Book Review: The Language of Coaching
An exploration of external focus and analogy
The Language of Coaching, by Nick Winkelman, was published in 2021. The subtitle is "The Art & Science of Teaching Movement". It was maybe a bit longer than it needed to be—he delves really deeply into the science of how the brain works to give a theoretical foundation for his coaching strategies—but the ideas at the core of the book will definitely influence my coaching moving forward. (And what bigger compliment is there for a book about coaching than that?)
The author shares his background as a movement expert, running training camps for athletes before they take part in the NFL Draft combine. So the "Coaching" in the title refers to coaching movements and form: running, jumping, lifting, etc. As he puts it:
By coaching language, I mean the stuff you say to influence the way a person moves.
In other words, this is not really a book on how to discuss strategy with your players. It's a book about how to most effectively help your players improve their form and the way they move.
So then what does the "Language" in the title refer to? While he mentions a few various tips throughout the book (not confusing your players by saying too much, connecting with players by using references and examples that are relevant to them, using player's names as an effective hack to hold their attention, etc) there are two main ideas that he really wrote the book to share:
First: the importance of using "external focus" instead of "internal focus"
Second: the use of analogies as a coaching tool
External and internal focus
Simply put, external focus is focusing on something outside of your body. Internal focus is focusing on your body itself. To give a personal example, I've written about the way that new frisbee players are often coached to have their "palm up" when they throw forehands. This is an internal focus—a focus on the position of your body. An external cue would be something like "keep the side of the disc that's farther from your body closer to the ground". Later on we'll talk about analogies. A forehand cue using analogy might be something like: as if using a scythe, cut the grass with the far edge of the disc. There are also "far external" cues, where you focus on something further from the body—like the place you want the disc to land, or the flight path you want the disc to take.
Does that sound...sort of arbitrary? You're not the only one to notice this! It seems like such a small change—exactly the sort of research finding that might not replicate. But Winkelman says that this science is robust and has been replicated many, many times. Specifically, the main finding of this research is about skill acquisition: people learn skills more quickly when taught with an external focus.
As a side benefit, he also cites a few papers that show people perform better under pressure when keeping an external focus instead of an internal focus. To put it another way: if this research is correct, thinking about the position of your own body instead of trusting its flow is the mechanism through which people "choke" in pressure situations. Coaching people to think about their body makes them more likely to do so under pressure.
To make things even more arbitrary, he suggests one way to turn an internal focus into an external focus is to put a small piece of tape on your athlete's skin/clothes, and have them focus on what they do with that tape. (Or even just focus on the clothes themselves: "Clothing is a perfect surrogate for referencing joint motion when you don’t want to mention the joint. ") To go back to the example of throwing forehands, I've written about how getting your elbow back in the windup helps generate power. An internal focus cue here might be saying "push your elbow as far back as you can". However, we can turn this into an external focus by putting a piece of tape on the back of the thrower's elbow, and telling them "stick that piece of tape high up on the wall behind you".
Here's an example from the book:
One of the most profound movement changes I’ve ever observed came off the back of using tape to sort out a posture issue during a sprint start. We were a few weeks out from the NFL Combine, and this athlete was still exiting his start with a flexed posture, which suffocated the force he would otherwise have access to during his first two strides. We had tried every cue I could come up with, and nothing could break this guy out of his hunchback. That’s when I pulled out two strips of sticky tape...
I put a strip of tape across his upper back, from shoulder to shoulder, and a second strip of tape across his low back... [and gave the cue:] “OK, on our next sprint start, I want you to focus on smashing those two pieces of tape together as you explode off the line.”
Describing vs. cueing
So that's one way this internal vs. external focus seems a little arbitrary: the "external" focus can be right on top of your skin and still be (supposedly) more effective than an internal focus. Here's another way:
Winkelman shares his coaching model, which he calls the "coaching communication loop". This is his five-step plan for coaching movements, and it goes like this:
coaches will DESCRIBE it, DEMONSTRATE it, and CUE it; athletes will DO it; and both will DEBRIEF it.
