The UGP Podcast
The UGP Podcast
Ep. 57 | Nick Winkelman, PhD on How to Build Movement That Sticks by Shifting from Assembly Line Coaching to Automation
What if the words you use as a coach are more powerful than the technical knowledge you possess? Dr. Nick Winkleman, Head of Athletic Performance and Science for Irish Rugby and author of "The Language of Coaching," revolutionizes our understanding of how communication shapes athletic performance.
After nine transformative years in Dublin following a decade at EXOS working with NFL athletes, Winkleman has crystallized what most coaches intuitively sense but struggle to implement: the power of language to unlock movement potential. "I recognized the importance of communication," he explains. "What we say to individuals had a massive impact on the quality of the relationship, but also the quality of the movement."
Through compelling research and real-world experience, Winkleman reveals why external cues ("push the ground away") consistently outperform internal cues ("extend your knees") across virtually all sports and skill levels. He describes coaching as being a "marriage counselor between the individual and their body," bridging the gap between knowing what to do and knowing how to do it. The discussion navigates the delicate balance between constraints (tools that guide movement) and verbal cues, suggesting they work best when strategically combined.
Perhaps most eye-opening is his distinction between "assembly line coaching" (where athletes depend on constant technical reminders) and true learning (where skills become automated). Quoting John Wooden, he reminds us that "I have not taught until they have learned," emphasizing that real learning only happens when athletes can perform without prompts or feedback.
For coaches, athletes, and movement enthusiasts alike, this conversation provides concrete strategies to enhance communication effectiveness, build stronger coach-athlete relationships, and create lasting skill development. Whether you're coaching golf, tennis, or any movement-based activity, understanding the language of coaching could be your most powerful tool for unlocking human potential.
Ready to transform your coaching approach? Listen now and discover how the right words at the right time can make all the difference in athletic performance.
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welcome back to the UGP podcast. Today I have Nick Winkleman on all the way from Dublin. Welcome to the show thanks, leo. My, my accent's gonna betray my location, that is true, calling it from Dublin Ireland yeah, how many years have you been there and is it starting to become a part of your DNA?
Speaker 1:You know it's been. It was my nine year kind of work life anniversary this month. So it's incredible how slow things seem to move when you're in it, but then in hindsight how fast it actually goes. And so it's funny, the first nine years of my career, which was at Exodus in Phoenix, arizona, that felt like it took nine years. You know what I mean, even in hindsight. But like this last nine years felt like it's taken half of that it's. It's unbelievable. Maybe it's a phenomenon as we get older. But yeah, I think you know this, having moved from Sweden, as you told me before we started to the US, I once heard a quote that you cannot truly understand your own culture until you've lived in another one, because you don't have that backdrop and that contrast.
Speaker 1:And so I think in a lot of ways I understand where I came from far better now living somewhere else. But also, absolutely I think after nine years you get absorbed into a culture and it becomes part of you, and I'm very happy it has that. The Irish people are a great, a great people, a great society, a great culture, and one that I'm very happy to be a part of and one that I'm very happy to be a part of.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, that's very true. The more places on earth you see, the better understanding we have, I think, of the world and humanity. But I'd love to get into the language of coaching, and we're a coaching company heavily influenced by the work of Gabby Wolf and obviously you know you popularized it in some ways at Exos and wrote a book about it. Have a PhD in motor learning, so can't wait to get into that. But why don't we start, kind of you know about your background and how you ended up in Ireland.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's funny, as you get older, these stories get longer, so I'll try to give a short version of it. Right, there's, there's there's the Nick Winkleman in the career as a strength coach, and then there's Nick Winkleman and kind of the passion project that is maybe born out of the language of coaching, and if I look at it, I think that they intersect quite heavily. Like many people in coaching, I find that if you're a physical therapist or a physio, you tended to have like some injury when you were younger or at some point in your career and you had someone positively influence you or not positively influence you. In either direction it drove you into wanting to get into that space. And I think the same thing for strength and conditioning coaches. You usually had someone who was really influential in your career, and so I'm no different in that regard.
Speaker 1:I had a high school strength coach named Rudy. I'm no different in that regard. I had a high school strength coach named Rudy and for those who are, you know, like the camera was an 80s or a 90s film. You know the movie Rudy about the football player at Notre Dame. He very much so captured the spirit of an individual who was there to support the young athletes at my high school, and not only to become great athletes but great people, and I probably didn't fully appreciate the role of coaches as helping the person inside the player until I got older, and so he represented the catalyst that said to me I want to go, do this, I want to help others in achieving the best I have to offer. As a coach, I can help others achieve the best they have to offer, whatever their sporting choice or life goal might be. And so I went to Oregon State and met a few mentors along the way there that were heavily influential, and I think from a very early age, leo, I recognized the importance of communication. I recognized that what we say to individuals had a massive impact on one, the quality of the relationship, but also the quality of the movement when it came to coaching, and so I carried that, by chance or choice, as an area of interest, probably until I had learned enough to do something with that idea.
Speaker 1:And so, 2006, joined Athletes Performance, now EXOS, and by 2009, I had the opportunity to take over the NFL Combined Development Program. So now I had 30-some soon-to-be NFL athletes who came to us for an eight-week intensive boot camp on bigger, faster, stronger, and I had to quite literally put my money where my mouth was in making sure that we could optimize the incredible assets they already had. In most cases, it wasn't actually about making them bigger, faster or stronger in a physiological sense, because it was such a small window. It was about optimizing what they had. I would always joke it's already a Ferrari, they have the Ferrari, but it's about the driver. It's them getting the most out of the assets they have.
Speaker 1:And inevitably that brought me back in 2009. That brought me back to that original seed of curiosity around the space between us and our athletes and how we communicate. And I think this is probably important for the listeners in that when I would talk to people back then and say, hey, how do we get better at coaching? Oftentimes I would kind of get this funny look back at me and people would say, well, you know you read books. Well, I come on on what they're like. Well, I'm periodization on strength conditioning, not program design, like no, that's what we coach.
Speaker 1:I'm curious about how we coach. I'm curious about this art form. We're literally stood on the pitch here or, or you know, on a golf course or wherever your context is engaged with somebody, how do we actually get better at transferring ideas, connecting with them, getting aha moments as a matter of choice versus chance, and they would look at me like, well gosh, that's, that's the art of coaching. You know you can't, you know that's. You just got to experience that trial and error.
