NICK WINKELMAN
Coaching Science—Theory into Practice
I’m Nick Winkelman, the Director of Training
Systems and Education for Athletes Performance.
I also oversee all of the speed development for our
NFL combine development program.
Today, we’re looking at the concept of coaching
science—theory into practice. We can also label this
a ‘skills acquisition presentation.’ We’re going to be
looking at a framework for coaching that allows us
to optimize the environment and the delivery of
information, thus allowing our athletes to retain
and learn at a higher rate that ideally transfers to the
field of play.
Even if you work with the general population,
many of the principles here, in terms of how to
instruct people to move and give them feedback on
their movement, are going to be very important to
their success even if it’s just in the weight room.
When we look at the whole framework for
coaching, we have to take a look at motor control and
learning. Motor control and learning really create
the foundation for practice and the development of
an environment that optimizes learning.
If we understand how someone controls
movement, we have a better understanding of how
someone learns to move. If we understand how
someone learns to move, we can optimize those
pieces within our practice design, our instruction
and our feedback.
These are our three major objectives for today’s
presentation.
• Understanding how to design
environment for optimal learning
• How to prime the system with proper
instruction
• How to refine the motor system with
proper feedback
If we can do these three things extremely well,
we’re going to place our athletes and our clients in
the best position to learn.
This is the transcript of Nick Winkelman’s Coaching Science—Theory into Practice audio lecture.
If you’ve received this material, do not own the audio lecture and would like to learn about it, visit www.movementlectures.com.
For more from Nick, visit him at facebook.com/nwinkelman.
If we basically take the example of cloning an
athlete by 10, creating the exact same program
each of those cloned athletes are going to go
through, but ask 10 different coaches to deliver that
programming, arguably, even though the program
and the athlete is unified, you’re still going to see 10
different results.
We understand that while ‘Xs’ and ‘Os’ are
extremely important, the biomechanics, physiology
and information we learn over and over again in
college and throughout our careers are extremely
important. The limiting factor oftentimes is the
delivery of that information.
Today, we really want to explore why certain
things we do work unbelievably well, both in
practice and the transfer to play, but also why some
things we do probably don’t work as well. This is
especially if they practice well, but for some reason
they don’t seem to transfer that to the field. All of
that falls into coaching science.
Again, we go back and look at those motor
control and learning books, because they give us the
foundation for the applied information we’re going
to discuss today.
If we look at the framework for coaching, at the
bottom, or base of it, we want to discuss practice
design. At a very universal level, independent of
what you say to your athlete or client, you can design
a specific environment that optimizes learning.
Frankly, if we understand that information,
an we can immediately start having an impact, not
only on how an athlete practices, but also how that
information is retained and, more importantly,
transferred to the field. While practice is important,
it’s all about that transfer.
From there, we want to start looking at
instruction. How do we actually teach an athlete
to move? What are those initial words we give to a
novice, an intermediate or a highly expert athlete?
How can we optimize it just from that first exposure?
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 Finally, once an athlete or client moves, how can
we give appropriate feedback to refine that motor
system? Are there certain bits of information that
are going to help them, and also certain bits of
information that can hinder them?
We want to know the information that’s going to
optimize learning and immediately start retracting
any statements that could be negative to that
learning.
We’ll start by looking at practice design and
optimizing the learning environment. When we
look at practice design, the first thing we want to
attain is our goal. Our goal is to optimize learning
and retention in an effort to reach maximum
transfer to the sporting environment.
Of course, we want our athlete to practice well.
It’s all about how that practice transfers to the
environment. One thing we have to understand
immediately is that just because someone is practicing
well does not mean the information they’re learning
is going to transfer to the environment of sport or
play.
Today we’re going to look at why that happens
and how we actually optimize practice to get
transfer. Within that, we have two specific terms
in which we’re very interested—practice variability
and the concept of contextual interference.
When we look at practice variability, we
want to define it as the variety of movement and
context characteristics a person experiences while
practicing a skill. In looking at this, our goal initially
is to create context.
We want the athlete or client to understand why
they’re doing what they’re doing to empower them
essentially to make those changes by themselves.
This way, when they make an error, they can look
back at it and tell you what they did wrong. On the
next repetition, we don’t even need to give them
information. They understand how to make the fix.
This is what we call context. The higher the level of
context our athletes have, the better it tells me how
expert they are.
When we introduce practice variability,
essentially we’re giving them a diversity of different
~2~
This is the transcript of Nick Winkelman’s Coaching Science—Theory into Practice audio lecture.
If you’ve received this material, do not own the audio lecture and would like to learn about it, visit www.movementlectures.com.
For more from Nick, visit him at facebook.com/nwinkelman.
contexts or a diversity of different movements
within the same session. Within that, we have
this concept of contextual interference. The goal
is to give the athlete or client context, meaning
they’re empowered; they understand how to do
the movement, how to correct it, understand when
they’re doing it right or understand it when they’re
doing it wrong. Contextual interference essentially
is how I can design a session to interfere with that.
The definition is the memory and performance
disruption that results from performing multiple
skills or variations within the context of a practice.
You’re probably thinking., ‘Why would we want
to interfere with context? Why would we want to
interfere with our athletes’ understanding of what
they’re doing right or what they’re doing wrong?’
Essentially, if I have you do the same movement
over and over again within the same session, it almost
becomes automatic. You know the predictability of
the pattern because you’re doing it over and over
again. Your focus—what we call your intrinsic
focus—on that movement isn’t as high. When your
intrinsic focus on the movement isn’t as high, you
tend not to learn as well.
If I interfere with that by giving you more
movements, more variations and even randomizing
the order of different movements, your cognitive
system undergoes greater overload. Just like the
body, when we overload a certain area of the system,
that system will adapt by learning and being able to
deal with these higher interference factors.
Think of sport. Sport is constantly exposing
the athlete to a variety of movement or variety of
stimuli. This is essentially the world. Our practice
then needs to do the same thing in a very systematic
order. Contextual interference tries to mimic the
demands of the sport environment successfully in
practice.
