Master Teaching and Coaching from The Talent Code and SoccerNationNews

I love all of Dan Coyle's stuff from The Talent Code. He really breaks down the process of developing into a great coach or player.

The article Coyle is citing is from The New Yorker magazine by Jeremy Denk http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/04/08/130408fa_fact_denk titled "Every Good Boy Does Fine - A Life in Piano Lessons" and is also a great read.

The following article from soccer coach Wayne Harrison outline many of The Talent Code concepts in a concise outline.

from The Talent Code blog:
How to Spot a Master Teacher: A Field Guide « The Talent Code:

In fact, Denk’s teachers turn out to be a beautiful set of case studies for analyzing what qualities master teachers tend to possess. I’ll list a few here:

 1) Master teachers love detail. They worship precision. They relish the small, careful, everyday move.

2) They devise spectacularly repetitive exercises to help develop that detail — and make those exercises seem not just worthwhile, but magical. As Denk writes, “Imagine that you are scrubbing the grout in your bathroom and are told that  removing every last particle of mildew will somehow enable you to deliver the Gettysburg Address.”

3) They spend 90 percent of their time directing students toward what is plainly obvious. They spend the other 10 percent igniting imagination as to what is possible.

 4) They walk a thin line between challenging and supporting. They destroy complacency without destroying confidence. This is tricky territory, and requires empathy and understanding on both sides — particularly when it comes to understanding the moment when it’s time to move on.

5) They do not teach lessons; they teach how to work. As Denk writes, they “ennoble the art of practice.”  (Isn’t that a fantastic phrase?)

I also like how Denk shows what the master teachers are not; namely infallible superheroes. Master teachers are master teachers because they’re good learners, constantly reaching to build the ultimate skill: constructing the talents of others.

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from soccernationnews.com
A Scientific Concept in Soccer Player Development

By: Wayne Harrison	Print
Posted: Tuesday, November 15, 2011 12:16 pm

A Scientific Concept in Soccer Player Development on SoccerNationNews Soccer News:

In my experience, there are three key ingredients for successful skill acquisition and development.

They are: 

1. Deep Practice
2. Ignition, and
3. Master Coaching

These three elements work together within your brain to create myelin. Myelin is the neural substance that adds vast amounts of speed and accuracy to your movement, thoughts and decisions.

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What is Myelin and why is it important to skill development?

Inside the brain information is transmitted through neurons.  Human skill is created by chains of nerve fibers carrying a tiny electrical impulse from the brain to the body through these neurons. Myelin is the insulation that wraps around the nerve fibers in our brains and increases signal strength, speed and accuracy. Myelin is produced by a person thinking about and analyzing skill situations themselves.

All human skills are created by linking the nerve fibers in your brain that send signals to your muscles. Myelin plays an important role by serving as an insulator for these nerve fibers. According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health, “The purpose of the myelin sheath is to allow impulses to transmit quickly and efficiently along the nerve cells” (NLM/NIH: MedlinePlus).

It has been shown that the more insulation – or more myelin – wrapped around those fibers, the stronger and faster the signal becomes as fewer of these electrical impulses leak out. Therefore, skill can now be redefined as “myelin insulation that wraps neural circuits and grows according to certain signals.” The two – skill development and myelin – are married together.

Myelin acts like an elastic band around the nerve fibers squeezing them and forcing the signal through faster. In football (soccer), with each repetition, myelin responds by wrapping layers around the nerve fibers, speeding up and improving decision making and thought processes.  With each additional layer of myelin added, the player increases the ability to process the football specific skill required.

Everyone has myelin and everyone can improve themselves through its production. The more myelin produced; the thicker the sheath, the faster the message; the quicker thinking the player becomes.

How do the “three ingredients” work to help create myelin and improve performance?

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Deep Practice

For his book Talent Code, Daniel Coyle searched out what he calls “hotbeds of talent” around the world, including a soccer field in São Paolo, Brazil. Through his research, he developed a theory of what he calls “Deep Practice” that helps produce amazing success. This means “training on the edge of your capabilities.” Training in this dynamic capacity leads to mistakes being made, which increases the speed of skill acquisition. Players learn through making errors/mistakes and then correcting them. This method produces results 10 times faster than regular practice.

As deep practice is occurring, the player is wrapping even more myelin around each circuit and increasing skill. Simply put: mistakes lead to better skill acquisition. Deep practice is most important for players 6 to 12 years old. Their spatial awareness and ability to understand tactical concepts is still developing and at its height, and they have an unlimited capacity to acquire and develop new motor skills.