Speaker 1:You know talking to people and so for me I knew that that was correct, but it was incomplete. And that's where the likes of Gabrielle Wolf and Jared Porter and other such influencers in the motor learning, educational psychology, psychology and communication space became very interesting to me and I started to examine what I said, when I said it, how I said it, and I really tried to attune or tap into my player's response. Right, was I getting nods? Was I getting kind of the aha eyes opening? Was I actually one-to-one seeing a transfer between what I said and the way it impacted, the way they moved? And inevitably, as at first, I engaged with tremendous frustration, feeling like there was this massive gap that nobody could see. We did this thing all the time, but no one was doing it intentionally, if you were good at it.
Speaker 1:It was more by chance than choice. And if you were good at it, why are you so good at this thing you do called communication? No one had a ready made answer, no one had really thought through it outside of their expression of it, and I'm like there's got to be a better way. And so I started to take the hard science and map it on to the very soft reality of engaging in the real world and tried to put the two together. And inevitably I went and did the PhD. And all that not because I wanted to be an academic, but because I wanted to make sure I exhausted my understanding of the core concepts so that I could representatively speak in a very practical way that maybe moved beyond just the science but still in service of it, such that if Gabrielle Wolfe was to read or listen to me talk, or Jared Porter or another pure academic, they'd be nodding along.
Speaker 1:They would see that this honors both science and practice. And so you know, inevitably jumping forward to 2020, I wrote the language ofaching because I told myself when I was done with the PhD a decade plus of applying the principles, over half a decade of studying them formally and getting a degree about it and researching on it that if the book I wish I had had when I was starting out wasn't written, I'd write it, and only if that was the case. So that was the birthplace of the language of coaching. So, fast forward, after spending 10 years at Exos, where that kind of incubator of ideas and application lived, I felt it was time.
Speaker 1:As a coach educator, I traveled around the world to try my skill set in a different environment. That once again challenged me, and in 2016, I had the opportunity to go from working kind of in the private sector of high performance sport very much so into the heart of European worldwide high performance sport with Irish rugby, and so I've now been here for nine years. The fancy title they give this position nowadays is head of athletic performance and science. That basically means I get to work with some incredible strength and conditioning coaches, sports scientists, physios, nutritionists, rugby coaches across all national and professional teams to drive our high performance systems forward. And so still, I find myself very much so in a coach slash, coach, education, leadership role here and bring forward these ideas that we're going to talk about every day, even though they kind of live underneath the radar because my day-to-day job is in more human performance related services. But ultimately, communication is a part of everything we all do, and certainly everything I do on a day-to-day basis.
Speaker 2:So yeah, you mentioned Oregon. You grew up in Oregon. There's no connection with Bill Bowerman and Nike and no, no, completely by chance.
Speaker 1:So it's funny though you go back and you read quite a bit around that individual, those individuals or coaches, you know, when you go back and just study the history, leo, of coaching, so many of the ideas that Gabrielle Wolfe captures in her work, so many of the ideas that I capture in my own evolution of her and my own work it maps on to you know. Say, for example, john Wooden and how he thought about coaching, how he thought about making things simple, how he thought about giving feedback, or so many others, bill Walsh, another kind of Bay Area great from an American football perspective. So these ideas that we'll likely get into have been expressed as long as there have been people moving and people teaching people how to move. It's just now making the invisible visible and helping those for which these ideas don't come natural be at least purposeful and taught.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, it's fascinating. So you were already applying some of this. You know attentional focus, motor learning research. Back at Exos, as you're learning about it, you're starting to apply it with NFL athletes. How was that experience Like? Did you see immediate differences when you're starting to getting to the different language?
Speaker 1:So a number of years ago I was asked to fly down and give a talk in Australia for the Australian Strike Conditioning Association on my NFL combine experience. They found it very interesting Aussie rules football, afl does a similar combine and it was just an area of fascination for people around the test but also how you prepare for them. And when I looked, mind you, it was crude, it wasn't in a highly controlled manner but nonetheless it was a complete data set. When I go back and look at the average improvements, no-transcript positive, especially if your data is good and you have a true starting point and a true ending point, especially over only eight weeks. But what I found is after I and we at XO started to really implement these ideas, especially on the field with how we were coaching sprinting and agility and jumping, that average went from 0.1 to roughly 0.22. And for me the defining difference, leo, between those kind of two periods of time were not the methodology, not the facility, not the equipment, not the quality of the athlete, but was the change in coaching. And so for me I both objectively felt that there was a significant difference, which I would later demonstrate in some of my own research at Southern Methodist University in sprinters and soccer players. But more importantly, there was the immediate difference that not only I would visually see in the quality of movement in the athlete, but also the immediate impact the athlete would have. And I'm sure you've experienced this in your own practice where if you give that cue to an athlete and it makes an immediate difference, they kind of look at you with those childlike eyes wide like, oh my God, yes, I found the buried treasure. I finally feel it, and I found that those moments were now becoming more predictable and more consistent to the point and I think this is non-trivial, leo A lot of really effective cues.
Speaker 1:I find leverage alliteration right. They leverage analogy, they leverage rhyming. So they tend to be very visual, they tend to be very memorable. You know, using the various linguistic features that children's books use to make them memorable for kids Works on adults as well, and in the population of players that I worked with, you know, rap music would be quite popular and I myself would be kind of a little amateur freestyler.
Speaker 1:So we would oftentimes make little ditties, little rhymes, little raps, and what I found over the years is I would hear the cues being fed back to me. I would have athletes. Actually one kind of created the best rap album of all the various cues. It would make little rap songs utilizing the phrases, and for me it's all in good fun, but what that points to is this language, leo, was really impacting them. It wasn't just impacting their movement, it was impacting them as people and ultimately, they saw this language as a mechanism or a signposting towards their future, towards a mechanism to get better at this thing than they needed to do to get into the NFL. And albeit it was trivial, at the same time, it wasn't because it started to point to this superpower as a coach and as an athlete, if you knew how to tap into it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's so interesting because in the world of golf, unfortunately, I think we're way behind here. I think actually other sports are a little bit ahead when it comes to this concept. And there's a golfer that played in the late 1800s His name was John Henry Taylor and he won the British Open five times and he had this quote and we liked it so much we put a picture of him in our facilities and the quote is I'm certain that there can be no freedom and no natural swing in hitting the golf ball if the mind is occupied by instructing the body. There you go, and that's in the late 1800s 1800s. So I think what's so cool with this is that you have this concept was known for a long time ago, but it didn't get really confirmed in science until the late 1990s, maybe earlier. You would know better than me.