If you think this does work, there’s a concept
of the contextual interference effect. This was
essentially found in 1979. It was defined as the
learning benefit from performing multiple skills in
a high contextual interference practice schedule or
what they call random, rather than performing skills
in a low contextual interference practice schedule—
what they call blocked.
In one case, blocked means you do the same
movement over and over again. It’s very predictable
and your body basically can go into auto-pilot,
whereas random means you’re doing a variety of
movements against a variety of stimuli that starts to
max the demands of the sport even more.
You can’t get complacent. You can’t predict or
anticipate what’s going to happen next. Your body
constantly has to be prepared to react. It ends up
being a higher load.
To bring this to life, think about a time when
you’ve driven home. You’ve driven home thousands
of times on the same road. I’m sure there have been
times where you didn’t even realize how you got
home. You’ve covered that 20 or 30 minutes, but in
your mind, you’ve been going through what you did
that day, what you’re going to do tonight and what
you’re going to do tomorrow because your body has
the auto-pilot, this autonomy.
Essentially, this same thing can happen in
practice when it’s a blocked practice. Your body just
knows what’s going to happen. Thus, you do it over
and over again. The learning effect isn’t as high. This
is why if we interfere with contextual interference
through a random-type practice, it has been shown
to drive up learning effects in transfer skills and
actually transferring to the sport.
We look at this contextual interference in
practice. What we know is that high contextual
interference conditions match every negative effect
on current performance within a practice setting
compared with low contextual interference.
Now, you’re thinking, ‘ Nick, why am I going to
want to have my athletes practice in an environment
where they’re not going to have as much success?’
Because it’s not predictable and because they
can’t anticipate the next movement, everything
is randomized. They’re going to undergo greater
cognitive load.
Anytime you’re learning a new skill, one that’s
more demanding. Anytime we affect that skill
~3~
This is the transcript of Nick Winkelman’s Coaching Science—Theory into Practice audio lecture.
If you’ve received this material, do not own the audio lecture and would like to learn about it, visit www.movementlectures.com.
For more from Nick, visit him at facebook.com/nwinkelman.
with multiple stimuli, it’s more demanding. While
practice is more demanding and they may have
more errors in which to accommodate, there is
also greater cognitive engagement. When there is
greater cognitive engagement with the practice, we
see better retention.
If we look at retention and learning, or essentially
how they’re actually going to do on Sunday when
they play the football game, high contextual
interference conditions can result in significantly
higher retention and learning following a series of
practice sessions.
Imagine a baseball practice when you take 100
fastballs, 100 change-ups and 100 curves. There’s
another person who gets those same 300 pitches,
but they’re now completely randomized. When we
wait three weeks and test them again in a normal
sport or environment, which is inherently random,
the person who did the random practice is going to
be more prepared to handle the diversity of pitches
they see, whereas the person who sees the fastball
is inherently going to expect a fastball next. When
they see the curve ball, they’re not prepared for it.
They haven’t dealt with that random environment.
Cognitively, they have not retained the ability to
truly hit a fastball, a curve ball and a change-up as
they see it because that’s not the environment in
which they learned the skill.
While practice may be affected, learning and
retention are optimized. This is essentially what
we’re trying to do. Can what we’re teaching in
practice actually transfer to the field?
If we look at this applied, you’ll see three
different terms in literature use—block practice,
serial practice or random practice. These are the
three different ways you can increase contextual
interference within a practice.
Blocks can be defined as multiple movements
trained within a week and single movements
trained in a blocked order within a day. This means
on day one, you may only work on one movement.
The next day you work on a new movement. The
next day you work on another new movement, but
in each day, you only focus on one thing. It’s like
doing those 100 curve balls or those 100 fastballs all
in one blocked session.
Let’s look at the definition of serial. It’s going to
be multiple movements training a pre-determined
series within a session. We’re not randomized,
because we’re doing movements in a very specific
order, but we’re going to complete all of those
movements before moving to the next.
Now instead of doing our fastballs, curve
balls and change-ups on different days, we’ll do
25 fastballs, 25 curve balls and 25 change-ups all
within the same day. There is greater variation, but
still highly predictable.
When we look at a random-type practice,
it’s going to be multiple movements trained or
sequenced in a randomized order within a session.
In this session are the same 75 pitches, but they’re
now going to be in a randomized order.
Let’s look a step deeper at an actual movement
skill or skills acquisition example. If I’m doing block,
that means day one I may only do acceleration. On
day two, I only do deceleration. On day three, I work
on something like the drop step.
Let’s look at serial now within one day. On day
one, the first part of the session we may work on
acceleration. The second part will be deceleration.
The third part will be the drop step. We’re working
on the same three movement patterns, but within
one single day.
The random is the same one-day practice. The
first drill might involve acceleration to deceleration.
The second drill set might be deceleration to a drop
step. The third might be acceleration to deceleration
to a drop step, all the while varying the different
stimuli that are initiating those patterns. As we move
from block to serial to random, we’re increasing
the amount of contextual interference within the
system.
Now we look at this in terms of skill complexity
and the skill of the athlete or client. Not everyone is
going to be equal. Some people need to start with
block. Some people need to start with random.
It’s going to be how we combine block, serial and
~4~
This is the transcript of Nick Winkelman’s Coaching Science—Theory into Practice audio lecture.
If you’ve received this material, do not own the audio lecture and would like to learn about it, visit www.movementlectures.com.
For more from Nick, visit him at facebook.com/nwinkelman.
random practice to progress an individual at the
fastest level to allow the person to retain information
or movement at the highest level.
If someone has a low skill level, meaning
the person is a novice and the movement is low
complexity, the skill level of the athlete is the limiting
factor. Therefore, you’re going to want to start with a
low contextual interference environment and move
to more of a high contextual interference.
You’ll start on the block-type practice moving
into serial and random. How fast you move from
block to random is essentially the speed at which
you see the athlete learning. I’m not going to give
you strict guidelines in terms of how long you spend
in each one of these.