He doesn't say internally-focused language should never be used. Instead, he separates the description of a movement during a pre-activity coaching session from the cue a coach might give a player at the moment they are actually performing the movement:
it’s not that we have to completely dispose of all internal language. That would be ludicrous. Rather, it is a matter of knowing where and when to put it within the learning narrative. In my own work, if I use internal language, it falls within the DESCRIBE it portion of the coaching loop or, off the field, in the context of a video analysis session.
Again, I'm pretty convinced by the science that this external stuff is a good idea. I plan to use it in my own coaching going forwards. But at the same time it feels a little arbitrary sometimes. How do we know a player is focused on the cue I gave them 5 seconds ago and not some aspect of the description I gave them 5 minutes ago?
Side note: one more arbitrary-ish distinction is that the more experience an athlete has, the less likely they'll be held back by an internal cue:
research has consistently shown that highly experienced athletes are less sensitive to the differences between internal and external cues than those with less or no experience...highly experienced athletes are better able to shed a cue’s verbal carcass and extract its core meaning
It does have a certain logic to it—both because (a) experts are more experienced using their body in general and (b) at a high level of performance, any changes are likely to be quite marginal. But even so, this distinction would make me slightly more suspicious of p-hacking, if it weren't for how well-replicated these studies seem to be.
Internal focus makes us lock up
So why doesn't focusing internally work? The research says that when we overly think about our body position, we tend to use too many muscles trying to put our body parts exactly where we want them to be. This keeps us from being able to attain the graceful fluidity that comes with expert motion. This makes intuitive sense to me. The more we try to carefully monitor our body position during a motion, the more muscles we activate trying to keep a joint exactly where we think it needs to be. As he puts it:
Like two people dancing to a common song, our muscles must work together to achieve a common goal. This neuromuscular dance requires a muscle to fire at the right time, with the right amount of force, and in harmony with its fellow motion makers...
...[In one study] an internal focus resulted in higher muscle activation in both the biceps and the triceps during the concentric, or upward, phase of the [biceps] curl.
Following the evidence to the present day, and we find that this result has been replicated and extended time and time again. [One study] had participants press the ball of their foot against an angled force platform by focusing externally on “pushing against the platform” or internally on “contracting the muscle in your calf.” The researchers observed that, while the activation of the calf muscle (i.e., agonist: soleus) was the same in both conditions, the anterior muscles (i.e., antagonist: tibialis anterior) were far more active when participants focused internally... Interestingly, [researchers] observed that force-production error was correlated with the level of muscle cocontraction. This means that the more muscles on both sides of a joint fire simultaneously, the harder it is for the primary muscle, the calf, in this instance, to accurately produce force...
...[when] both sets of muscle fire loudly, [it] is something like trying to drive on the freeway with your parking brake on, as one set of muscles resists the action of the other.
Using analogies
After convincing us of the benefits of using an external instead of internal focus, Winkelman's next goal is to convince us of the power of delivering those external cues through analogy. Notably, while his argument in favor of external focus mostly relied on pointing to all the movement studies showing its effectiveness, his argument in favor of analogy focused on discussing how our brains work. For example, he starts off his discussion of analogy saying:
As you will see, an analogy is a sort of mental molecule that helps us make meaning. In the same way that mitochondria power our cells, analogies power our minds, allowing us to use association and comparison to expand and refine both our knowledge of the world and the way we move through it.
And then pivots to a discussion of the way babies begin to develop and interact with the world. I assume this lack of focus on motor research means there haven't been quite as many studies on the effectiveness of using analogy to teach motion. Hopefully those studies are being done now, so he can point to all of them in the next edition of his book.
