"Donadoni rues Italian 'mistakes' against Dutch"
"Mental errors cost Demons in regional quarterfinal"
"Mental mistakes doom Rays in loss to Cardinals"
If
you are a frequent visitor to my site, you may have noticed a
customized Google news feed on the right-hand side of the page. At the
top are different phrases to
select to get relevant news stories (i.e. the "Sports Science"
selection will list stories on just that.) Every day, there is always a
new variety of stories linked to the phrase, "mental mistakes" (the
list from 6/10/08 is displayed above). Either the writer recaps a game,
calling out the mistakes or a coach or player claims that mistakes were
made. It has become sort of a throwaway phrase, "...we made a lot of
mental mistakes out there today, that we need to avoid if we want to
get to the playoffs..." The million dollar question then is HOW to
reduce these mental mistakes. And, to answer that, we need to define
WHAT is a mental mistake?
In a previous post, I introduced the "Sports Cognition Framework", which is a trio of elements needed for success in sports. These three elements are:
- decision-making ability (knowing what to do)
- motor skill competence (being physically able to do it)
- positive mental state (being motivated and confident to do it)
Most
of the time, a mental mistake is thought of as a breakdown of
decision-making ability. The center fielder throws to the wrong base,
the wide receiver runs the wrong route, or the defender forgets to mark his
man, etc. These scenarios describe poor decisions or even memory lapses
during the stress of the game. They are not necessarily the lack of
skill to execute a play or the lack of confidence or motivation to want
to do the right thing. It is a recognition, in hindsight, that the best
option was not chosen. In addition to glaring negative
plays, there are also missed opportunities on the field (i.e. taking a
contested shot on goal, instead of passing to the open teammate).
So,
back to the payoff question: HOW do we reduce mental mistakes and poor
decisions? Just as we practice physical skills to improve our ability
to throw, catch, shoot, run, etc., we need to practice making decisions
using a a training system that directly exposes the athlete to these
scenarios. Dr. Joan Vickers, who we met during our discussion of the Quiet Eye, has created a new system which she calls the "Decision-Training Model", and is the focus of the second half of her book, "Perception, Cognition, and Decision Training".
As opposed to traditional training methods that separate skill training
from tactical decision making training, the Decision-Training model
(D-T) forces the athlete to couple her skill learning with the
appropriate tactical awareness of when to use it. So, instead of an
"easy-first" breakdown of a skill, and then build it up step by step,
D-T begins with a "hard-first" approach putting the "technique within
tactics" demanding a higher cognitive effort right up front. The theory
behind D-T is that the coach is not on the field with the player during
competition, so the player must learn to rely on their own blended
combination of skill and game awareness. Research from Vickers and
others shows that D-T provides a more lasting retention of knowledge,
while more traditional bottom-up training with heavy coach feedback
delivers a stronger short-term performance gain, but that success in
practice does not often translate later in games. Practice and training
need to mirror game situations as often and as completely as the real
thing.
There are three major steps to Decision-Training (p. 167):
1.
Identify a decision the athlete has to make in a game, using one of the
seven cognitive skills (anticipation, attention, focus/concentration,
pattern recognition, memory, problem solving and decision making)
2.
Create a drill(s) that trains that decision using one of the seven
cognitive triggers (object cues, location cues, Quiet Eye,
reaction-time cues, memory cues, kinesthetic cues, self-coaching cues)
3.
Use one or more of the seven decision tools in the design of the drill
(variable practice, random practice, bandwidth feedback, questioning,
video feedback, hard-first instruction, external focus of instruction)
This post was just to serve as an introduction to D-T. Dr. Vickers and her team at the University of Calgary offer full courses
for coaches to learn D-T and apply it in their sport. Combined with the
visual cues of the playing environment provided by the Quiet Eye gaze
control, D-T seems to offer a better tactical training option for
coaches and athletes. Coming up, we will continue the discussion of
decision-making in sports with a look at some other current research.