In block practice, you give them context. Now
they have the innate capacity to interact with stimuli
of the environment and the movement and decide if
they’re doing it right or wrong. They can now make
the changes intrinsically on their own.
Once they have high context, we can interfere
with it. We can then give them more serial and
random-type practices because they’re going to have
the intrinsic ability to fix or correct themselves—
what we call discovery learning—in addition to the
instruction and feedback you’re giving them.
Let’s look at a second example. Someone has
high skill abilities or maybe has more autonomy,
but is also now learning a high complex movement.
We’re going to want to still do the same thing. In
this case because the movement is novel, it’s highly
complex.
Even though the person has high abilities, we
still want to start with a block practice with a new
skill. Once the individual has learned that new skill,
we can quickly move into more random. Thus, we
have low to high contextual interference.
If the athlete has a low skill level and high
complexity movement, we have to start with block
practice. More than likely because the complexity
of the movement is so high and the skill level of
the athlete is so low, you might have to spend a bit
more time in that block practice. However, you still
eventually want to move on to higher abilities, but
initially you might spend more time in block.
If it’s a high skill level athlete and a low complexity
movement, you can probably go right into random-
type practice. You don’t even need to do block-type
work because the person already has high ability
and the demand of the skill is very, very low.
These examples display what we call the
‘challenge point hypothesis.’ This means you can’t
just live in one camp or the other, only block or only
random. It’s basically a diversity of the progression.
If we think about blocked to serial to random
increasing contextual interference, children need to
start with block practice whereas adults can better
handle random-type practice. As a progression, we
move from block to random.
If it’s a low skill level individual versus a high
skill level individual, typically we want to start
with block, move toward more random and then
finally high skilled complexity versus low skilled
complexity. With high skilled complexity, start with
block moving toward more random.
All of these are specific research studies that
fall under the challenge point hypothesis. Progress
from block to random, but as a rule of thumb,
higher levels of random practice will result in better
retention and learning. This is the reason we want to
move people toward a more random environment
successfully after they can handle blocked.
So far we’ve really just been discussing black and
white—blocked or random, blocked or random.
However, some of the modern research on this is
saying that a progression might be better.
If you look in the literature specifically for
the terms ‘contextual interference,’ these are the
two terms people are going to use when they talk
about practice. There are well over 1,000 published
research studies. Most of those just look at block
practice versus random. The vast majority of them
will tell you that random practice is always going to
result in better transfer and learning.
However in 2010, Jared Porter looked at block
versus random versus someone who progresses
~5~
This is the transcript of Nick Winkelman’s Coaching Science—Theory into Practice audio lecture.
If you’ve received this material, do not own the audio lecture and would like to learn about it, visit www.movementlectures.com.
For more from Nick, visit him at facebook.com/nwinkelman.
from one to the next. The name of the study was
Moderately Skilled Learners Benefit by Practicing
with Systematic Increases in Contextual Interference.
It had 45 participants practice three different
basketball passing strategies under blocked, random
or progressive practice schedules. Passing accuracy
was based on a target and how close they got to the
target based on the three different passing skills.
What they found was very simple. A progressive
increase in contextual interference from a block to
a random schedule improved retention of passing
skills better than if they just did the random or
the block alone. A random practice is better than
blocked. If we look at a progressive schedule from
block to more random, we create the context with
block practice, teach them the skill and teach them
how to correct themselves. Then interfering with
that with more random-type practice is better than
starting with one or the other by itself.
This goes hand-in-hand with the challenge-point
hypothesis. The speed at which we progress from
block to random is highly dependent on the age,
the ability and the complexity of the skill, innately
allowing you to progress as their skills improve,
getting eventually to random practice because that’s
going to be the key to truly lock in this information
from a retention and transfer standpoint.
The major take-homes here are to move from
block to random and get people to random practice
successfully and safely. This is what’s going to
transfer to the field of play.
Some further considerations when looking
at practice that we have to factor in is what we
call ‘regulatory’ and ‘non-regulatory’ conditions.
Independent of blocked, serial or random practice,
we want to then look at the environment in which
the person is practicing.
Regulatory conditions are factors that can affect
motor skill characteristics—things like what surface
you play on, how many opponents there are and the
sport rules. All of these affect the type of movements.
Now, we manipulate these all the time. If I’m
playing soccer, maybe I make the field a bit smaller.
Maybe I adjust the rules now and we only get one
touch on the ball versus two.
All of these are what they call ‘manipulation of
regulatory conditions’ that inherently changes how
athletes move to bias a specific skill they’re trying
to learn. Whether it’s block or random, you can still
optimize or change these regulatory conditions to
bias out a specific movement.
From there, we can look at ‘non-regulatory
conditions.’ These are factors that indirectly affect
motor skills. These can be things like the crowd,
the game score and the game ports. If someone is
shooting a free throw in basketball, the athlete may
in practice be able to do this with 95% accuracy.
However, the second atheltes get into the game,
especially if it’s playoffs, maybe that accuracy goes
down to 75%. Even though that has no direct
correlation to how they move, it’s still from a
cognitive perspective that limits them.
How can we affect these non-regulatory
conditions? Is it having loud music or having loud
noises that sound like a crowd? You see this all the
time, especially in football environments where
they’ll blast very loud crowd-type noise.
Can you have two individuals race against
each other or track down a ball to then create an
environment of sprinting? That essentially shouldn’t
affect how they move, but because it increases the
importance, as winning is on the line, it creates a
non-regulatory demand on the body.
When we look at this, we can finalize this as a
considerable level of variation within the regulatory
or non-regulatory conditions. Simply try to match
those environments. Especially as you get closer
to very important demanding games, you want
to make sure the practice of regulatory and non-
regulatory conditions, in addition to blocked versus
random practice, is going to match what we need
them to do.
Some final examples would be as follows.
Closed skills are those that do not involve random
or reactionary-type conditions. Sprinting would be
an example. They’re always going to run the same
~6~
This is the transcript of Nick Winkelman’s Coaching Science—Theory into Practice audio lecture.
