intrinsic flow and information
The athlete can't think his way to a goal.
What I mean is that in life there are results and there are processes.
The process > results. Because we can't control the results, only the process of getting there.
In practical terms, you can control your stroke, your turn, your start. You can't control the time. The clock is a byproduct. It shows up on its own once the process is right.
As coaches we are so data driven. It's a good thing for us. For our athletes, not so much. We want to hide as much data from them as possible.
This is counterintuitive. More information doesn't make an athlete better.
The reason, and you can probably deduce this from past blogs, is that we want to keep them in an intrinsic state and not an extrinsic one. We want to keep them in “flow." In motor learning terms this is close to an external focus of attention. It really means keeping them in a state where they are not focusing on their body but on executing the task in front of them.
In swimming this gets tricky because there is so much going on in the body at once. A hand entry, a catch, a kick, a breath, all of it competing for attention. But it is still this performance shift we must guide our athletes toward.
“The more they manage each moving part, the less the whole thing runs on its own.”
When we hand in an athlete more information, most of the time it becomes too much. The abundance itself pulls them off the task. It's better for us to hold the feedback as the coach and then control where their focus goes. We become the filter, so they don't have to be. This makes the athlete to coach relationship highly important. They have to trust that what we're not telling them is on purpose.
So what does this mean for us as coaches?
Becoming a filter for our athletes and not exposing them to too much data, only what serves the next rep.
Creating challenges that keep them in intrinsic states so they can work on process-oriented details without us naming everyone.
Not pushing them toward goals and instead pushing them toward overcoming specific challenges. Win the challenge in front of them and the goal will take care of itself.
Coach the process. Let the result arrive on its own.