Please give me your thoughts on D-T and the whole topic of mental
mistakes!
Winning Olympic Gold With Sport Science
From: Winning Olympic Gold With Sport Science
Sports Are 80 Percent Mental
Its
something that every coach and every athlete of every sport is
searching for... the EDGE. That one training tip, equipment
improvement, mental preparation or tactical insight that will tip the
game towards them. The body of knowledge that exists today in each
sport is assumed, with each competitor expected to at least be aware of
the history, beliefs and traditions of their individual sport. But, if
each team is starting with the same set of information then the team
that takes the next step by applying new research and ideas will
capture the edge.
To me, that is what sport science is all
about. The goal is to improve sports performance by imagining,
analyzing, experimenting, testing, documenting and training new methods
to coaches and athletes.
You might have seen a great article in the 6/23 edition of USA Today; "In hunt for Olympic gold, techies are major players" by Jodi Upton. We meet Peter Vint, a "sport technologist" in the Performance Technology Division of the US Olympic Training Center
in Colorado Springs, CO, whose job it is to find ways to win more gold
medals. From the article; "The next revolution, Vint says, is breaking
down the last secrets of elite athletes: response time, how they read
the field and other players — everything that goes into the vision,
perception and split-second decision-making of an athlete. 'We've
always looked at that as mysterious, something that's unmeasurable and
innate,' Vint says. 'But we think it can be taught.'"
Interestingly,
Vint cites another pioneer in evidence-based sports coaching, Oakland
A's general manager, Billy Beane. "We're becoming progressively more
data-driven," Vint says of the center's training efforts. "We are
trying to pursue what Sabermetrics and Billy Beane did for baseball,
identifying factors that can truly influence performance." The radical
concept that Beane created, as documented in the bestseller, "Moneyball" by Michael Lewis,
is to stop searching for "the edge" in all the same places that
everyone else is looking. Instead, he started from scratch with new
logic about the objectives of the game of baseball itself and built
metrics that gave new insight into the types of players and skill sets
that he should acquire for his team.
If sport science is going
to thrive and be accepted, it faces the challenge of inertia. The ideas
and techniques that are the product of sport science can also be
captured in the phrase, "evidence based coaching". Just as evidence
based medicine has slowly found its place in the physician's exam room,
the coaching profession is just beginning to trust the research.
Traditionally, "belief based coaching" has been the philosophy favored
in the clubhouse. Training drills, tactical plans, player selection and
player development has been guided by ideas and concepts that have been
handed down from one generation of coaches to the next. Most of these
beliefs are valid and have been proven on the field through many years
of trial and error. Subjecting these beliefs to scientific research may
not produce conclusions any different than what coaching lore tells us.
But, today's coaches and athletes see the competition creeping closer
to them in all aspects, so they are now willing to at least listen to
the scientists. Beane likens it to financial analysis and the stock
market. The assumption is that all information is known by all. But, if
someone can find a ratio or a statistic or make an industry insight
that no one has considered, then they own the competitive advantage; at
least until this new information is made public.
It takes time,
though, to amass enough data to convince a head coach to change years
of habits for the unknown. Reputations and championships are on the
line, so the changes sometimes need to be implemented slowly. Vint
describes the gradual process of converting U.S. hurdler Terrence
Trammell and his coach to some of his ideas. "The relationship between
the athletes and sports scientist is critical," Vint says. "But (for
some), biomechanics has not yet provided useful enough suggestions."
There still is debate on evidence based coaching vs. belief based coaching. Here are two opposing opinions; evidence-based: "The Second Law of Thermodynamics" by Brent S. Rushall of San Diego State University
and belief-based: "Evidence Based vs. Belief Based Coaching" by Richard Todd of Webball.com. If you have a few minutes, please read each opinion and offer your take on this. After considering these opinions, Robert Robson,
sport psychologist and management consultant, stated, "Sports coaching
should absolutely be evidence-based, but any argument that places the
sole source of evidence in the realm of the scientific method is, I
would argue, naive and lacking in an understanding of the philosophical
underpinnings of science."