Simply put: mistakes lead to better skill acquisition.

Repetition of themes in small sided games is crucial, and especially in the “sweet spot” on the edge of the comfort zonethat produces errors but also teaches skills. This is where futsal comes in to play.

As Coyle explains in Talent Code, “Most Brazilian players learn their skills through futsal, the ssg equivalent of soccer. Futsal uses a half size and much heavier ball that doesn’t bounce; that promotes touch, technical and skill development. Sharp passing is paramount to have success. Futsal compresses essential skills into a small box, puts players into the ‘deep practice zone,’ making and correcting errors, constantly generating solutions to vivid problems. Players touching the ball 600% more often learn far faster, without realizing it, than they would in the vast expanse of the outdoor game.”

Deep practice needs to be on the edge of the players comfort zones, and maintained in game-related skill-developing situations.

Building myelin takes time, and putting ourselves in a position to fail actually helps fix our mistakes. Failing “better” and continuing this process until we accomplish the task is one of the quickest and most efficient ways to build myelin. We talk about letting players make their own decisions, allowing them to think for themselves – to problem solve; to self correct.  Myelin production does just that.

This learning process can boost the brain's efficiency by increasing the speed with which a signal travels down the nerve fibers by up to 100 times. So think about it: if self-correcting could make signal transport over 100 times faster, why would you not want to help build this into a player’s mentality? By commanding the players, by telling them what to do, you are actually restricting this process from taking place.

Therefore, your players will actually think and react and make decisions more slowly and less efficientlybecause of this command style of coaching. Unfortunately, some coaches are still stuck in this old methodology of command coaching and it has to change. It doesn’t work.

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Ignition

Deep practice is a cool conscious act; ignition is a hot, mysterious burst – an awakening.

Ignition is the motivational fuel that generates the energy, passion and commitment of a person from withinto perform deep practice. It is intrinsic motivation where the athlete has a self-willed drive to succeed. This is the catalyst, and it represents a huge level of commitment that can be borne out of a player’s deepest, often unconscious, desires to succeed.                                             

A person’s motivation is not just intrinsic; it can also be ignited by an event in the outside world, such as being inspired to play for your country after watching the skills of the World Cup Champions. In a famous example, Roger Bannister broke the seemingly-impossible four-minute mile in 1954. This ignited everyone’s belief to go for it, and within three years, seventeen athletes had broken what was previously considered a physiologically impossible feat.

An athlete can also be ignited or inspired beyond the intrinsic by Master Coaches.

Master Coaches

Master Coaches are the final piece in the “jigsaw of success,” and can have an immense amount of positive influence on the player. These coaches create a learning environment where the players are actively engaged and are lead by guided discovery methods of coaching. Training should be player centered not coach centered, where coaches only need to step in at the appropriate moments to make corrections.

Real master coaches are like farmers; they are deliberate cultivators of myelin. They are talent whisperers, and can be the difference between success and failure for athletes.

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In simple terms

1. The more Myelin the person produces the faster, stronger and more accurate the messages are from the brain.
2. Deep Practice ensures myelin is produced.
3. Ignition is the process that serves as the motivation for deep practice. Ignition supplies the energy, and deep practice translates that energy over time into forward progress (increasing the wraps of myelin). Ignition is caused by the inside energy of the person (desire, self belief) and the outside energy of the coach or outside events. Words are the signal most used to trigger ignition.
4. Master Coaches use the words that trigger ignition, which in turn motivates the deep practice that produces the myelin that speeds up and strengthens the decision making signals in the brain of the player. So, the types of words used can influence the player greatly.Negative words can have as much bad influence; as positive words have good influence. Coaches should take note of this important statement.
5. So, working backwards, the formula is: Master coaching creates Ignition, which encourages Deep Practice. Deep Practice – and especiallyspecific practice – enhances myelin production, which produces improvements in accuracy and speed of decision making.

In conclusion

My method of coaching is, as you see, all about inspiring the players to think and make decisions for themselves. We need to encourage them to self determine “where, when, how and why” they need to play a particular way or make a particular decision in a particular situation.

It is encouraging, to say the least, that I have discovered this wonderful work – Talent Code by Daniel Coyle – which supports my work. This book proves scientifically that the way to develop players is to empower them and to give them the reins of thought.

The key is becoming a Master Coach. The Master Coach guides players and steers their path towards greatness. He applies his knowledge and experience to use the “less is more” approach in the right contexts of development. In a way he, is showing them without showing them, guiding them to the light at the end of the tunnel – without showing it directly – until the players themselves find and see it and go through it.