If you’ve received this material, do not own the audio lecture and would like to learn about it, visit www.movementlectures.com.
For more from Nick, visit him at facebook.com/nwinkelman.
100 meters. They’re always going to do it in the same
fashion on relatively similar tracks and in relatively
similar environments. It’s a closed predictable skill.
We want to vary the regulatory and non-regulatory
conditions in practice based on the actual variation
seen during the sport. If there’s not a lot of variation,
you don’t need to vary in practice.
Open skills, on the other hand, are your
reaction, random, non-predictable environments.
These are typically team or field sports. The nature
of open skills calls for variation in both regulatory
and non-regulatory conditions used systematically
throughout practice. Therefore, you want to vary
the things that affect movement and things that
indirectly affect movement, especially as a game’s
importance increases.
There are different environmental things we want
to think about—block to more random, regulatory
and non-regulatory conditions and creating an
environment for learning. Again if you’re interested
in this, you want to look up the terms ‘contextual
interference’ or ‘practice design’ in the literature.
That falls under motor learning and motor control
categories in terms of science.
Here’s a big-ticket item. Increased contextual
interference is associated with a short-term
performance decrement in practice that results in
significant improvements in learning retention.
When we talk about decreased performance
in practice, we’re not talking about increasing
movement dysfunction. Rather the speed at which
they move might be limited since they’re having
to process more information because it’s more of a
random environment. This means the more they’re
exposed to that, the better they can handle it and the
faster those movements will become.
The performance decrement is still going to allow
higher retention when it comes to actual sporting
environments. That’s where this can be misleading
and why it’s important for us to understand practice
design and transfer.
Once we understand how to create an
environment for learning—and I think that last
section is very important for any kind of sport,
coaches and performance coaches who do field
work—we now want to look at the second level,
what we call ‘task instruction,’ or priming the motor
system.
For the personal trainers, those who maybe
just work in the gym and are teaching movement,
this starts to become increasingly important for the
general population client, priming the motor system
with proper task instruction.
If we look at an instruction model, we basically
can instruct in one of two ways—either using verbal
information or visual information. Under verbal
information, we can either give it an internal focus
or an external focus.
We’ll go into this deeper, but an internal focus is
essentially talking about body parts—talking about
muscles, talking about the process of the movement.
Everything between the head and the heel within
the body is where you draw their attention or their
focus. This is why we call it internal.
External focus is less of a process of the
movement, but more about the outcome. Now, all of
these cues are going to have to do with everything
environmentally around the body.
Internal focus during acceleration may be
something like extending your knee, firing a quad
or squeezing your glute. External focus may be
pushing the ground away or driving your body
off of the line. One is inside of the body and one is
outside of the body; hence, internal versus external
focus. As we’ll discuss, the difference between these
is unbelievably massive.
With visual, on the other hand, we can watch
one of two models. We can watch a novice model,
someone learning the movement for the first time,
or we can watch an expert model.
Inherently, we all try to teach in terms of an
expert model. We want to show them the perfect
way of doing things. However, there may actually
be some benefit for showing them from a novice
perspective, having them to be able to observe a
novice and learn from that. We’re going to look at
both the visual and verbal model.
~7~
This is the transcript of Nick Winkelman’s Coaching Science—Theory into Practice audio lecture.
If you’ve received this material, do not own the audio lecture and would like to learn about it, visit www.movementlectures.com.
For more from Nick, visit him at facebook.com/nwinkelman.
Let’s start by looking at verbal instruction.
You want to provide one to two focus cues to
build awareness. Within this, you want to limit
unnecessary information to avoid over-coaching.
The more information we give them, the more of
their attentional capacity we take. The more of their
attentional capacity we take, the less attention they
have to actually focus on the movement they’re
doing.
A perfect example is this. Have you ever had
someone do a movement and then while they’re
doing the movement, you say, ‘Great job. Keep that
up.’ All of a sudden, they mess up.
The reason is because all of a sudden they’ve
diverted their attention from what they were doing
to you now exposing their movement as having a
dysfunction.
In all reality, their movement was fine. It’s your
interference with what they were doing or their
attentional focus that drove the movement down to
go haywire. Thus, we want to avoid over-coaching
both in the instruction as well as the feedback we’ll
discuss here in a bit.
We want to always start and finish instruction
with what we want versus what we don’t want. A
good friend of mine, Victor Hall, calls this, ‘the sippy
cup principle.’ This is a great conversation he and
I had. Now having my own daughter, I completely
understand this. Victor gave the example of his son.
Every time his son was finished with his sippy cup,
he would throw it. He said, ‘Don’t throw the sippy
cup.’ Instead of throwing it, his son would dump it
out. He said, ‘Don’t dump your sippy cup.’ When his
son was done, he would start banging it on the table.
Every time Victor told his son what he didn’t
want, his son chose something else to do. He finally
realized this and said, ‘When you’re done drinking,
I want you to put the sippy cup on the counter.’ He
didn’t give him 1,000 different options of what he
could do. He gave his son one option of what he
wanted him to do correctly.
This is no different than with our athletes. If we
tell them not to do something or we identify an error,
there are 1,000 other things they can do. Essentially,
we’re not focusing their attention. We want to tell
them what we want them to do correctly. Give them
one option—one focus point. It decreases their
attentional demand, allowing the focus and move to
be successful.
Thus, we have the ‘sippy cup principle.’ Tell them
what you want. Try to diminish the focus on what
you don’t want.
Finally, you want to focus their attention
externally on the outcomes as opposed to internally
on the process of the movements. Going back to
verbal, we can either give them an internal cue or
an external cue.
Dr. Gabriel Wolf ’s work has shown that
focusing someone externally absolutely improves
performance and efficiency as opposed to focusing
someone internally, which decreases performance
and decreases efficiency.
When we look at both, external focus improves
transfer and retention whereas internal focus
diminishes it. This is probably the most important
concept for both instruction and feedback. When
we cue, we want to cue with an external focus and
diminish any kind of internal cueing that drives
up an internal focus. Internal cueing is inside the
system and external cueing is outside the system.