Speaker 2:But in golf, unfortunately, it's extremely technical, extremely internal, and we have a long way to go in the world of golf and we sometimes talk about software versus hardware and coaching. Improving the software and the physical training that we do as well with our golfers is improving the hardware. Um, what's your experience, you know, with, like what I just talked about, that quote and the actual like science that is now coming out confirming this? Um, you know, are there, are there any? Are there any exceptions to that rule? Or what do you see in your coaching?
Speaker 1:so, and the reality is, and it's embedded in that quote. We know that we get better at what we focus on. But being able to focus on the right things at the right way and at the right time is the challenge right? We know that broccoli is probably better for us than you know eating french fries every night. Yet even with that knowledge, it doesn't mean we make use of it. And so this is the irony that it is to be a human. Oftentimes we know what we need to do.
Speaker 1:The challenge is not in the knowing right what to do. It's knowing how to do it. It's how to gravitationally go from state A to state B. And you know, we have this false sense of how well we can command our mind, especially when we coach people. We just feel we can speak something into an existence and then instantly they'll be able to do it. But you know, a tough day at work, an argument with a loved one, and you put your head on the pillow how much would many of us love to get our mind just to stop thinking for a moment, so we could sleep at night. And the best will in the world. And you just keep on spinning.
Speaker 1:And when you add the challenge of a high precision sport like golf, let alone the pressure that can come in expressing that in a competitive forum where, even more so, you're not amongst teammates, you're the only one stood on a green or on a tee, which means there is a heightened risk of focusing on the wrong thing right at the wrong time, or the right thing in the wrong way at the wrong time, and so on and so forth. So a few things to unpack. Number one you used an important term and I agree with. I think it's a useful. Even though the body's integrated, I think it's useful to kind of think of this hardware versus software piece, what I oftentimes will analogize to the car versus the driver. And I think when it comes to golf, rugby, any sport, any physical endeavor, what we want to first understand is do they have the physical, physical capacity, not necessarily the know-how, but the physical capacity to get into the positions that are required to express whatever that the skill is, in this case swinging a golf club, and so in your sport it's do they have enough internal external hip rotation? Do they have enough uh uh rotation in the thoracic spine? Do they have internal external rotation at the shoulder, at the elbow at the wrist, so on and so forth, because the degree to which any of these ranges of motion, whether in mobility or stability, are shut down or restricted, that is then going to immediately impact the way the know-how, the way the movement, the way the software expresses itself.
Speaker 1:For example, you might have a Porsche and you could be on the Autobahn in Germany. But if you're in a traffic jam, yes, there's tremendous potential, and even if you put an F1 driver behind that Porsche, there's tremendous potential. But the best will in the world, if there's traffic or if there's debris maybe that's a better example on the motorway, on the freeway, you're not going to get the most out of that vehicle. So, as I'm sure you do with your golfers, we do it with ours. Physical screening takes precedent, understanding those physical assets, and I don't want to linger too much more here, but it's important for the following reason right, you cannot use a coaching cue to fix a mechanical problem, which is to say, no magical coaching cue is going to suddenly give you more thoracic extension rotation, no magical coaching cue is going to give you better external rotation on your back hip and internal rotation on your front hip If you actually are legitimately shut down physically in those areas. You have to address those in parallel with good coaching practice and swing development, and so that's the first thing. So let's now, if we can, unless you have more questions there from this point on in the conversation, leo, I like to say we are going to assume that the athlete, the golfer, can physically do everything that our coaching is going to encourage, and now it's a matter of identifying the right coaching cues or the right lenses with which to attack the movement, to bring the most out of the body. Okay, so that's what we're now calling the driver, or which pun and no pun intended here, but that's kind of funny when we think about it in golf terms or the software. Okay, now, how do we go about doing that?
Speaker 1:That then requires the next step, and that is identifying what, if corrected, what, if corrected, will lead to the technical changes required to get the performance outcomes we desire, whether it's a longer drive, whether it's a straighter drive, whatever the parameter is, and so this, as you know, being a golf professional and working amongst them, is not always straightforward. You can see someone swing off the tee, just as I can watch somebody sprint and say, hey, there's actually two or three things going on here. But if we respect that, the body is an interconnected constellation of movement where everything at some level affects everything else, what we're trying to identify is the problem dissociated from the symptoms that are secondarily generated because of that core problem. So, for example, if I'm not getting enough early hip rotation to then load and have it transferred into my upper body club and inevitably, you know, club head to ball, well then that might be my target area for my cueing or I might use some cues or constraints that get at that area directly or indirectly. But that's my core operating and an analogy about doing that which I got from a friend of mine, bobby Magalinas, who works in professional baseball and is a hitting coach.
Speaker 1:He got this from another hitting coach.
Speaker 1:He said you got to kill the spider, you got to smash the spider, and what he meant by that is you could go into a barn and you could every single day go down and pull down all the cobwebs, but until you actually go and kill the spider, right, you're not going to solve your problem and I think that's just a I just like that.
Speaker 1:It's another way to say you've got to be able to dissociate the core driving first domino to fall problem versus those secondary, tertiary, echoes or symptoms of that problem or the cobwebs of that spider, and that takes some trial and error. So that's the next thing then we're going to do, leo, is we're going to assume that one they have the physical capacity to do it and second, you've identified the spider, you've identified the problem. Once you've checked both of those boxes which, let's be honest, leo, are not always easy to check then we are in an interesting discussion around how best to, either verbally or non-verbally, influence the way that movement takes form and ultimately do so in a way where it changes the athlete to such a degree that they don't even need to think about the mechanisms that led to that change, back to the quote you gave earlier from the golfer in the 1800s. So I'll kind of pause there, because I've said a bit for your, your comment, and then we can kind of unpack that further yeah, no, no.
Speaker 2:I think it's an important point because if you start to tear down the cobweb, sometimes that can cause other issues that you don't want. Before you, you know, find a spider right. And I think it's interesting. When I was reading Gabby Wolfe I don't know 10, 12 years ago, I realized like this is the language of the body, yeah, and you know, the human brain is very.
Speaker 2:12 years ago, I realized like this is the language of the body, yes, and you know the human brain is very smart, so we can understand pretty much anything. So you have, let's say, external cueing. You know, analogies, comparisons, stories on this one side, that the body can understand, right, the brain understands everything pretty much. Right, I can understand. Keep your arms straight, like, oh, I get it, you know. But there's this other set of like words and a language that the body can relate to and basically react to. Is that?
Speaker 1:correct. You know what, leo, I really like. I've never put it exactly how you've put it there, but if I can use my own words to reference it back, we can understand far more than is useful to learning movement, and our job, then, as the coach and the athlete, is to understand which of all this stuff about our body, understand what language is of greatest use for the intelligent knowing of the body.