Looking forward, I will dig a little deeper into this topic in the next week, so please check back or subscribe to Sports Are 80 Percent Mental.
Single Sport Kids - When To Specialize
From: Single Sport Kids - When To Specialize
Sports Are 80 Percent Mental
So,
your grade school son or daughter is a good athlete, playing multiple
sports and having fun at all of them. Then, you hear the usual warning,
either from coaches or other parents; "If you want your daughter to go
anywhere in this sport, then its time to let the other sports go and
commit her full-time to this one." The logic sounds reasonable. The
more time spent on one sport, the better she will be at that sport,
right? Well, when we look at the three pillars of our Sports Cognition Framework,
motor skill competence, decision making ability, and positive mental
state, the question becomes whether any of these would benefit from
playing multiple sports, at least in the early years of an athlete
(ages 3-12)? It seems obvious that specific technical motor skills,
(i.e. soccer free kicks, baseball bunting, basketball free throws) need
plenty of practice and that learning the skill of shooting free throws
will not directly make you a better bunter. On the other end, learning
how to maintain confidence, increase your focus, and manage your
emotions are skills that should easily transfer from one sport to
another. That leaves the development of tactical decision making
ability as the unknown variable. Will a young athlete learn more about
field tactics, positional play and pattern recognition from playing
only their chosen sport or from playing multiple related sports?
Researchers at the University of Queensland, Australia
learned from previous studies that for national team caliber players
there is a correlation between the breadth of sport experiences they
had as a child and the level of expertise they now have in a single
sport. In fact, these studies show that there is an inverse relation
between the amount of multi-sport exposure time and the additional
sport-specific training to reach expert status. In plain English, the
athletes that played several different (but related) sports as a child,
were able to reach national "expert" level status faster than those
that focused only one sport in grade school . Bruce Abernethy,
Joseph Baker and Jean Cote designed an experiment to observe and
measure if there was indeed a transfer of pattern recognition ability
between related sports (i.e. team sports based on putting an object in
a goal; hockey, soccer, basketball, etc.)
They recruited two
group of athletes; nationally recognized experts in each of three
sports (netball, basketball and field hockey) who had broad sports
experiences as children and experienced but not expert level players in
the same sports whose grade school sports exposure was much more
limited (single sport athletes). (For those unfamiliar with netball, it
is basically basketball with no backboards and few different rules.)
The experiment showed each group a video segment of an actual game in
each of the sports. When the segment ended the groups were asked to map
out the positions and directions of each of the players on the field,
first offense and then defense, as best they could remember from the
video clip. The non-expert players were the control group, while the
expert players were the experimental groups. First, all players were
shown a netball clip and asked to respond. Second, all were shown a
basketball clip and finally the hockey clip. The expectation of the
researchers was that the netball players would score the highest after
watching the netball clip (no surprise there), but also that the expert
players of the other two sports would score higher than the non-expert
players. The reasoning behind their theory was that since the expert
players were exposed to many different sports as a child, there might
be a significant transfer effect between sports in pattern recognition,
and that this extra ability would serve them well in their chosen sport.
The
results were as predicted. For each sport's test, the experts in that
sport scored the highest, followed by the experts in the other sports,
with the non-experts scoring the poorest in each sport. Their
conclusion was that there was some generic learning of pattern
recognition in team sports that was transferable. The takeaway from
this study is that there is benefit to having kids play multiple sports
and that this may shorten the time and training needed to excel in a
single sport in the future.
So, go ahead and let your kids play
as many sports as they want. Resist the temptation to "overtrain" in
one sport too soon. Playing several sports certainly will not hurt
their future development and will most likely give them time to find
their true talents and their favorite sport.
