good news is that developing your eye in one helps with the others.  Part of doing this is actual visual skill, much is cognitive processing, and part is learning that specific movement.  The dist two, visual and cognitive, carry over to other movements to some degree. 

Where do you get your reps?  First of all coaching your own athletes.  Then while observing others coaching.  Still, this might take a while to get to a master level.  plus, what if you don't get to see all the movements in your setting?

How about when watching sports? Instead of watching the game, pick a player and watch their movement whether in the play or off the ball.  Watch it with a critical eye and analyze what you see.

Hows your video collection?  DVDs of elite sports events are a great source to develop your eye.  Video clips abound on the Internet, good and bad.  If you have access to Dartfish or similar software, you can increase your learning even more.

By using Dartfish, our coaches get to watch the same movement more than once.  They can slow it down, or go frame by frame.  This allows them to see the details.  Then they can go back to full speed and try to see it in the action.

The question is; are you developing your coaching eye?

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