Speaker 2:Is this still kind of a cornerstone of your coaching, or is this just one of your tools, would you say?
Speaker 1:It's an interesting question. It's, I think, a cornerstone of my. My coaching, leo, is about connection, and so it's about connecting to the person, and in our craft in doing so, it's I connect to the person by helping connect them back to their body. So in a lot of ways I'm a marriage counselor between the individual and their body and the way they're able to combine to get the synergy between what they want the body to do and its ability to actually do it.
Speaker 1:The perennial problem for coaches and athletes alike is the following Coach, I know what to do, I don't know how to do it. Fellow coach, I know what I want them to do, I don't know how to get them to do it. And so both coaches and athletes alike share this frustration. Whereas this gap between you said it right there, the intellectual understanding between you said it right there. The intellectual understanding, the, if you would, the procedural understanding that can be verbalized, of this needs to happen and that and that and that, and the actualization, the embodied ability, the nonverbal expression of that coming to life. And this is where certain language forms lend themselves greater to physical expression than others.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, social science is, you know, equally important, then right, because we need to be able to create a connection, to create buy-in, so that the athlete listens to you and actually wants to do what you ask them to do. So that you could argue potentially that's an equally large bucket, because you can have all the best information in the world, but if the athlete don't like you or don't want to hear you coach them, they're not going to do it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so your credibility gets them in the door and your coaching keeps them in the door.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:And what is the best way to keep someone there? One of two things, and the best coaches do both. Either they really enjoy your company it's kind of like so many people that get a personal trainer and they make no changes at all to any of their goals, but they just enjoy the company of the trainer, the physical work being done. Maybe there's a therapeutic extension of the relationship by having someone to talk to Fantastic and you know what. For some that's enough value, and I'm sure you see that in golf as well. I'm absolutely sure you see that in golf as well. But then there's another reason. Maybe the relationship, maybe the person is a little bit dry, maybe the person doesn't want to have the laugh with you, but when you are in their presence, gosh, you get better. And you see it on the weekend when you're back on the course, or you see it on the weekend with your weekend where you feel better, physically, right. But then you have this super relationship whereby you have someone who you love being in their presence and you feel an extension of that is, you see significant and consistent improvement in whatever the performance outcome you are there to gain. And interestingly for me, it started out with a little bit of a cold, calculated focus on cueing, but ultimately what I found is the better I understand the athlete, who they are, what makes them tick, their likes, their dislikes, their preferences. In starting to build the rapport across those domains, I then started to get the raw material that I could then repurpose in my coaching cues, could then repurpose in my coaching cues. So let's say you're a golfer but you used to be a tennis player, or you like tennis as well, play tennis on the weekends. I might then, by extension, use some tennis example that maybe you were quite good at and I map that on to a similar rotational golf skill. And even though it's the exact same movement, your brain body connection hadn't made that connection yet. And by way of an analogy, I've now created a bridge between this is kind of like that and once you understand that, you can map the tennis experience onto the similar feature of the golf experience, unlocking the next level of the movement you've been chasing.
Speaker 1:And so this required that I listened to you. I asked questions, you shared a story. I then demonstrate that I listened, that I care about what you say To such a degree. I integrated your story into a future coaching cue to help you get better at this thing that you enjoy. Think about the layers of that, leo. I'm signaling that I listen, that I pay attention, that I integrate, I reapply, and I'm all doing that in service of you. If that does not signal an important value characteristic of a relationship, I don't know what does. And so what that starts to do is it implicitly works away in the background, leaving the person feeling great when they're in your presence, feeling heard, seen, connected and better for it. Who doesn't want to keep coming back to that environment?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. It's beautiful because it's not an easy thing to do, especially now with a variety of personalities, and you have to be a chameleon and really advanced and know both what we call the back office like all the knowledge and technical skills and the front office what you deliver to the client. It's really a life's work. It takes decades to get good at it, To do it afterlessly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you have to be really passionate about going on down that path, right? Yeah, I think you put that really in a great way because you know you can combine these sciences, like you said you can. You know and create this, this, you know, journey with that with an athlete. That is not easy to do but when done right, it creates, you know, better retention of the skill that they are learning and in a longer relationship that hopefully leads to results. So, um, let's dig deeper on, like the because, uh, this concept of you know, external queuing, that's just one piece. You know you can put up constraints, you can have training aids, like you know, in in your practice. What do you tend to enjoy or use the most? And have you found anything recently that's like, wow, this is working even better or worse?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think. So I think the first thing To do as a whether you're listening to this as the golfer or as the golf professional is to understand that the landscape of how we influence movement, to keep this very narrowly focused, so principally in in motor. We have two ways of influencing attention, and that, for our conversation, attention is the currency of learning, attention is the cognitive spotlight or variable that we are trying to influence with our coaching practice, and so the core question is, assuming we know where to place attention this goes back to the spider assuming we know where to place the attention and assuming they have the capacity to physically demonstrate what we want. Now the question is okay, how, how should we point the attention? And we do this in one of two ways, and everything can boil down to these two different mechanisms. So there's there's technically two major broad umbrella methods we can use, and in motor learning or skill acquisition, speech, we will refer to these as either top down, which we can we can think of as starting in the brain and then out-down and outwardly expressed into the environment, or bottom-up, meaning it starts in the environment and works its way up into the body, reacting to something or responding to something that is the bottom up, I'm responding to something in my environment, right, such as there is a uh, there is debris on the motorway in my porsche and I have to respond and work around that debris. Okay, in doing so, the debris captured my attention and in capturing my attention triggered a physical motor response to turn the wheel to the right, to move out of the way and ultimately down the freeway. Okay, so that's bottom up. Top down is me saying okay, I want to change lanes now and actively thinking and purposely preemptively planning to put on my signal or my indicator for Europe and move my car to the right lane. Okay. So these are two examples of, in physical expression, the exact same motor activity, both in body and vehicle. In this example, one is bottom up, responding to the environment. The other one is top-down, doing it by choice. In both cases, my attention was the main character in that story, but how I triggered the behavior probably an important word here was slightly different. So now let's bring it into coaching. We have two words, and you've used them both already, and these two words ultimately, in large umbrella terms, point to these two different mechanisms for influencing attention and thus the way we guide learning.
Speaker 1:In conventional motor learning speech we use the term constraint, and a constraint is anything that is bottom up. It's something we change in the environment that is meant to trigger our attentional focus, to change the way we move, and so, in golf in particular, there's a lot of implements that are used. These are referred generally as movement constraints. You encourage one thing over another by that tool, and that requires that I respond to it versus think about it. Slightly different Still requires my attention, but it is in a more subtle, nuanced way, less explicit. Of those tools that I might bring out onto the driving range, I could come up with an equivalent verbal cue, not to say it would work better, but I could come up with an equivalent verbal cue that encourages that same movement pattern. The difference is, rather than it being an implicit response to an implement, it is an explicit, right forward response to a coaching cue.