Source:
Abernethy,
B., Baker, J., Côté, J. (2005). Transfer of pattern recall skills may
contribute to the development of sport expertise. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 19(6), 705-718. DOI: 10.1002/acp.1102
Why The Offsides Flag Has Been "Ruud" to Italy
From: Why The Offsides Flag Has Been "Ruud" to Italy
Sports Are 80 Percent Mental
Two
Euro 2008 games and two questionable offsides calls against Italy, one
on defense, the other on offense, are still being talked about this
weekend. First, in the Netherlands opener,
van Nistelrooy scores from an obvious offsides position... except for
Panucci, who is lying on the ground next to the goal. In fact, UEFA had
to defend their referee
for a correct interpretation. The call that did not get an explanation
was Luca Toni's offsides on a cross from Zambrotta in the Romania match, which disallowed a first half goal. The first call was deemed correct, the second one was a blatant error.
Calling
offsides correctly is one of the most difficult officiating duties in
sports. In fact, some have argued that it is nearly impossible given the
limitations of the human eye and the number of objects that need to be
tracked by one assistant referee. Back in 2004, Francisco Belda
Maruenda, M.D. of Centro de Salud de Alquerías in Murcia, Spain, took a
look at the eye movements necessary along with their associated
durations to determine if it was a humanly possible task. Let's look at
his logic.
First, some eye physiology definitions are needed:
Saccadic
movements - when we shift our eyes' focus from one object to another,
we are making a saccadic movement. As an assistant referee (AR) looks
from the ball carrier to the last defender to the offensive players, he
needs to make several saccadic movements to take in the whole scene.
Vergence
movements - there are two types, convergence (changing gaze from
objects far away to objects closer to you), and divergence (just the
opposite, near to far).
Accomodation - to change the focus of the eye from far to near or near to far, the convexity of the retina lens needs to change.
All
of these eye movements, saccadic, vergence and accomodations take time
to accomplish. Let's see how Maruenda added these up for an offsides
call:
- the AR needs to keep track of at least four objects, the
ball, the last two defenders and the offensive receiver of the pass.
There may also be more offensive players to track as well.
- to make
saccadic movements from the first object to each of the remaining
objects will take about 130ms for the first object and then another
10ms per object after that. With four objects to track, that would be a
total of about 160ms.
- if some of the players are on the far side
of the field and some on the near side, then a vergence movement and an
accomodation would be required, taking an additional 360ms for the
accomodation and 640ms for the far to near vergence movement.
- of
course, the players are constantly moving during the play, so their
position is changing rapidly. If the speed of an offensive player is
assumed to be 7.14 m/s, then in 100ms, they will have moved 71cm. This
movement could be the difference between an onside position and an
offside position. See the diagrams below (taken directly from the
article)
Top: No offside, players in correct position.
Bottom: 100 ms later (players' velocity 7.14 m/s), offsides
The
conclusion then, is that the total time needed for the AR to focus on
at least four different objects in sequential order and process their
positions cognitively is beyond the 100ms that would be needed for an
offensive player to move from an onside position when the ball is
played to a perceived offsides position when the AR finally focuses on
him.
There have been some responses to Maruenda's logic, mainly
centered on the fact that ARs have long known they can't watch the ball
and the last defender, so they instead listen for the sound of the ball
being struck while staying focused on the line of defense. This method
may be used, but the sound of the crowd, the muted sound of the boot on
the ball and the slower speed of sound may also have an effect on this
judgement.
There is technology being developed to make offsides
calls with multiple cameras, etc., but FIFA is not in favor of taking
the flag away from the AR yet, just as they are against obvious goal
line technology to watch for goals. It appears the debates and
arguments will live on for the near future.
Source: Belda Maruenda, F. (2004). Can the human eye detect an offside position during a football match?. BMJ, 329(7480), 1470-1472. DOI: 10.1136/bmj.329.7480.1470
Federer and Nadal Can See the Difference
From: Federer and Nadal Can See the Difference
Sports Are 80 Percent Mental
Watching
Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal battle it out in the French Open final
last month, and now the epic Wimbledon final, I started thinking more about the interceptive timing
task requirements of each of their visuomotor systems... yeah, right.