Dr. Wolf has a book entitled Attention and Motor
Learning. Looking at attention and motor learning
is essentially what we’re doing here. Every time we
give information, we’re affecting the attention of
the athlete. If we focus the attention externally, it
takes up less demand. If it takes up less attentional
demand, it allows more attentional resources toward
the movement. This is what we want. We want the
cognitive load intrinsically from the athlete to focus
on what they’re doing—not to focus on what we’re
saying.
What we find is that internal cues draw too
much of the attentional demand away from the
actual movement, thereby decreasing the optimal
ability of the athlete or client to move.
Let’s take, for example, a RDL. An internal cue
would essentially be to drive your heel away from
~8~
This is the transcript of Nick Winkelman’s Coaching Science—Theory into Practice audio lecture.
If you’ve received this material, do not own the audio lecture and would like to learn about it, visit www.movementlectures.com.
For more from Nick, visit him at facebook.com/nwinkelman.
the top of your head. That cueing is keeping the
focus within the body. An external cue would be to
drive the bottom of your shoe at the fence behind
you.
Now for all of you who use analogies and
metaphors when you’re teaching people to move,
that is spot on. Analogies and metaphors fall into
the external cueing focus because they don’t involve
internal focus. Analogies and metaphors—or direct
external cues—fall into this category.
If we’re teaching someone to do some type
of plyometric, an internal cue might be to drive
your hips through your head. It essentially keeps
all of the energy inside their body, not allowing
the coordination to release or finish the whole
movement versus trying to touch the ceiling above
you. If you’re using a Vertex, try to touch the highest
rung. External cueing in this case is going to improve
efficiency.
One of the studies Gabriel Wolf did was with
jumping. In one case, she told them to try to get
their fingers as high as possible. In another case,
she simply told them to try to reach for the highest
rung. Just by saying the word ‘fingers’ versus ‘reach
for the highest rung,’ think about the difference
there. It’s miniscule. One is outside of the body and
one is inside the body.
What they found was staggering. Statistically,
the people who just simply tried to touch the highest
rung jumped significantly higher than those who
focused on the height of their fingers or getting the
fingers as high as they could.
They also found that people who focused on
trying to touch the highest rung not only jumped
higher, but they did it with lower EMG. In the people
who focused on their fingers, the EMG of the lower
body went up. This means their muscle activation
went up, but their jump height went down.
To increase muscle activation, should this
actually increase jump height? Yes and no. If
that activation results in more co-contraction,
or decreased timing and efficiency, it could be a
constraint on the system.
 This is actually what happened. The decreased
EMG showed improved efficiency and less co-
contraction, allowing the body to complete the
coordination better and more effectively, thereby
increasing efficiency and less energy and also
increasing performance. When they looked at a
couple of retention tests, the people who focused
externally still jumped higher.
When you look at this information, it’s
staggering. What you say affects performance. Jump
height affects efficiency, timing and synchronization,
as well as affects transfer to the actual sporting
environment.
External cueing to instruction is what high
random or contextual interference is to practice
design. This optimizes the environment within
practice, but also to transfer. This is unbelievably
important. Dr. Gabriel Wolf ’s book, Attention and
Motor Skill Learning, is the resource you’re going to
want to look at to find out more.
If verbal is half the equation, visual is the
other half. Then, we’re going to look at how they
go together. If we watch an expert performer, we
understand there’s this concept of mirrored neurons.
In our brain, we have the ability to mirror things we
see outward.
Think of a baby boy or girl. I have a young
daughter who is now six months old. When she was
two to three months old, she started to smile, but
she only smiled when I smiled at her. Eventually, she
learned that smiling meant happiness. Now when
Mommy or Daddy see her, she smiles on her own.
Her mirrored neurons gave her time to create an
understanding and context of what smiling meant.
Now, she’s able to own the movement.
Our athletes are no different. Our mirrored
neurons still have the capacity to do this. When you
watch an expert performer, you can mirror what
they’re doing. However, we also want to look at the
benefit of watching a novice performer because it
improves problem solving and discovery.
Imagine now that you started by watching an
expert performer, seeing exactly what they need
to do right. Now, you draw all of your athletes’
~9~
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attention to each other, meaning you do a waterfall
start. Every athlete chooses acceleration and does a
10-yard sprint. Now, you’ve seen how to do it right.
Let’s say you’ve watched your nine other fellow
athletes who are learning just like you, but who
are not doing it perfectly. That allows you to fill in
the gaps of what the expert did right and what the
novice did wrong, already driving your attention to
what you should be focusing. This is all happening
subconsciously.
Thus, it improves problem solving and discovery
learning. In fact, a combination of expert and novice
could be the best way to use visual instruction. Don’t
just assume it always has to be the person doing it
right.
Within this, it doesn’t mean you have to call
attention to what the novice is doing wrong. Just by a
novice watching another novice do a movement after
seeing what an expert did right, they automatically
can pick up what is done wrong and focus their
attention on how to fix those things in themselves.
Therefore, combining both creates context to
know what the novice is doing wrong and drives
learning. This is a great model. Have the athletes
watch you or an expert do it perfectly. Have them
do three or four practice repetitions. Then maybe
on every third or fourth repetition, do a waterfall
start. Draw their attention to each other so they can
learn. It’s no different than them doing visualization.
They can learn from watching others move, thereby
eventually increasing their learning and retention.
These are the big-ticket items. Combining visual
and verbal instruction may be more beneficial than
either independently, especially when teaching a
novice or learning a novel task.
Visual creates an image and verbal, utilizing an
external focus, can drive the outcome of that image.
Think about this. Visual creates the image in the
mind and verbal drives the outcome of what that
image represents.
Giving them outcome externally oriented
feedback takes up less attentional demand allowing
them to intrinsically focus on the movement at
hand and allowing the cue to drive the outcome of
the movement.
 We see theoretically that this is the reason
why external cueing and the use of visual together
improves not only their performance in practic,e
but also the retention and transfer of the movement.