Speaker 1:Both of these features have an impact on attention and in fact it's a constant balance and dance, because there is always an environment to be perceived and there is always a perceiver.
Speaker 1:And so this top-down, bottom-up, it's not like you can turn one on and the other off, they are both always in play. What we are trying to do, though, is we are trying to influence the flow and the balance of attention across these two, flow in the balance of attention across these two and, simply put, we're trying to put the right lens on the way. I focus on the movement, so, whether your attention is pulled into the environment or guided towards the environment, ultimately the same outcome can be achieved. So, as I've stated before, it's not about cues versus constraints. It's about better cues and better constraints, and oftentimes, leo, they need to work in concert, and whether or not we know what they do, work in concert with one another. I think the reason, especially in golf, there's been such a push for implements and constraints One is because and this is true sport over, but golf in particular you can't sell a coaching cue, but you can sell an implement.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:So let's be very clear. There is a commercial reason. There's absolutely a commercial reason why constraints are so heavily used in golf. Don't confuse that commercial reason with efficacy and effectiveness. That's the first point I would make.
Speaker 1:The other piece is constraints are visible, they're tactile, I think, because this thing exists in the real world and I can see and touch it. It must be better than these sound waves coming out of my coach's mouth. But the reality is, when I go out and play those 18 holes or 36 holes on the weekend, I don't have all my fancy tools. All I have is my top-down intentional attentional focus. And so this is where they need to play nice together.
Speaker 1:And the other point I would make is this Because and it goes back to your 1800s golfer quote because it is so effortlessly simple to overload with language, because it is so simple to do that, we have falsely confused that with language in general being ineffective for teaching movement, and it is absolutely a mistaken path to go down we just have to understand that attention is a bottleneck, and so if we try to put too much through that bottleneck, even if it's good stuff, it will get stuck, it will overload, and so that's where education around quantity and quality of information is essential to get the most out of language.
Speaker 1:But equally, we have to have similar challenges to the way we use constraints that's uh, well said.
Speaker 2:That's really interesting in golf. You know, a common way for us to do this would be you know, you're in a bay, you have the big screen, we pull down the screen and we say you know, hit the ball under the garage door. So imagine a garage door, hit it under, and you know it's a feeling, right, it's a feeling that after a while, and sometimes really good coaching is just leaving the player to it. Yes, it is, and not add more words, because those words can potentially get in the way from them actually learning the movement organically over time, basically teaching themselves the movement. I don't know if that's scientifically correct, but sometimes it feels like you know I think I saw you post a quote you know we have to ask ourselves are we, you know, are we basically saying the words for the athlete or for ourselves? For ourselves, yes, yeah, you know, and I'm guilty of that too.
Speaker 1:We all are.
Speaker 2:Of course, because it new environment is, can be incredibly effective, even though it's not, you know, considered maybe traditional coaching. And that's the problem. Right, there's the stigma like I need to be told what to do or I need to be instructed. You're just going to leave me here and, you know, hit a 50 balls, try to hit it under the garage door, and I can't get it. I can't get it. But actually we've done this enough to know that after a while the body starts to respond to this input and they can start to get it.
Speaker 2:And the magic of that is this one cue can improve six different technical things in the swing without the player being aware of it, without the player being aware of it. And just staying in that kind of grind and trying to figure out yourself how to get the ball under the garage door can be so unbelievably beneficial. But it's quiet and it's awkward sometimes and it's like hard. But you can, the coach can get them to do it by giving them 17 cues. Usually they can actually get them to do it right. Keep the handle forward, you know, make sure the club head is behind you, all these different things and you can basically manufacture the outcome. But then, when you go on the golf course, the language don't remember all of that, the body doesn't remember it and the body can't relate to it anymore. Therefore, you can't repeat it bike.
Speaker 1:We call them training wheels, in Europe they call them stabilizers, and that is kind of what I would call training wheel coaching and that when the coach is present and they can be that constant source of forced reminder. You're right, the athlete can manufacture I love your use of that word because there's a bit of an artificial nature to it. They can manufacture I love your use of that word because there's a bit of an artificial nature to it. They can manufacture that change, but they can't automate it necessarily. There's a difference between an assembly line Think of it. Right now we have assembly line manufacturing that's like first queue, second queue, third queue, fourth queue and what? What is everyone the world over trying to do? Build in automation.
Speaker 1:And so the difference between automation versus this assembly line coaching, automation is this one singular cue or source of intelligence and everything coordinates around it.
Speaker 1:There's one idea that allows everything else to seamlessly flow together as a byproduct, like a conductor in a symphony, whereas this assembly line cue cue is, well, first you do this and then you do this, which takes in tremendous intellectual brain power and even in many cases still doesn't work for people. Another visual analogy to articulate the point you're making is, let's say, you're at the grocery store or the shop and I hand you an orange, fine, you can hold the orange, maybe even two oranges. And now if I give you a third, okay, you can kind of put your hands together where you can hold the three, and kind of a cradled manner, like you cradle a baby's head, but then if I give you four, five, six, all of a sudden you're, you're, you're in these awkward positions trying to hold all of these oranges, and then all of a sudden you get one too many, they all fall out, and that's kind of what overcoaching is like.
Speaker 1:You've just given them one too many oranges, one too many pieces of fruit to hold. And it's funny from a golfing perspective. I have no idea if this story is true, but you might know it. It's the one about Einstein and he got a golf instructor. He wanted to learn to golf for some reason, and the golf instructor has him out on the driving range and starts giving him all these cues. And the story goes that Einstein walks over to the bucket of balls, grabs as many balls as he can hold in his two hands, looks at the instructor and says catch, as he tosses all the balls at him. So of course, of course you know this golf instructor, einstein's you know, throwing golf balls at him. I'm sure he did it in a very eloquent way and they just come, you know, falling down like the particles that Einstein studies.
Speaker 1:And the individual, or Einstein, says to the instructor just as you cannot possibly catch all these golf balls, I cannot possibly think about everything you are saying to me. Give me one thing to think about at a time, so kind of like your 1800s golf example there's another one to cash in. So there's this intuition in all of us. There's this intuition in all of us that our attention is limited in its capacity to multitask, and so oftentimes I think we have this false impression, as coaches and athletes, that we can think about multiple things simultaneously or in parallel. The reality is that's not neurologically possible.