So please, let the players learn for themselves. With guided deep practice and appropriate ignition by master coaches, over time players will develop far better than coaches commanding and demanding and not allowing players to think for themselves.

Related Article: Coach Wayne Harrison's Awareness Training

http://www.soccernation.com/soccer-coach-wayne-harrisons-awareness-training-player-development-cms-1848

Athletes and age of peak performance | Axon Sports

Betty Davis once said "Old age is no place for sissies". Judging from the results of the studies cited in the Axon Sports article, it's no place for athlete's either. But the good news is that research appears to be leading to a better understanding of how the brain ages, which leads to advancement in treatments and cures for degenerative diseases like Alzheimers, as shown in the follow-up article on Galantamine.

As the safety advances that are developed on NASCAR tracks eventually flow through to the auto industry and provide benefits for the masses, some of the research built around the "laboratory of athletics" will lead to health benefits that will effect BOTH former athletes and non-athletes.

from Axonpotential.com:
Athletes and age of peak performance | Axon Sports:

July 27, 2011

Athletes and age of peak performance

Via Joaquin Chapa

The consistency of this rise-peak-decline pattern is striking, even across very different sports. For nearly every major sport, the age of peak performance is in the range of 22-30, and some interesting trends emerge when you look at sport type in relation to an athlete’s peak age. The age at which performance tends to peak across sports seems to mirror the continuum from purely explosive, athletic sports to slower, more skill-based sports, with explosive sports peaking earlier. Further, even within sports that combine different abilities, explosive abilities (e.g. base stealing in baseball) tend to peak earlier than more cognitive, skill-based abilities (e.g. drawing walks in baseball).

* For baseball, a number of studies, using different methods, have pegged peak age between 27-29. (Link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02640410802691348#preview
* For Tennis, peak age has been pegged between the early 20′s and 25. (Link)
* For basketball, peak age has been found to be at 27 for all positions, with different positions showing different patterns of decline. (Link)
* For Track and Field, peak sprinting age has been found to be in the lower-mid twenties, with endurance events having older peak ages. (Link)
* For golf, athletes have broader peaks–between 25-35, with slower declines. (Link)
* For football, running backs and receivers peak around 27, with running backs showing sharper fall-offs than receivers. Quarterbacks have a broader peak between 25-35. (Link)

So why do athletes decline? One place where we might look for an explanation is in myelin integrity. Myelin is a fatty sheath that insulates the axon of the neuron, the long portion of the neuron that conducts the electrical signal when a neuron “fires”. This sheath acts like an electrical insulator, and allows the axon to conduct a signal much faster than an unmyelinated axon. Myelin is what gets called “white matter” when we’re talking about the brain (as opposed to “gray matter”, which is mostly composed of neuronal cell bodies). Neuroplastic changes in white matter have been observed in musicians and other categories of experts–it’s as if repetition and practice cause the laying down of additional layers of this myelinated insulation–so it isn’t too great of a leap to anticipate that highly trained athletes might exhibit differences in myelination and white matter when compared to the general population.

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Galantamine May Improve Myelin Integrity
http://www.life-enhancement.com/magazine/article/1947-galantamine-may-improve-myelin-integrity

We’ll get to that matter of broken insulation. First, however, let’s consider a provocative idea put forth recently by Dr. George Bartzokis, a neurologist at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, who stepped outside the box to have a fresh look at something important to all of us: our brain function and how it deteriorates with age.¹ The box in question encompasses our thinking about the use of acetylcholinesterase inhibitors (AChEIs) for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, particularly Alzheimer’s disease, the greatest scourge of them all.

Bartzokis believes that the indisputable benefits of AChEIs may be due in large measure to something other than what we’ve thought all along. To put his view into perspective, let’s have a quick look inside the box he broke out of. It’s not that there’s anything wrong in there—there certainly isn’t, as he’s quick to point out—but rather that the box is too small to encompass the larger picture he sees.

Galantamine—Potent and Versatile

It has long been known that AChEIs, such as the plant alkaloid galantamine, are effective in alleviating the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and slowing its inevitable course, usually for a period of about 6 months to a year, before the decline resumes in earnest. (There is still no cure for AD, which is ultimately fatal.) Some AChEIs, such as donepezil and rivastigmine, are prescription drugs. Galantamine too is sold by prescription, but, unlike the others, it’s also available as a nutritional supplement, owing to its use as such for many years before the FDA approved it as a “drug” in 2001.