Finally, if instruction is priming the motor
system, we now want to look at feedback refining
the motor system. Within this refinement, we’re still
utilizing verbal information. Therefore, the internal
versus external cue is going to fall hand-in-hand
with this feedback model we want to discuss. A
model of feedback is going to follow like this. Again,
there are two different categories—task-intrinsic
feedback and augmented feedback.
We look at task-intrinsic feedback as being very
simple. It’s essentially the natural feedback that
comes from doing a movement. It can be visual,
auditory, tactile or proprioceptively connected.
Think about people in archery. If they pull
back and shoot, they can use visual feedback to
understand exactly where they hit on the target. You
don’t need to tell them they missed the bull’s eye.
Look at auditory versus tactile versus
proprioceptive. If we’re doing any type of balance
work, the proprioceptive system is giving spatial
awareness. I don’t need to tell the person they fell
over. Just by allowing someone to do more balance
tasks improves balance because it has high task-
intrinsic feedback.
Certain things from a sprinting perspective—
how much extension they have or how much knee
drive—might not inherently increase awareness.
Therefore, we need to tell them those things. Maybe
the time they ran the 10-yard or 20-yard sprint and
don’t inherently know that, they’re going to need that
information. That’s essentially where augmented
feedback comes in.
Augmented feedback falls into one of two
results—knowledge of results or knowledge of
performance. If we look at augmented feedback,
knowledge of results is essentially defined as
information about the outcome of a skill or the
goals achieved. It’s quantitative in nature. It’s the
numbers—how fast you run.
~10~
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Knowledge of performance is information
about the movement characteristics that led to the
outcome. These are more qualitative. This is where
we’re actually cueing them on movement qualities.
In looking at this, we typically give a lot more
information on knowledge of performance versus
knowledge of results. Frankly, as athlete improve
ability and hve the context on how to correct
themselves, we tend to give them more knowledge
of results—how fast they ran, if their cadence was
okay and if they met the quantitative goal of what
they were doing.
In the example of running a 40, knowledge of
results would be that you ran the 40 in 4.56 seconds.
Knowledge of performance would be driving the
knees during the first five yards. If you want to be
highly external, draw a black dot on the end of the
knee and say, ‘Drive that black dot more during the
first five yards’ to drive in even more external focus.
The big-ticket items here are very simple. The
higher the task-intrinsic feedback, the less need for
augmented feedback. The lower the task-intrinsic
feedback, the greater the need for augmented
feedback. Therefore, we do not want to talk just to
talk. If a movement inherently gives the information
to the athletes on what needs to be fixed, we don’t
need to tell them. If we continue to give error, error
and error to the athletes, they’re going to take that
as a negative.
To drive up self-efficacy, we essentially want
to hand over the keys to the car. As much of the
environment they can self-regulate, we want to give
them that ability. At the end of the day, the coach
is on the sideline. The coach is in the box when the
athletes are playing on the field.
We want to give them the environment to
transfer. We don’t want to have a high coaching
environment and a minimal-to-no-coaching
environment. Allow task intrinsic feedback to do
what it does for the athlete. However, if it has low
task-intrinsic feedback as this section focuses, that’s
where augmented feedback is very important.
Next the question becomes, ‘How much
feedback?’ We tend to see this especially in new
coaches, thinking more is always better. They coach
every single repetition. They’re talking the entire
time because they value themselves as coaches in
terms of what they’re saying.
I’m going to challenge this thought process.
We should not value ourselves in terms of what
we’re saying and how it sounds, but rather how the
environment we create transfers to the sporting
environment. At the end of the day, that is what
our athletes are paying us to do. They want to see
transfer. They want to be better at their sports.
The concept of ‘a guidance hypothesis,’ which
was really first hallmarked by Salmoni in 1984, tells
us that feedback guides the athlete and client toward
the correct movement or toward the correct context.
That’s very important—we need feedback and
instruction. However, when given too frequently, it
can have detrimental effects on the movement skill
and create feedback dependence.
Imagine this. If athletes are having problems,
rather than depending on themselves, rather than
depending on their own feedback or their own
long-term memory, they focus on you as the coach.
Their dependence on you is so high that the second
you remove that constant form of feedback, they are
essentially paralyzed. They can’t do the movement.
These are oftentimes the athletes who practice
unbelievably well and are used to having high
coaching dependence. However, the second the
coach is removed and play starts in an actual sport
environment, they can’t transfer. It makes sense.
They are depending on you as the resource. You
are almost an external hard drive for them. The
second you unplug an external hard drive from the
computer or the athlete, they no longer can access
that information.
Now, we want to look at how much feedback is
appropriate. Let’s actually look at a study from Dr.
Gabriel Wolf. This study is going to reinforce the
difference between internal and external focus, as
well as how much information should be given.
This study was done in 2002. It is one of the
most powerful studies ever done on instruction and
feedback. The concept was enhancing the learning
~11~
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of sport skills through an external focus feedback.
You know why that’s important.
We know that external is going to be better than
internal, so here’s what the study looked like. Fifty-
two participants took part in a passing accuracy
task. This was a kicking-type passing accuracy task.
Feedback frequency and internal versus external
focus was examined. They had four different groups.
They had one group that received 100% feedback
and there was an internal cue. The second group
received 100% feedback and there was an external
cue. The third group received 33% feedback with an
internal cue. Finally, the fourth group received 33%
with an external cue.
As a whole, both in practice as well as a couple
of days later in retention, an external focus was
superior to internal focus. Performance, accuracy
and all of the variables improved not only in
practice, but in retention as well. That’s what’s so
important about this.
The athletes are going to feel better because
they’re practicing better, whether it’s blocked or
random. Even more importantly, they’re going to
retain that information. There’s actual learning
going on.
The interesting fact is that 33% feedback was
superior to 100% feedback for all internal focus
conditions. This makes sense. If internal focus
messes up athletes, it’s believed that giving them
less of that feedback is better. That’s what this study
shows.