Speaker 1:Our brains work in a sequential manner.
Speaker 1:But what we are very good at is two things One, switching our attention rapidly, and two, we have a memory that, hey, I know these 10 things, and so the memory that I know 10 things, which is different than paying attention to 10 things, let's be very clear.
Speaker 1:But the memory that I know these 10 things and my ability to rapidly switch my attention gives me this false impression, which is expressed in how we coach, that I can possibly think about more than one thing in any given moment. And when you take a singular, discrete activity like a golf swing, unlike a continuous activity like running, which gives you a bit more continuous mental real estate to try different things out, I really don't have room for a lot of different things. I can probably focus on something in my setup and I probably need one driving, central focus or feeling or visual to bring that swing to life, and so it's a singular swing thought. So it might be a setup thought and a swing thought, and what you're trying to do, inevitably, is find the swing thought that can do as much lifting as possible. Hence, if I'm trying to get my trajectory of a ball down, well, that idea of hitting the ball underneath the garage door can do quite a bit of heavy lifting for an individual.
Speaker 1:And it doesn't mean you don't accent it with other kind of frames and ideas, but ultimately that's the main driving focus, and so it makes complete, complete sense. What I think, leo, might be valuable for the listener is maybe for us to go through some of the different types of cues we can give, just to kind of give them a mental picture of what we're talking about. Is that okay?
Speaker 2:Would love that yeah.
Speaker 1:So I'm going to use a story to teach cues. So the story goes something like this Imagine you're in Vegas and you see this and I tend to do this, but I think it's a, it's a useful thought experiment. You see this, uh, uh, you know, mgm grand, this they let let's make a bet athletic version. And you walk in, you're, you're, you're intrigued by this and I'm just going to use a simple example on sprinting so that everyone listening can kind of relate to it. And you walk up to the attendant. You're like what's this all about? You see this kind of track off to the right, these timing gates up, and the attendant says to you it's very simple. We have a cue card here. You're going to read each of these three coaching cues. Each cue is intended to help you run 10 yards as fast as possible and you are going to pick the cue that you think will allow you to run the fastest 10 yard time from a dead start to a three point start. And we're going to assume that each time you do your rep, that you actually focused on what was on the card and, using a bit of physiological magic, you actually did this and you were not fatigued and everything's controlled, blah, blah, blah. Okay, let's have a go. So you read the first cue and the cue says cue A, we'll call it, focus on rapidly extending your knees. So you're like, okay, I'm sprinting, extend my knees, that makes sense. And you kind of run it through your mind because you have to place the bet before you actually go to do this. Okay, got it.
Speaker 1:Then you read the second, q qb, and it says focus on rapidly pushing the ground away. And at first instant, okay, rapidly extend my knees, push the ground away. Those are kind of the same. But then when you close your eyes and run it through kind of your physical filter, okay, those feel a little bit different. Now already, for those listening, if I said, would you choose A or B, I'm sure for you, leo, in your audience, they would already have one that chose them. I want to say that you didn't choose the Q, the Q chose you. Think about that. It wasn't like you had an opinion, even like your favorite ice cream, for that matter. Right, did you like constantly? Well, I'm going to like rum raisin. No, you either like rum raisin or you don't you did not offer that liking.
Speaker 1:Same thing when it comes to coaching cues. And then, finally, you get to QC and you read it. Imagine there is a rattlesnake right behind you Beat the bite, beat the bite. Okay, so you circle the cue that you think is going to allow you to run the fastest time, and then you walk over and you run your three reps, one under each cue, and you see if you are correct. So for you, leo, you'll have to speak on behalf of your audience here. Between cues a and b, right the rapidly extend the knees versus push the ground away, which one would you prefer? Push the ground away?
Speaker 2:you chose one. Would you prefer Push the ground away?
Speaker 1:You chose B. Now, if I opened up to A, b or C, which now includes the rattlesnake analogy, which of those three would you choose?
Speaker 2:I think for evolutionary reasons. C.
Speaker 1:All right. So every audience I've ever spoken to, live or otherwise, tends to grade out at the same way. Okay, now people might think I'm cherry picking an example using a highly salient, scary thing like a snake. That's true, but myself and colleagues have done a study on this and the reality is no people will consistently have a preferential treatment towards analogies, cues that kind of visually capture the change or performance outcome we're encouraging. Second to that, usually an external cue, something that orients you to physical motion in terms of your environment, and then typically what comes in last place is what we refer to as internal cues, and so what this does is it creates, naturalistically, an understanding of preference. But what's interesting to know is those preferences map onto the now three plus decades of research on this space up an external cue or an analogy that promotes an external state of mind that not only results in better performance in the moment, but it also results in better retention of those promoted physical changes long-term, without reminder, prompt or feedback. This seems to be independent of whether someone's a novice or an expert, independent of skill type implement, like golf, non-implement, like running, discrete, like golf, or continuous, like running and independent of age and ability. So this is a uniform principle that we move best when we place our attention on the feature of the environment that promotes the best expression of the movement required to achieve that goal. So if I'm trying to jump as high as I can, for example, better to focus on trying to reach towards the ceiling or push the ground away rather than thinking about some motion of the arms, the hips or the knees, and so again it goes back to that. We need a conductor, we need a central, unifying thought that guides and coordinates the symphony of muscles and joints that must work together to achieve those ends. Whether I use a literal cue like jump as high as you can and try to touch the ceiling or explode to the sky like a rocket taking off, in either case I'm focusing and narrowing attention on a place in space that allows my entire body to work together. Specific actions of a limb or specific actions of a muscle. I'm only at best able to give them part of the story when I give an internal cue.
Speaker 1:So we know that naturalistically people prefer external cues and analogies. We know objectively now, across hundreds of papers spanning populations and task type, that we perform better with external cues and analogies by and large. Are there exceptions? Are there studies that have shown better improvement with it? Yes, there have, but they represent the minority and in many cases and I had to evaluate this during my studies, as many others have there's a lot of flaws in many of these papers that have these findings that seem to contradict the majority.
Speaker 1:But then let's take it one step further. Let's assume for a second, leo, that internal cues and external cues are equal in effectiveness. Let's play that out. If we play that out, you still, ultimately, will find greater advocacy for external cues and analogies. Why?
Speaker 1:Well, if I tell you, hey, I need more rotation in your back hip.
Speaker 1:And let's say you're a right-handed swinger, okay, when you swing that club, you only have one right hip, and you only have one right hip that needs more external rotation when you swing.
