What makes an effective practice?
1. Real and meaningful practice with game relevance, team relevance and situation relevance.
2. Practices where the rules lead the game towards what you as a coach want to get out of them and where the players are allowed to make and learn from mistakes.
3. Practice that aids self-correction and that brings forth the need to evidence understanding of game principles.
4. Practice that is innovative and rewards success with freedom.
5. Practice that develops capability for manipulating time and space
6. Practice that aids pattern recognition, storage and retrieval of information that can be brought to solving the problem.
7. Practices that condition ball-comfort and seeing the game.
8. Practices that create an evolution of pragmatism in the player.
9. Practice that provides opposed and competitive situations from an early stage
“ Their senses began to decode meaning attached to
patterns quickly and accurately - enabling them to do things differently from the majority of the player population.”
What type of practice activity can optimise learning and retention of decision-making? Assuming that the necessary level of technical ability has been acquired and the players are at a certain mental stage of development, it has been widely documented (See Williams and Hodges, 2005) how important random and variable practice is as opposed to blocked and constant practice methods, regarding the development of skill acquisition. This is based on the increased level of interference and the level of cognitive (mental) simulation (similarity to match-play) thought to be involved. On this subject, playing form activities (Ford et al., 2010) are seen to be of more value than those that come under the category – training form.
A recent study (Ford et al. 2010), focussing on academy football, found that only 35% of ‘playing form’ activities were being delivered, suggesting that this form of practice may be under-represented in England. It may be that orderly, highly structured and even cosmetic practice sessions are the preferred choice at Academy level (thought to enhance technique in isolation, short-term performance and motor skills), rather than disorderly, unstructured, genuine, challenging, problem-solving practices (activities thought to best enhance perceptual and cognitive skills, decision-making and tactical expertise). This may indicate a predominantly ‘coach
dependence’ culture rather than one of ‘autonomy’ and ought to be carefully considered, if future generations of home-grown performers are to become more sophisticated decision-makers and tactical experts.
CONCLUSIONS/RECOMMENDATIONS
1) Design age-appropriate practice problems based on characteristics that advanced decision-makers evidence on the highest stages.
2) the coach acting as the ‘supplement’/‘conductor’/ ‘orchestrator’/expert communicator in ‘playing-form’ practices, with match-play as the ultimate test of learning and development.
Of course, all this sounds easy, but as always, the artistic detail lies in the moment.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88