The Science of Coaching and Learning Mountain Bike Skills
In this podcast I explain what makes for good coaching cues when trying to teach and learn skills on your mountain bike (or anywhere else for that matter). There is some fascinating research behind the language you use when thinking about or talking about a movement skill and I hope that you’ll learn something that can make your journey towards improving your skills faster and easier. You can stream or download it from the link below or you can find it on Itunes, Podbean, Spotify and all other major podcasting platforms. While I go into these things in a lot more detail in the podcast, here are the notes from it: One of the most important things you can do as a rider is to invest in your technical skills. The better your skills are the safer you will be, the faster you can ride and the less energy you will use. However, not all methods of coaching are created equal and some methods are demonstrably better than others. There is some fascinating science around the subject of cueing and teaching movement and sports skills and it has changed the way I coach based on it. I was first exposed to some of these concepts at a presentation I heard from a coach named Nick Winkelman at a Perform Better Summit. He talked about how he was taking a deep dive into the science behind language and cueing movement and that there were some interesting things he had found about how certain types of language and cueing were much more effective than others. I started to apply some of the things he talked about and found them to be helpful and more effective. Last year I came across the book he wrote called The Language of Coaching and in it he spelled out everything he had found in the last few years of researching and applying the science behind coaching movement skills. At the end of the day, learning and coaching MTB skills are no different than learning how to lift properly, throw a fastball, swing a bat or kick a soccer ball or any other movement skill and so the findings are as applicable to our sport as any other. And it is important for you to know this stuff in case you need to help another rider learn a skill and so you know how to best approach your own learning. The idea behind coaching any movement skill is to give your brain the input it needs to figure out how that skill should feel. The skills aren’t “Step 1, Step 2, Step 3…”, they are the principles you are applying and proper application will feel different than bad application. The goal is to move beyond Step 1, ect. and and not think about them when you ride. The best in the world aren’t thinking through the X Steps of Cornering when they are riding, they are going based on feel. Like I tell people in BJJ class, the steps are not the technique. They are simply the window into the principles behind the technique and it is your job to use that window to learn them. So this is why cueing is so important - they are the bridge between “knowing” and “feeling”. Good ones make that journey easier, bad ones can make it impossible for you to ever make it in the first place. Based on Nick’s research here is what makes for good cueing: Less is more. Most coaches tend to over cue a skill and give people too much to think about. While not science, my experience tells me that 3-5 cues per movement is the most someone can remember. The body learns best through analogies that “stick” in the person's head and that these analogies will be different for different people. People don’t think in exacting detail and analogies can help you pack a lot of cues into one. Internal vs. External Cueing. The science clearly shows that External Cues that focus on something outside of the body are more effective than Internal Cues that focus on a body part or muscles. Use Internal and External language for describing but focus on External for cueing. Direction of the cue can also have an impact (moving away from vs. moving towards something) Using tape can help you turn an Int