This is right in line with the guidance hypothesis
that 33% feedback is better than 100% when
giving internal focus. This means you give them
information every third repetition.
In studies that have looked at internal and
external, sometimes they actually found controlled
groups did better than internal focusers. This means
if you didn’t give the athletes any information at all,
they’re going to do better than if you drive them to
internally focus on their own bodies. In looking at
this 33% feedback, less is more if it’s non-externally
based.
 Now, here’s the interesting fact. In terms of
the external focus, 33% and 100% feedback were
equally as effective. If it’s you’re working with novice
athletes or they’re learning a novel task, you might
want to communicate with them a bit more. That’s
fine as long as the feedback is externally oriented.
As a whole, I think we can agree that less
feedback is better than more. That 33% to 50%
feedback amount is what you see in the literature.
And external is better than internal.
At the end of the day, we’re trying to hand the
keys to the car over to the athlete. We do not want
to interfere with the learning. We don’t want to plug
in and unplug. Then all of a sudden, there’s a power
outage and they can’t do the movement effectively.
This is why. Oftentimes, the heightened practice
capabilities with lower play transfer capabilities
could be coming from coaches not creating the right
environment, instruction and feedback models to
allow for learning.
There are huge dangers in giving too much
feedback. It’s what I like to call the coach dependence,
the DVD player analogy. We chuck the DVD
in. That’s practice—high coach volume. They’re
watching that DVD. The second we pull the DVD
out and now they’re playing, that system no longer
ceases to be able to play the information. They have
high coach dependence.
Less dependence on intrinsic processing means
there’s less cognitive overload. If I’m constantly
listening to a coach, the coach is giving me the
answer versus me being able to implicitly or
intrinsically figure out that answer or discover the
answer by myself.
If I turn the lights off in a room and tell you
where to go, it’s easy. However if I turn the lights
off in a room and you have to figure out where the
light switch is, you will forever know where the light
switch is located.
This same analogy is with coach-athlete
relationships. To the best of their abilities, we want
to empower them to find the answer for themselves.
Discovery learning is less coach dependant. Practice
well, but when feedback is removed, attentional
~12~
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For more from Nick, visit him at facebook.com/nwinkelman.
learning is not expressed on the field. Think about
this.
Forever we’ve done a ton of block practice and
we’ve given them a ton of information. This allows
them to inherently practice unbelievably well. They
become very skilled. However, the second you
remove that feedback and you now take them from
a blocked environment to a random environment,
which is sport, we wonder why they can’t play
well. It’s because we’re creating a false, artificial
environment. We want to create an environment
that most matches the demand, especially when
we’re talking about field work and skills acquisition.
Finally, the big one is over-coaching—paralysis
by analysis. Sometimes a lot of feedback works.
However, the risk is coach-dependence. Also, a lot
of times too much feedback doesn’t work and we get
immediate feedback from the athlete—paralysis by
analysis. You give a great, long speech and all of a
sudden the athlete looks at you and says, ‘What do
you want me to do, coach?’ We all have felt this.
I don’t meant to just tell you what you need to do,
but to reinforce probably what you’re already doing
well. I want to give you a bit of the science behind
what you’re doing, why it’s working and maybe why
some of the things you used to do or some of the
things you’re still doing today aren’t working so well.
In the end, there’s this concept of terminal
feedback methods. There are actually certain types
of feedback that help to decrease the amount of
feedback you give and allow you to optimize the
quality of that feedback.
The first one is called ‘bandwidth feedback.’
It’s called terminal, because it’s given after the
movement, or series of movements is completed.
Bandwidth feedback is given whenever it reaches a
limit.
Think about it. You write the session. You’re
going to do these movements in this order and you
structure the whole thing. However, how often do
you structure and plan your coaching?
This is where you are now going to be able to tap
into not only designing a session, but also how you
are going to interact with that session. Bandwidth
feedback is a way to do that. We now know for
every movement you’re going to be going through,
especially the high-level skill application-type
thesis, you’re going to give yourself very specific
focus points. This could mean in terms of if they do
one error wrong, you’re going to give them a cue.
Maybe there are four different things they
typically do wrong. However, you know that one
of those is the major thing they need to work on.
So your bandwidth feedback might be on that
one specific area. You’re only going to give them
information when they’re doing that piece wrong.
This allows you to set objectives for the session.
It also allows you to interact with those objectives so
you’re coaching and cueing to meet the objectives
of what you’re trying to do on a given day. It also
naturally decreases the volume, because when
they’re doing it right, you don’t need to talk to them.
You allow them to intrinsically drive what they’re
doing.
Then, there’s what they call ‘summary or average
feedback.’ Feedback is given after a number of trials
have been observed and average errors have been
identified.
It is very important that we understand this
inherent idea of movement variability. With every
single repetition, there are going to be differences.
You will never run two repetitions exactly alike.
What we need to figure out is ‘What is general
movement variability?’ Is it an error that just
happened to be exposed on that repetition versus a
consistent movement dysfunction?
Too often, we try to coach every repetition,
which means we never truly get to see what an
actual consistent error looks like. We just see general
movement variability.
As people are learning, they’re going to be doing
all sorts of things wrong. It doesn’t mean they have
movement dysfunction. It means they are learning.
Again, we allow them to go through three to
five repetitions. We give feedback maybe 33% or
50% of the time. We actually can get a summary
~13~
This is the transcript of Nick Winkelman’s Coaching Science—Theory into Practice audio lecture.
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For more from Nick, visit him at facebook.com/nwinkelman.
or an average understanding of how they move,
and then give more focused feedback on an error
that’s actually reoccurring. It’s a better focus of
information, but less volume of information given.
‘Fading feedback’ goes with our block-to-
random contextual interference flow, meaning that
feedback is given more frequently at the beginning
of a session and is progressively decreased over the
course of that session—again, external feedback
being the focus.
Finally, the one I really want you to think about
trying, even with non-athletes, is ‘self-selective
feedback.’ Feedback is given to the athletes at their
requests. Try this with both new athletes, as well as
highly experienced athletes.