C'mon, I just needed a good opening line for this post.
However,
other than a 120 mph tennis serve, take
a second to think about all of the different sports that send an object
flying at you at very high speeds that you not only have to see, but
also estimate the speed of the object, the movement of the object and
what you want to do with the object once it gets to you.
Some examples are:
- a hockey puck at a goalie (70-100 mph)
- a baseball pitch at a batter (70-100 mph)
- a soccer ball kicked at a keeper (60-90 mph)
Previously, we took a look at this in baseball and in soccer and also discussed the different types of visual skills in sports. There, we broke it down into three categories:
- Targeting tasks
- Interceptive timing tasks
- Tactical decision making tasks
The
second category, interceptive timing tasks, deals with the examples
above; stuff coming at you fast and you need to react. There are three
levels of response that take an increasing level of brainpower. First,
there is a basic reaction, also known as optometric reaction. In other
words, "see it and get out of the way". Next, there is a perceptual
reaction, meaning you actually can identify the object coming at you
and can put it in some context (i.e. that is a tennis ball coming at
you and not a bird swooping out of the sky). Finally, there is a
cognitive reaction, meaning you know what is coming at you and you have
a plan of what to do with it (i.e. return the ball with top-spin
down the right line). This cognitive skill is usually sport-specific
and learned over years of tactical training. Obviously, for
professional tennis players, they are at the expert cognitive stage and
have a plan for most shots. Federer's problem was that Nadal had better
plans. But, in order to reach that cognitive stage, they first need to
have excellent optometric and perceptual skills. Can those skills be
trained? Or are the best tennis players born with naturally better
abilities? Did their training make them better tennis players or are
they better players because of some natural skills?
Leila Overney and her team at the Brain Mind Institute of Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL)
recently studied whether expert tennis players have better visual
perception abilities than other athletes and non-tennis players.
Typically, motor skill research compares experts to non-experts and
tries to deduce what the experts are doing differently to excel. In
this study, an additional category was added. Overney wanted to see if
the perceptual skills of the tennis players were significantly more
advanced than athletes of a similar fitness level, (in this case
triathletes), to eliminate the variable of "fitness", and also more
advanced than novice tennis players (the typical comparison). To
eliminate the cognitive knowledge difference between the groups, she
used seven non-sport specific visual tests. Please see the actual study
for details of all the tests. The bottom line of the results was that
certain motion detection and speed discrimination skills were better in
the tennis players (in other words, being able to track a ball coming
at you and its movement side to side).
So, the expert tennis
players were better at tracking balls coming at them than triathletes
and non-tennis players.... seems pretty obvious(!) But, these results
are a first step to answering the question of "can these skills be
trained"? We see that there is, indeed, a difference in ability level
between expert players and athletes that are in similar shape and
competitive spirit. Now, the question becomes, "how did these tennis
players acquire a higher level of perception skill"? Was it "nature or
nurture", "genetically gifted or trained through practice"?
What do you think?
Source: Overney,
L.S., Blanke, O., Herzog, M.H., Burr, D.C. (2008). Enhanced Temporal
but Not Attentional Processing in Expert Tennis Players. PLoS ONE, 3(6), e2380. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0002380
The Coach's Curse - Mental Mistakes
From:
The Coach's Curse - Mental Mistakes
Sports Are 80 Percent MentalSee The Ball, Be The Ball - Vision and Sports
From: See The Ball, Be The Ball - Vision and Sports
Sports Are 80 Percent Mental
The
whistle blows and Shaq goes to the line again after being fouled on
purpose for the fourth time. And, again, we watch as he takes that
awkward stance, looks at the basket and then clanks one of the back of
the rim. We wonder how hard this can be... just aim and shoot! Isn't it
that simple? Well, not exactly. In our introduction to this series I mentioned the research of Dr. Joan Vickers and her concept of the "Quiet Eye". In her book, Perception, Cognition and Decision Training, she describes this visual targeting pathway:
"...the
visual pathway begins when information is registered on the eye's
retina by the focal and ambient systems, then travels to the back of
the head along the optic nerve and radiates to the occipital cortex, where visual information is registered as billions of features. These then race
in parallel fashion both to the top of the head to the parietal cortex
(dorsal) and along the sides of the head to the temporal (ventral)
areas. There is an integration of information in the somatosensory cortex as the
information goes to the frontal cortex, where the goals and intentions
reside and plans are formulated for the specific event that is
occurring. The flow of information then goes to the premotor and motor
cortex at the top of the head before going down the spinal cord to the
effectors." P.26
This same process repeats
constantly during any athletic event and it is the most critical
determinant of the outcome of the game. Just think about the types of
visual work that needs to be done by an athlete (as defined by Dr.
