Today’s episode features Nick Winkelman, head of athletic performance and science for the Irish Rugby Football Union. Nick was formerly the director of education for EXOS, and oversaw the speed and assessment component of their combine development program. Nick is an internationally recognized speaker, and has his Ph.D with a focus on motor learning and sprinting. Nick also has an anticipated upcoming book called “The Language of Coaching” where he goes in detail on his learnings and methods on the impact that communication has on an athlete’s ability to learn and perform movements.
Just like we’ve mentioned on episodes talking about mental training for sport, the art of communicating with athletes, and how we talk to their conscious and subconscious mind is heralded, but not given much actual attention in our daily processes. Perhaps its because coaching, and specifically strength & conditioning often seems to draw more numbers and qualitative driven individuals than those concerned with the inherent artistry involved in the coaching profession, and in being a human being in general. This being said, I’m really excited to have Nick on the show this week, because he is a master of the “conversation” we coaches have with athletes to help lead them to their highest potential on a physical, mental and emotional level.
On today’s show, Nick goes into how he became interested in coaching cues and communication, ideas on coaching cue differences, the importance and effects of using analogies, and much more. This episode is a must listen, because this is the type of material that isn’t emphasized in modern coaching curriculums, but at the same time, might be the biggest thing holding coaches and athletes back from reaching their highest level of performance and enjoyment in sport and human movement.
Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more.
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View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage.Key Points
- How Nick got interested in the art of cueing and language to assist in skill acquisition
- Why some cues and coaching models cause technique to not be retained well and how we can make our technical coaching practice “stick” better
- Some primary differences between internal and external cues
- The power of simple awareness versus hardline internal cues
- The power of analogies in creating imagery for athletes that assists them in technical acquisition
- How creativity is an important element of becoming better at the technical instruction of athletes
“And then I thought to myself, “What’s the number one variable, what’s the number one coaching strategy that I am using to manipulate how they run?” i.e. the coordination and quality of their movement, and it hit me: my voice, my cuing, my coaching.”
“When I say coach I’m really talking about movement professionals in general. So if you teach movement for a living, I’m calling you a coach. Because… …my definition of a coach is anyone that helps to move others to the place they want to be.”
“I’ll define a cue as the last idea that goes in an athletes head before they move.”
“If I want to put a little bit more energy behind that cue, I might say, drive the bar away from the bench. So the bench itself has nothing directly to do with the outcome, but by giving that focused thought of, bar away from bench, it allows me to narrow my focus in on a very tangible goal and the environment helps me do that.”
“So internal and external cues tend to be literal, they reference the literal body or the literal world around me that I can touch feel and see. But analogies reference the figurative and leverage the mind’s visual system to be able to move ‘as if‘.”
“When it comes to the type of things you should think about while you move, to optimize performance now, but most importantly learning later, the cues that fall on the external and that analogy side, outperform internal language again, and again, and again.”
“When I give someone an internal cue and tell them to actively move a joint or a muscle. I am constraining or rather defining that complex movement by that micro component. Conversely if I simply ask you to observe something in motion, I’m not dictating how that motion takes place. And thus from a brain perspective, I’m not constraining the way the movement operates I’m simply asking you to become aware of that movement, possibly spotlighting one region.”
“I do think the vast majority of internal language that people feel works the best, actually is in the form of the awareness piece.”
“When you’re initially teaching a movement, you’re going to describe it. You’re going to give a longer explanation… …Then, from a teaching perspective, or again if you’re doing video analysis, there’s going to be some kind of visual feedback. So either a demonstration, or you’re watching a video on a screen… still a form of demonstration. So we describe it and we demonstrate it, and these two pieces of the communication loop serve to increase our players knowledge of the movement. They’re awareness of the movement, and it’s in these two pieces that I believe, there’s a home, there’s a place for internal language.”
“The knowledge of what the movement is, and knowing how to do it, I don’t believe those are the same thing.”
“Analogies are nothing more than little visuals in the mind.”
“Ultimately whether I’m seeing something, or hearing something that causes sight, in both of those cases we know they’re more effective techniques, because they’re brilliant. They hide the detail, giving the conscious mind just the intention.”
“Emotions are like hashtags, literally they are. And the more a language is colored with the right emotion, the more memorable the physical words are, and as a byproduct the more memorable the movements they encourage are. ”
“At the end of the day, the language we use to coach the movement, can tap into why they are even there moving in the first place, and don’t for a second think your language is just building better movement. It is building better relationships between you and the client, and I’d argue better people in the process.”
Timestamps:
6:46 Nick Talks About What Got Him Into The Language Of Coaching 19:20 Internal Cues vs. Awareness 27:45 Where Internal Language Fits in the Coaching Equation 33:43 External Cues vs. Analogies And When To Use Them 42:52 Dealing With Over-Thinkers And Being A “Cue Converter” 47:01 Movement-To-Movement Analogy And Using Visually Rich Language 49:57 The Emotional Responses To Analogies 53:40 Nick Talks About His Book: The Language Of CoachingAbout Nick Winkelman
Nick Winkelman is the head of athletic performance & science for the Irish Rugby Football Union. Prior to working for Irish Rugby, Nick was the director of education for EXOS (formerly Athletes’ Performance), located in Phoenix, AZ. As a performance coach, Nick oversaw the speed and assessment component of the EXOS NFL Combine Development Program. Nick has also supported many athletes in the NFL, MLB, NBA, National Sport Organizations and Military. Nick is an internationally recognized speaker on human performance and coaching science, and has multiple publications through the UKSCA, NSCA and IDEA Health and Fitness.
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