This is going to give you an understanding of
how they like to communicate or how they like to
communicate at the stage of learning they’re in.
Most of the research done in this avenue was
done on non-athletes—the general population.
Think quickly: When do you think they ask for
feedback? Was it when they did it right, when they
weren’t sure or when they did it wrong?
Think about novice athletes or the inexperienced
general population. You have the answer in your
mind now. In the majority of the research, they
found that when you’re learning a new skill or
you’re a novice or a general population person, you
actually ask for feedback when you did it right.
This matches with everything they’re saying. The
reason they asked for information when they did
it right is because they’re trying to create context.
If they did it right, they could capture and retain
that, therefore better regulate how they move going
forward.
Now let’s consider an advanced athlete—and
I’ve pooled the athletes I work with—when would
you want feedback? Think about what you would
say for advanced individuals. They don’t want
feedback when they’re doing it right. They don’t want
feedback when they’re doing it wrong. Think of a
great athlete. They know when they’ve done it right.
They have enough positive ego and confidence to
say, ‘Hey. I hit that one on the head.’ They definitely
know when they did it wrong. No great athlete likes
a coach to hammer them on something they already
know.
The athlete typically wants to know when it’s
ambiguous—when they’re not quite sure. ‘Coach,
that wasn’t bad, but it didn’t quite feel right.’ That’s
when they typically want feedback.
Try self-selective feedback. It’s really going to
tell you a lot about how the athlete or client wants
to gain information. It inherently decreases the
volume of information and it increases self-efficacy.
It empowers the athlete. It says, ‘I trust you. I’m going
to hand you some ownership today.’ Especially as
they get more and more automony, try to self-select
the feedback. All of these methods focus you—less
volume and a higher quality of information.
When you look at the final ‘identifying the
feedback’ content, this is where the ‘Xs’ and ‘Os’
become very important. You have to understand
how the movements biomechanically and
physiologically are supposed to be performed so we
can focus our attention.
We want to understand the major technical
components of the movement and understand that
multiple errors will oftentimes be seen, especially
when we’re looking at running, linear and multi-
directional movement. We then want to prioritize
the multiple errors—on which ones we want to
focus.
It’s no different than the Functional Movement
Screen. I’m not going to try to fix all seven
movements. I’m going to prioritize and fix the top
one or two.
It’s the same thing when it comes to movement
real time on the field. We want to prioritize the
multiple errors we see and give them top priority.
We want to direct our feedback at the true weakest
link—cause versus symptom. This means if I see
five things going wrong, four of them are probably
symptoms, but one of them is actually a cause. The
better we understand our movement on the field, the
better we can understand the causes of movement
~14~
This is the transcript of Nick Winkelman’s Coaching Science—Theory into Practice audio lecture.
If you’ve received this material, do not own the audio lecture and would like to learn about it, visit www.movementlectures.com.
For more from Nick, visit him at facebook.com/nwinkelman.
dysfunction and what are simply symptoms of that.
It’s no different than if I have pain at my knee, which
is a symptom, but the cause may actually be coming
from my hip or my ankle.
These principles go from isolated focus all the
way down to high-speed running. Within this
is descriptive versus prescriptive information.
Prescriptive is better for the beginner. We want to
tell them exactly what we want them to do right to
fix the problem. Putting it in a positive connotation
brings us back to the sippy cup principle.
Descriptive means I can just tell the athletes what
they did wrong. If they have high levels of autonomy
and I tell them what they did wrong, high-level
autonomist athletes can handle that because they
know how to fix it. They don’t need you to tell them
how to fix it.
However, as most of us work with the
novice, beginners or intermediate, we want to be
prescriptive. Tell them exactly what you want them
to do right on the next run. Focus on that. Even if
what they’re doing is wrong, is it that bad? Tell them
they’re doing it right to reinforce that pattern—
cause over symptom. Positive, positive, positive.
Take a look at Attention and Motor Skill Learning
to further understand feedback messaging. Again,
the book is by Dr. Gabriel Wolf. This is a must-have,
easy-to-read resource.
Dr. Gabriel Wolf developed the concept of
internal and external cueing when she was wind
surfing. She has since done all of the research and
stemmed all of the research on the concept. Reading
her book is like reading a book on gravity by Isaac
Newton. There’s a direct correlation there—an
unbelievable science developed by an unbelievable
woman.
Many motor learning and control studies are on
non-athletes. They do not factor in movement quality
or the kinematic standpoint. This means I want to
see that they learn and retain the information, but I
also want to see the kinematic or movement quality
information. Thus, more research needs to be done.
That’s why more coaches have to get into motor
learning and control. We need to not only look at
how our athletes learn, but how they retain optimal
movement patterns, meaning place it on yourself.
Don’t just be proud of practice, but look at how
practice and training actually transfer to the field.
You have to move faster, but then does that actually
results in more stolen bases? The athletes are more
powerful, but can they actually drive the ball further
and more accurately when they’re on the golf course?
Look for transfer.
Take home a message here: Coaching is the
science of creating an environment for optimal
learning. We want to do this by understanding that
performance and learning are limited by attentional
capacity and its constraint on coaching.
This means the more we coach incorrectly, the
more we take their attention away from what they’re
doing. The more they become dependent on us, the
less their ability to intrinsically learn.
Manage attention by managing your coaching.
Modifying practice instructions and feedbacks can
diminish conscious thought and create a causative
load that optimizes learning.
Again, take our framework. Practice, instruction
and feedback create an optimal environment to
optimize the cognitive load to make sure they’re
guided, but can discover the right answer implicitly.
Finally, understand that while the ‘Xs’ and ‘Os’
are important, the ‘Xs’ and ‘Os’ are limited by the
delivery. Team, this is truly the equal sign. Thank
you very much.

~15~
This is the transcript of Nick Winkelman’s Coaching Science—Theory into Practice audio lecture.
If you’ve received this material, do not own the audio lecture and would like to learn about it, visit www.movementlectures.com.
For more from Nick, visit him at facebook.com/nwinkelman.