Vickers):
1. Targeting Tasks - being able to fixate on a target,
fixed or moving, to be able to throw, kick or send an object towards
it. (i.e. Shooting or passing a baseball, football, basketball, soccer
ball, hockey puck, etc.)
2. Interceptive Timing Tasks - being able to recognize, track and finally control an object as it comes at you (aka "catching")
3.
Tactical Decision Making Tasks - being able to take in an environmental
scan of the field/court and recognize patterns of all the moving
objects (i.e. a quarterback scanning his receivers and choosing the
best option for a pass).
All
of these scenarios require the athlete to focus or "gaze" on the right
points in the environment and ignore the rest of the scene. Dr.
Vickers' work has been to observe athletes of different skill levels,
expert and non-expert, and define the "best practices" of visual
control so that the non-expert athletes can be coached to better
performance. Her research lab uses "eye-trackers" (see photo) to
monitor the focus and gaze of the athlete's pupils as they perform
their skills. For example, she has found that expert baseball hitters
focus on the release point of the ball exclusively, rather than random
fixations on the pitcher's arm, head, jersey, etc. She found that
expert golf putters focus on a specific point on the cup, then a
specific point on the back of the ball and remain fixated on the point
on the ball after the ball has left the putter blade. Novices allow
their gaze to wander from the ball to the hole, without a very specific
focal point on either the cup or the ball. The term "Quiet Eye" comes
from these observations that expert performers have consciously chosen
points in their space to focus on rather than allowing their eyes to
wander and fixate on multiple points (i.e. a "noisy" eye).
So,
why does the Quiet Eye work? When we fixate on key points in our field
of vision, how does this help our neuromuscular systems perform better?
The subconscious part of our brain may be recognizing a pattern that we
have seen and experienced before and directing our movements based on
this information. Some have called this "muscle memory", meaning our
brain has learned through repetition and practice how to throw a ball
to a moving receiver at that distance and speed, and so, when presented
with a similar scenario, knows what to do. Think about when you shoot a
jump shot and sometimes you get that sensation, as soon as it leaves
your hand, that the ball is going in. Your brain may be telling you
that, based on past experience, when you've executed the same aim and
same muscle movement then the ball has gone in.
This takes us back to the discussion we had in our previous post on baseball fielding
regarding theories of perception-action combinations. The Information
Processing model claims that we perceive the environment first through
our senses, primarily our vision. Then, we access our memory to find
the rules, suggestions and knowledge that we have gained from past
experiences and these memories guide our action in the moment. The
Ecological Psychology model removes the memory access step and claims
that our perception of the environment leads directly to our actions,
as there is not enough time to access our lessons. If that is true,
then how does the Quiet Eye help us? It seems the Quiet Eye is what we
need to connect the current scenario (standing on the free throw line
looking at the basket) with our lessons learned from the past (how we
made this shot hundreds of times before). Research continues on this
question and I'm sure we'll come back to this in future posts.
Next
time, I will take a look at Dr. Vickers' "Decision Training Model",
which builds on the Quiet Eye theory to train athletes to improve their
tactical in-game decision making. We will look at the athletes who are
known as having good "vision of the field" and how to raise everyone's
game to that level.