Speaker 1:If that cue doesn't work for you, leo, you have just hit cueing bedrock. There is nowhere else to go. But if you have an external cue, hey, I want you to snap your back hip like you would snap the tennis racket through a hard forehand. I want you to hit that ball with your hip and the club head like a strong forehand. Let's say it happens to be a tennis player. I want you to block all the way to. I want you to think about creating rotation down into the ground. Screw in know if that was a cue to promote that external rotation, whatever it might be. All of a sudden, when I start using my orientation to the environment which, by the way, is always necessary in all movement I'm not in space here I'm always connected to a physical context and then extend that to near the near infinite examples I could summon with the appropriate level of creativity and movement understanding analogically, and I realized that even if they were equalized, I still would end up in the same place, leo.
Speaker 1:And so ultimately, for those listening, that's not the case. To be clear, people oftentimes, especially in highly technical sports like golf and baseball, get really agitated if they think that I or we are saying you can't use internal queuing. I'm not saying that. I'm simply saying internal queues is assembly line queuing versus automation. But ultimately, understanding the assembly line was necessary to automate, it wasn't it? Ultimately, understanding the assembly line was necessary to automate, it wasn't it? And so in my case, I still use internal language all the time. I don't say I use internal cues, but I use internal language. Internal language is the language of what to do. I use internal language to say hey, here's what we're going to do. We're trying to get more rotation in your backhand, we're trying to get more rotation in your upper back. Beautiful Say that. That's laying the groundwork for understanding. Now, dot dot dot. To do that, to do that. Focus on this.
Speaker 1:And so I refer to that as a hybrid or an and versus or approach, and I feel you get the best of both worlds. But let's use internal cueing for what it's good for general understanding, let's use external cueing for what it's good for movement understanding And's use external cueing for what it's good for movement understanding. And it goes right on back to your point earlier. I can understand far more about my movement than is useful to improving my movement, and I think that's what we've now landed on.
Speaker 2:And when you give that internal cue of the right hip, the reason you say it's a bedrock is because now you've attempted to get the athlete to basically do the end-all outcome that we're getting to and if it doesn't work it might sabotage future coaching or future cues a little bit, Is that right?
Speaker 1:Or if that's all you know what to say, Leo.
Speaker 2:Got it yeah.
Speaker 1:Ultimately, they haven't made the change. You hit bedrock. You have nowhere else to go, yeah, whereas if you want to be able, if all loads lead to Rome, I want a lot of roads here, because I'm going to have people trying to get to Rome from a lot of different places on this earth trying to get that technical change. And even though certain cues are probably going to work for most, they're never going to work for all, yeah. And so this is where diversity.
Speaker 1:Right now, someone might say, hey, just simply telling my athlete to rotate through their back hip works, that works. Hey, who am I to judge? Go for it. But on the whole, focusing on the whole, focusing on the flute section only, is not going to generate a great symphony. It's certainly not going to generate a consistently great symphony.
Speaker 1:And I think what coaches need to be attuned to, leo and you said it earlier is just because the athlete or the golfer is better in their presence doesn't actually mean they've made them better, because it's unavoidable that in the presence of a coach, there is a high risk that the stabilizers, the training wheels, are on, and so the biggest test is does that player, does that golfer feel that when they go out on the weekend on their own. There is a transfer and translation of that work to when there is no reminder, prompt or feedback. And it goes back to what John Wooden said I have not taught until they have learned. And learning can only be assessed in the absence of the stimulus that caused it, meaning learning can only be expressed in the absence of the coach giving a reminder, prompt or feedback. That's the difference between the assembly line situation and knowing. We have full automation now yeah, totally, and it's.
Speaker 2:We learned this from dr will woo like the actual definition of learning is pretty a tough test and I think this is really important for any athlete to understand, because, especially golfers, because we are so delusional about our abilities and when it comes to a performance change, like a UGP, you know in a bay, we're in a bay. Like yeah, um, you know some people might be shocked me saying this, but like you don't get better at golf at UGP. Like you don't get better at golf at UGP. Like you don't get better at golf in the bay, like we guide you, but you get better on the golf course.
Speaker 2:Like this is just an augmentation of the actual game that's played on the golf course, just because you can hit the shot now in here, because what happens is they will believe that this is the new norm, right, even after maybe two reps. Right, oh, I can do this now. But actually you know and Will would explain this much better than I am but, like you know, you have to be able to repeat that in a slightly different environment two weeks later without any of this going on. And most of us golfers don't look at learning like that at all, like we actually feel like, oh, after one session, I got this. Now I just have to work on it a little bit and I got it down. It's like you have to go through a much longer process. Like Tiger Woods is a great example when he went through, you know, his swing changes you have probably one of y'all, you can have that argument but best player of all time it took six months to go through a swing change and he practiced a lot more than anybody basically in history.
Speaker 2:So, exactly, just to think that you can make change and actually learn a new movement in a couple of weeks. Practicing an hour a week is not reality.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. And I think the difficult part about this is we confuse again knowing what to do with knowing how to do it, or the knowing of something and the doing of something. And so once we have it up here in our mind, we we falsely confuse that with oh okay, so it's there, we're good, we're fine, um, and it's only automated when you can't undo it, when it is so ever present in you. You couldn't screw it up if you tried. So if you assume your swing was as consistently positive as the consistency with which it is negative, driving them to come actually see you in the first place, right, they unavoidably make this mistake. It's their swing signature, inevitably. You are trying to inverse that such that you are unavoidably effective in what you're doing to such a degree you can't even mess it up yourself. It's a part of you, it is fully. That word automation is not deceptive. It's literally what we are going for and it's the word automaticity that we use as kind of. That's the holy grail of learning in its highest expressed form, as Will rightly talks about. And I think, ultimately, what we are trying to do is recognize that what starts as this coaching cue, which exists as a cognitive currency, an intellectual currency needs like a sieve, it needs to make its way down into a motor currency, into a physical currency, and ultimately that requires it to be stripped of the words, stripped of the language, stripped of the symbols, and what is left is the felt expression, literally the embodied, felt, physical I know how to do it expression of what those words mean in a motor, physical sense. And I like to think of this like by way of an analogy.
Speaker 1:Good cues are like bananas, whereby the peel is like the words. I offer you the banana, I offer you the cue, I peel back right the banana, I peel off the words and what's left is the nutrition inside of the peel, the physical knowing inside of the cue, the best cues. You can do away with the language and it's almost like the second. The golfer, the athlete hears the cue, they're getting the nutritional value, they feel the change before they've even had a chance to practice it. That's what the best cues do.