 The Myelin Model of the Human Brain

In his paper, Bartzokis outlines what he calls the myelin model of the human brain, which he has been developing over the last several years (in numerous published papers). It involves the fact that the myelination of axons in the human brain is not fully developed at birth, but develops gradually throughout the first four decades of life, peaking at around age 45; thereafter, the brain’s myelin content declines gradually for the rest of our lives, as the myelin sheaths degrade. From the myelin perspective, these two broad phases in the life of the brain—a development phase (myelination) and a degeneration phase (demyelination) represent a curved trajectory, as seen below

More Words of Wisdom from the trenches

NIGHTLINE - The Talent Factories

Innate or in-born talent versus good coaching, practice and good old-fashioned hard work. Talent is not born, it is made. Practice, practice, practice is the key, just as the old joke about "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?

Practice makes perfect, but not just any practice, deep practice. Developing myelin in the brain, the old concept of reinforcement. Muscle memory, yes. But remembering the fundamentally correct mechanics to perform. So not as much 'practice makes perfect' but instead 'perfect practice' that leads to talent development and therefore, success.

Great coaching. Who the teacher is, is very important. A knowledgable, patient teacher that demands the correct fundamentals repeated in the proper sequence leads to success. A watchful eye, making small but important corrections under deep practice conditions.

Total concentration. Finding and fixing small technical mistakes. Making corrections leads to better skill development. Getting in the proverbial "zone" in practice. Resilience and perseverance lead to Talent.




THE TALENT CODE - Daniel Coyle

A trailer for Daniel Coyle's book, The Talent Code, which explains how talent grows in the brain, and how you can grow more of it. Included are a discussion of tiny, wildly successful talent hotbeds in sports, art, music, and academics; their distinctive patterns of practice, motivation, and coaching; and a bit of neurology (after all, every skill is located in the brain). The clip also includes the author's performance of a Tiger Woods golf trick--a trick with an extremely unplanned ending.

How parents and kids can develop Olympic-style mental toughness - from Jim Murphy

Olympic athletes and parents can use the same tools to train themselves and their kids. Jim Murphy, author of the new book by McGraw-Hill, Inner Excellence: Achieve Extraordinary Business Success Through Mental Toughness, explains how to use the mental skills of Olympic champions.

1. Focus on values. If you want your kid to have more confidence in their sport, encourage them when they show compassion, teamwork, and discipline. When you focus on values, you give them the freedom to fail, which allows them to win more often. [Top Olympians lead with their heart and connect with what they value most.]

2. Detach from the outcome. If you're like most parents, you're happy when your kid succeeds in sports, and disappointed when they don't. It's natural. But it also connects your love to their success. Don't get too excited about the outcome (win or lose); it sends a subconscious message that ties their performance to your love for them. Go to their games, cheer for them, and love them for who they're becoming, not how they performed. [Top Olympians focus on how they want to feel and let the outcome take care of itself.]

3. Write 3-5 goals everyday as if they were already true. For example, if your kid wants to be the starting shortstop on the baseball team, you may have him write: I love playing baseball and being the starting shortstop. Have some school ones too. For example: I am focused and confident every day at school as I achieve a B average. [Top Olympians affirm their goals every day as if they were already true.]

4. Remember the great moments. Spend five minutes every day with your kid visualizing great performances from the past. Remind him or her of a great performance and ask about that moment and how it felt. Then tell your child to "re-live" that moment and get the feeling again. This can be a powerful time you spend with your kids every day. [Top Olympians are continually re-visiting great memories of past performances].

5. Weed out the negative thoughts. Every day you and your kids will have negative thoughts. This is perhaps the biggest obstacle either of you will ever face. Here's four ways to deal with them:

a. Wear a rubber band and snap it each time you have a negative thought.
b. Replace the negative thought with the complete opposite. (I'm going to fail becomes I'm going to succeed.)
c. Yell "stop!" in your mind and picture an oversize STOP sign.
d. Tell yourself, "It's only a negative thought" and go back to what you're doing.

Negative thoughts only have power over you by what you give them, and you give them power when you let them linger in your mind.

[Top Olympians develop keen self-awareness of their thoughts and feelings and continually direct them towards their goals and dreams.]

The essence of "The Cody Ross Experience". Explained by Cody Ross

"Every time I went to the plate, I knew I was going to do something, do some damage. When you feel like that, you've got to ride it as long as you can, because you rarely feel like that."
—Cody Ross, a month after the World Series, looking back at his fabulous postseason.

Ex scientia pecuniae libertas. - "Out of knowledge of money comes freedom."