Here's a few more of his arguments in favor of analogy. First, our brains run on visual imagery. Over the course of human evolution, in the so-called ancestral environment, visual processing and spatial memories ("where to find the best blueberry bushes") were much more important than interpreting spoken words. That's why something like the memory palace method is so effective in helping people remember things.
One of his general communication tips that I mentioned above (and that many other top coaches also believe in) is not saying too much. The more cues your athletes are trying to keep in mind at any one time, the more confused they're likely to end up. That makes analogies powerful—as they say, a picture is worth 1,000 words. When an analogy connects with an athlete, they'll be able to extract a number of separate ideas from one short phrase. A few quick words can communicate a complicated concept.
A final argument for the power of analogies is there's evidence of a link between the words we hear and our ability to perform related motions. For example:
A phenomenon known as the action–sentence compatibility effect confirms this expectation. Specifically, after reading a sentence about forward motion (e.g., “close the drawer” or “you handed Jerry the ball”), you are faster to indicate that the phrase made sense when you have to move your hand forward to press a button, while the reverse is true for sentences involving backward motion (e.g., “open the drawer” or “Jerry handed you the ball”)
And the same is true for orientations:
...subjects recognized objects faster when the objects were in the same orientation as the objects described in the sentence. Hence, reading the sentence “John put the pencil in the cup,” primed subjects to identify a pencil in a vertical position, with the opposite being true for the sentence “John put the pencil in the drawer.”
This evidence suggests that the mind simulates the implied orientation of an object and, thus, primes itself to be able to perceive that orientation. Notably, this same research group extended this finding to shape, showing that reading about an object's shape primes the mind to perceive it.
Analogies that connect
We have to be careful, as he notes, to use analogies our athletes can actually interpret and connect with. Make sure you actually check in and get feedback from the athlete. If one analogy doesn't work, don't hesitate to try another. Let's go back to the discussion I mentioned above on getting the disc to have the right flight path when throwing a forehand in ultimate frisbee.
I proposed an analogy of imagining the outside edge of the disc is a scythe being used to cut grass. I doubt anyone here has actually used a scythe to cut grass, but most of us have seen a similar action in some old-timey movies. In my limited experience sharing this analogy with people learning to throw, I've gotten some positive feedback. But I don't expect it to connect with everyone, and I'll be quick to leave it behind with other learners if it doesn't connect for them.
Someone once told me they were taught to throw a flick "like Spiderman shooting a web" (I like this one). I've written about how the arm is like a whip. Other people have mentioned being taught that throwing a flick is like "snapping a towel". But, as these friends have pointed out to me, not everyone has snapped a towel before! I couldn't help mentioning this one because coincidentally, Winkelman also uses snapping the towel as a potential analogy:
“Snap the bar to the ceiling [when performing a weightlifting movement] just like you were trying to snap a wet towel.” By adding the analogy, we provide a comparable movement scenario that requires similar wrist mechanics. Assuming the athlete has snapped a towel before, they can map the sense of snapping a towel onto that of snapping a bar. By leveraging an existing movement memory trace, we lower the barrier to learning.
Note that he doesn't assume everyone has snapped a towel before!
I do think teaching in ultimate can sometimes be especially challenging because many people will pick up ultimate as adults (or as college students) without much previous athletic experience of any type. The less sports a new athlete has experience with, the harder it will be to connect through saying "it's like doing [movement X] in [sport Y]".
Final thoughts
The final section of the book is a great "library" of motions along with illustrated analogies to use when teaching those motions, making the book a valuable resource for people who are often teaching motion. I’ve included a few of my favorites throughout the review above.
Although there's some arbitrariness in the external vs. internal distinction, and I’d like to see more studies directly testing the power of analogy, I'm generally convinced that external focus and analogies are the way to go when coaching movement. I felt the book was a little longer than it needed to be, so I've tried in this review to give you 90% of the book's interesting stuff in 10% (or less) of its length. Now get out there and snap off some analogies like you're, um, snapping a towel.