Today’s show is with Nick Winkelman. Nick 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. Nick is an internationally recognized speaker on human performance and coaching science, and is the author of the book, “The Language of Coaching”. Nick previously appeared on episode 193 of the podcast where he went in detail on internal and external cues, analogies, and what it takes to make cues more effective.
One of the major shifts in my coaching career and personal movement/training practice has been understanding the “art” of coaching on the levels of psychology, motor learning, and how we actually go about instructing athletes in the course of the training session. As coaches, we all tend to start out with a combination of what we did ourselves as athlete, and then whatever training frameworks we learned in our education process.
When we look at any training session, whether it is sport skill or gym work, it’s par for the course to look at it on the level of tactics, sets and reps, which drills to use, or x’s and o’s. It’s far more rare to look at the session on the level of meaning and engagement, and how we can work cohesively with athletes to better communicate with them, direct their attention, and allow them to understand, on a deeper level, what improving their sport technique feels like (and not to just intellectualize the process). Improving one’s ability in this “soft” side of the coaching equation will help improve the long term success and sustainability of the training process.
On the show today, Nick speaks on principles of attentional focus, and how factors such as motivation and novelty can direct an athlete’s attentional focus in training. Nick will discuss cueing dynamics on a level of meaningfulness and embodiment to the athlete, moving past simply intellectualizing instruction (and how we can improve our dialogue in that process). Finally, Nick will give his take on how coaches can become better story-tellers to their athletes in communicating ideas and instruction.
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Timestamps and Main Points
5:03 – Why Nick believes that the “soft” practices in athletics (communication/cueing/motor learning/etc.) are less-traveled in the process of performance training 2:19 – Dynamics of attention, motivation and novelty in athletic performance 29:03 – “Survival” oriented coaching situations as a means to gain the attention of athletes 31:41 – How to go through the process of making coaching and cueing more meaningful to the athlete through listening to the athlete 43:14 – How the shortcoming of internal cues can teach us more about how we learn and function as humans, and how cues and attention placed external to the body can help the “one-ness” of movement fully form 52:12 – Nick’s take on the place and context of internal cueing in the process of coaching athletes 57:33 – How “noticing”/awareness of one’s body in the midst of movement fits in with the cueing eco-system 1:01:28 – Nick’s take on personal practices for coaches that can help them paint better pictures with their words when they are actually coaching“Over time, every coach who is attentive and self-aware to the journey, starts to pick up on “a weak signal”, and they start to realize, that “hold on… not everyone responds to programming the same way, so I might have to individualize… and not everyone responds to the same communication style”
“What are we trying to get people to do: We are trying to get people to focus their attention on the right things, in the right way, at the right time”
“Attention is like a spotlight, and we can’t actually increase the size of the spotlight, and I we want to change, we have to change what we point the spotlight towards”
“Attention will switch to the stimulus in the environment that is most likely to inform me of my survival odds”
“Our attention floats to things that are novel, interesting, or things that we are motivated by”
“Cues need to be both accurate and interesting; we are talking about seedlings of communication here”
“Even though motivation powers attention in the long term, in the short term, we know that novelty, things that are kind of salient, things that stand out, that are unique, they are very good at grabbing attention”
“To the individual, you will rarely find someone who doesn’t enjoy solving a problem”
“When you are giving the athletes something that aligns with an individuals preferences, likes and desires, I think some of that reciprocity is paid back in a “hey coach”, we’ll listen to you a little bit better”
“Over time I realized, the athlete is the painter, ultimately they are the one who needs to be able to understand the coaching cue, has to resonate with it, and needs to be able to embody it, such as what makes a change as you recognize as a coach, and they recognize as an athlete
“Over time I felt my coaching convert over to a choice based question format which is based on my ability to listen to them deeply”
“To make it meaningful to the athlete, you need to know what is meaningful to them”
“I might give you one of the following questions: What does that mean to you? How does that cue make you feel? Put that into your own words, if you like.”
“I think every single coach, especially people who get to a higher level, they experience this reality, athletes saying “I know what to do, I just don’t know how to do it””
“So often when we communicate, we just explain the step by step information as if described in a textbook, but that’s not how human motion comes about… human motion is about one-ness, we have a symphony of muscles and joints that must come together in a pursuit of one common goal, just as a real symphony is directed by a conductor”
“If the language we offer is only intellectual, we can’t offer it into the physical body. I don’t want to know what you think about my cue, I want to know how it makes you feel”
“We know that an external cue provides better results in the moment, and transfers better long term”
“A first principle of motor learning is that, when we are learning something, we are best to place our focus in an externally directed manner”
“I think by taking a fictional form to my work, I am actually embodying at the deepest level, what I’m trying to teach coaches, (and this is certainly not my idea) and that is humans think in narrative, we are story tellers, both prospectively and retrospectively, and we learn far better through fiction, even when it’s non-fiction”
About 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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