Speaker 1:I don't know if you've ever experienced that where you give a golfer a cue for the first time maybe you spontaneously come up with it after trying different things and they kind of give you that look like they know it's going to work before they've even tried it. And then they step up, bam, and it works, because it goes right back toward the same from the beginning. Certain language has a more direct route to motor expression or physical understanding than other types of language and, broadly speaking, it's that internal to external to analogy that gets us closer and closer and closer. You still need to direct it at the spider and you still need to frame it in a way that's probably intellectually curious and interesting to them, but you're getting a lot closer if you're able to apply what we're talking about today.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think I think it's. You mentioned, like sports history a little bit, where if you're coaching an athlete that have played a different sport, I think that's such an important, like interesting subject. If I, if I was ever going to do a phd, I would probably do it on that um subject because to me, different sports is basically like growing up learning different languages, and certain languages are similar, like portuguese and spanish. They're similar. So you know, like tennis and table tennis, like you have a completely different opportunity to learn golf faster. If you grew up playing a racket sport Like it's not even close right, like, let's say, you grew up speaking Portuguese with your grandma and then now, at 35 or 40, you're going to learn Spanish, like that person is going to improve dramatically faster learning Spanish right. And so it's so interesting to me to study these different sports because we see so many clients and I still haven't seen one exception of that rule.
Speaker 2:If you have a golfer that's maybe a new golfer to get to single digit, let's say, in 18 months to two years, that's extremely fast, like completely outlier. I've never seen that happen. Or, for example, going from 10 to scratch really fast, like in a year, year and a half never happens unless you either grew up playing golf and stopped. Basically, like Steph Curry, for example, grew up playing golf right, you know basketball players, that doesn't, it's not the same language. Like, basketball players really struggle getting good at golf because of that.
Speaker 2:They grew up speaking a different language, or so they grew up playing golf and stopped. Or they played some of the racket sports really any racket sport, hockey, pitcher in baseball but any field sport. Or throwing right Any throwing, but any field sport. Or where you had to kind of use your body, like gymnastics or swimming. I mean you are at an unbelievable disadvantage, unfortunately. So that's why, when I talk to parents of junior golfers, like play table tennis, play these like you have to improve, like their overall body language, so that they, you know, improve faster later, in the later stages of their career.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, and I think that's that's the. Again. It's kind of like the constraints are preferential because it's a physical implement, it's commercial. I can see it, I can, I can touch it. It's. It's easier. Uh, language is it's. It's difficult, right, and I think, ultimately, this idea that you're teaching your body different languages and you're broadening the number of solutions, physical solutions, you have to a given problem, is spot on. But in the same way that constraints maybe are more interesting than cues, right, cues for many people are more interesting than just experiencing it. You know, you said earlier when you had a person hit it under the garage door and after a few reps, where the intellectual novelty of that cue wears off, they want the next hit. No pun intended here.
Speaker 1:They want that, but think about it. They want there's a dopaminergic response to the next cue. In the same way that people buy things oh I want to get the next thing, I want to get the next tool there's a bit of a dopamine hit. It's the same thing with coaching cues. People want that next cue, that next hit, that next idea that's going to unlock. This is no. Get comfortable with the unknown, get comfortable with just feeling your way through this.
Speaker 1:And because that feeling isn't as tangible, isn't as visually objective as something on the ground, we devalue its importance. And on and on, the persistence in navigating that feeling that is ineffable, that is very difficult to put into words. I mean coaches literally spend a career trying to put into words what is ultimately not meant to be put into words, because it's meant to be an experienced form of knowing and we assume that it's a lesser form of knowing because it's not easy to verbalize. But that's where we get it wrong. The second we start to value how something makes us feel and the second we can tap into that language of the felt experience of movement, the motor awareness.
Speaker 1:That's where people can learn things unbelievably rapidly. Learn things unbelievably rapidly because they're depending on secondary and tertiary forms of knowing by either visually seeing something which again is kind of like training wheels, constantly hearing a reinforced intellectual cue kind of like training wheels versus. We'll get rid of all that and just feel it real life. Training wheels are gone. Mom and dad have pushed me down the road. I I gotta either pedal this thing or fall. I gotta feel my way through it.
Speaker 2:That's the junction where learning occurs it's so funny, nick, because my last question to you was going to be do you ever, with athlete, end up using a cue? Like it's funny, when I talked to o'neill count, our director of coaching, we will sometimes call it like a life cue or life drill. Yeah, like something that you'll do for the rest of your life. Yeah, basically like that you that you keep coming back to is that uh, do you see that like? Do you use same cue because it works so well over and over again?
Speaker 1:with the same, absolutely, absolutely.
Speaker 1:I find that it's kind of like a skeleton key it unlocks most doors and so you, absolutely, you'll find that generally for certain movements there's, there's cues that are you know they're.
Speaker 1:They just kickstart everything and then inevitably those get fine tuned into what works for for that individual.
Speaker 1:So a hundred percent, I think the key is it's hard, but if you keep going back to what Will Wu rightly said is the best test of learning, and that is the, and you use that as a feedback loop to subtly, consistently and systematically adjust what you say, when you say and how you coach it, constraint or cue and everything is linked together, turning. But the reason that's going to happen is that is literally the most systematic way to ensure progress as long as you're oriented to learning. If you are not oriented to learning and you're just satisfied by what happens when you're physically present, you'll still probably have a great business. And if you're a good person and you're good at chatting, you'll likely have them coming back. But ultimately it goes back to what we said said are you not only creating a great environment for learning, but an environment that results in a transfer of learning, making you ultimately redundant, but in doing so, somehow making you a staple to what they do, because they know they're getting better in your presence amazing, really fun talk.
Speaker 2:I really appreciate you taking the time Before we finish off. What's next for you? Like what's going on with Irish rugby? Like what's your plan?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I mean in terms of this topic. I've just been informed that we will be doing the second edition of the Language of Coaching, so I'm very excited to start that project, which hopefully won't take as long as writing the book originally. So the second edition of the book's coming out. I'm actually doing kind of a bit of a language of coaching tour around Australia next month, which is great. People are consistently interested in this. And with rugby we have our international cycle. It's a Lions tour year. People can look up what that means. And we have our next cup, uh, later this year for the women and then in 2027 for the men. So never a boring day with rugby I love it, are you like?
Speaker 2:basically your whole life is rugby.
Speaker 1:Now, in terms of like your, your main position there, as as in terms of my professional life, it's all through rugby in. In my personal professional life, everything is still kind of centered around the language of coaching, doing things like this and making sure I'm spreading the good word about the good word.
Speaker 2:Awesome, I really appreciate it. Thank you for your time. Okay, thanks, leo. All the best.