10/02/2024
This week, I had the pleasure of listening to a talk from Craig Morris (high-performance coach for British Canoeing) at the Ecological Dynamics Symposium in Melbourne. Craig made a great point about how he used to force a technique or position onto athletes, which looked “perfect”, but halfway through his career, he questioned this approach as he switched to an Ecological Dynamics philosophy.
It got me thinking: What shooting techniques do we take for granted, don’t question, and unequivocally deem to be correct without critical appraisal? Why do coaches stick to a textbook-perfect example of shooting and sometimes train out emergent behaviours?
For example, do athletes have to enter the target straight from the top? Or is it good enough for success to enter the target from the same area above the horizon of the 10 (satisfying the context-independent constraint of gravity)? After all, our bodies are nonlinear complex systems, and travelling in straight lines could require further constraining, which could lead to less adaptability and consistency in competition, resulting in less success for your athlete.
Should the coach determine the height of a pre-aiming point before the approach to the ten-ring, or how an athlete gets there? Could it be more functional for the athlete to work this out for themselves? Who says a pre-aiming point is needed at all?
Dick Fosbury changed the sport of high jump forever by jumping backwards on take-off; this would have been seen as radical and a big technical “No” at the time throughout his training until his subsequent win at the Olympics.
Though these are just random, arbitrary examples to get people talking, the points remain: Should we force athletes into the correct technique, or do we allow them to create emergent functional solutions themselves however that may look?
You may ask, if we let the athlete find these themselves, what is the role of the coach?!?!? As Craig eloquently put it in his presentation, the coach is a ‘designer’, not a ‘prescriber’. Our role as coaches is to design training environments and tasks that facilitate desirable emergent techniques for achieving task goals. We do this by using the constraints-led approach and allowing the athlete to explore performance solutions without being overly prescriptive. This way, they can create functional behaviours to navigate their performance environments goal-directedly (get the rifle from the stand to the 10-ring). Sometimes, it can be hard to watch athletes try solutions that don’t look right, but eventually, they will learn what is functional and how to adapt their techniques without the need for reassurance or permission from a coach.
Craig's talk made me explore my own practice and understanding. I hope this post can allow you to explore your own practice and allow you the space to question where we, as coaches, acquire knowledge. The main takeaways are not to be prescriptive, allow the athlete autonomy over their own development, and be creative with how you design your training environments and tasks.
