Within our society we from time to time get buzz words, in government a few years back everything was about ‘community’, in sport it is all ‘Coaching’. The big problem is that one simple word can conjure up a very diverse image of what it actually means, and therefore what a ‘coach’ actually does to be ‘coaching’ someone is a rather grey area.
The Oxford English Dictionary definition: noun. , a trainer or instructor of sport. b, a private tutor. verb. a, to train or teach. b, give hints to; prime with facts. So whilst the dictionary uses the descriptors of teaching, training and instructing at Sport Coach UK they use the definition that, ‘A coach is someone who uses sport as a vehicle for development of individuals, both as performers and as people’ (What is Sports Coaching, Sports Coach UK, 2003).
However this still does very little to help us to understand what the difference is between a coach, teacher or instructor. What many people seem to be doing at the moment is branding the term coaching at anything that refers to helping people improve there performance, which fits within all of our definitions. However with no official coaching qualification it has meant that whilst well-known experience climbers have set themselves up as a ‘Celebrity Climbing Coaches’, other people less well known but arguably as well qualified coaches are unable to compete, despite offering comparable services.
Whilst some are ‘coaches’ are unqualified, it is important to remember that in the UK there is no requirement for official qualifications. The Health and Safety Executive instead say there are four ways to demonstrate competency, which are in house training, official qualification, equivalent qualification or appropriate experience.
What is important whether you are qualified or not as a instructor, coach or teacher is the legal and moral responsibility of your position. The need to be able to justify, if someone was to have an accident under your supervision and was to take you to court, that you were at an appropriate venue on an appropriate route using appropriate equipment, not to mention that you were managing the situation in an appropriate manner. Failure to do so will make it easy for someone to prove your negligence.
Now qualification isn’t a defence against negligence, however it will help you understand your legal and moral duty, as we as be aware of what appropriate practice is. Any accusers will call their own ‘expert witness’ to back their case up. So even the courts won’t recognise the difference between a qualified instructor or self declared coach, what they are interested in is good and appropriate practice that is backed up by a demonstration of the coaches/instructors competence under the HSE recommendations. So qualified or not, a coach or instructor still needs to be offering a service that has some underlying management of the students safety.
What qualification offers at present to students is piece of mind that the individual coaching or instructing has reached a level of ‘competence’ and therefore likely to offer a student a safe and appropriate course. To the coach or instructor they give piece of mind that they are using appropriate techniques, equipment, crags and routes. Where the current qualification fall short is the softer skills of the coaching process.
However in terms of coaching and instructing, my experience is most coaches instruct and most instructors coach, in that they both use good coaching practice even if they have come across by accident. To clarify this statement we need to understand the science of coaching, and that comes from much research into what is referred to as effective coaching.
Now in order for a coach to be effective they need to teach someone as efficiently as possible a new skill, and that skill needs to be what is referred to as robust, in that they can perform it in a variety of situation and more importantly when the coach or instructor isn’t looking over their shoulder, which in climbing can be quite challenging. To achieve this understanding of effective coaching we need to look at what we know about the psychology of learning and skill acquisition.
In order to learn something our brains have to take in various pieces of information, process that information and then store it ready to use again. This process uses three types of memory; short term sensory store (STSS), Short term memory (STM) and long term memory (LTM).
The STSS is where we receive all senses from physical feelings, hearing, vision, taste. There is evidence that has shown our STSS to have a capacity of around 25 to 30 items, but these can only be stored from a few seconds, before they disappear.
In order to cut down on unnecessary information the brain filters what we take in through the STSS and sends the ‘edited highlights’ through to our short term memory. This filtering process is often the reason that different people experience the same situation in different ways. Our STM has been shown to have a capacity of 7+/-2 ‘chunks’ of information and last up to 20 seconds.
That information is then sent to be stored in our LTM, which stores information as procedures, autobiographically and semantically it is this bridge between the long term and short term memory that is important to developing a skill, as whilst the STSS and STM are use to get the initial information, it is the driving of a skill from the LTM to the STM where it is used, and back again that helps create engrams or memories of movement skill.
In order to do this effectively many researchers have looked at a variety of learning paradigms. In these experiments they have shown that there are various underlying principles that help create the optimum learning through what has become know as effective practice. It is a coaches job to ensure that any practice is appropriate for the learning required, and based on the notion that it takes over 150 repetitions of a movement for it to become an ingrained in our muscle memory.
These forms of practice can be:
blocked – repeating an exercise over and over(1,1,1,1,1…….)
series – repeating different exercise in order (1,1,1,1,2,2,2,2,…)
varied – repeating different exercises (1,2,3,4,1,2,3,4….
random – repeating exercises in random order (1,4,2,3,3,1,2,4,1,)
bilateral – repeating the exercise left and right, up and down
augmented – having a rest in between practice
observational – extra information gained through observation
Each of these different forms of practice has pro’s and con’s; some are good for experts others for beginners. Some will create a skill quickly, however that skill won’t necessarily be transferable to a slightly different task. Others will produce a robust skill that will allow an individual to reconstruct and elaborate on the original skill and apply it to a different setting.
So how does a coach ensure that all of this is catered for during a session, well the answer is through experience and a lot of forethought. As well as a series of teaching models that help to ensure that all the necessary bases are covered.
Two of the most common are IDEAS and EDICT, both of which are acronyms. What these teaching models do is cater for the three major learning pathways (Visual, Auditory and Kinaesthetic – VAK for short)
IDEAS – INTRODUCE the skill, DEMONSTRATE the skill, EXPLAIN the skill, Allow the group some ACTION to practice the skill, SUMMARISE after the activity.
EDICT – EXPLAIN the skill, DEMONSTRATE the skill, Allow the group to IMITATE the skill, CORRECT any mistake, let the group TRY again.
Researchers have also investigated how best to apply these components of the model, so when explaining you have to remember the 7+/-2 chunks of information, otherwise you might overload your students. However because we chunk information we can use that to our advantage.
An example of this is belaying where at first, it is a very confusing series of instruction:
take the rope in by pulling down with the left hand and pushing up with the right, then lock the right hand by putting it down by your side, move your left hand down and grab the dead rope, and swap the right hand up to just below the belay plate on the dead rope, and return you left hand to the live rope just in front of your nose.
…this then becomes…
Take in, lock off, hand swap…..
…and then it just becomes belaying.
Other research has looked at how to give good demonstration, how to analyse performance and give appropriate feedback, as well as looking at your own teach/coaching and using reflective practice to constantly develop your own work.
On top of this a coach also needs to understand the physiological and psychological demands of a sport. In climbing there is a common opinion that research in other sports does translate to climbing, which is a bit of a myth. Many sports actually have used climbing based studies to research anxiety-performance problems. Similarly there are a growing number of studies that have looked into the physiological components of rock climbing. There is very little evidence to suggest climbing is a special case.
What is unfortunate at the moment is that the current qualifications all pretty much overlook the majority of this coaching process, they all concentrate on safety and group management rather than teaching/coaching skills. Many of the ‘climbing coaches’ may well have researched and taught themselves some of this coaching science/art but at present there is no official way of gaining recognition for your skills as a coach. At present many people who are coached prefer to be coached by someone who is a high performer themselves.
Whilst the elite coaches have the credentials that they have trained themselves to a high level, there is still no guarantee they can actually transfer that knowledge of how you can improve your performance effectively. Perhaps the best argument against this is that the majority of coaches that train Olympic athlete actually don’t out performs their athletes. Lynford Christies coach didn’t run quicker than him, he just knew how to analyse performance and design an effective coaching strategy.
At the moment British climbing is on the cusp of a revolution in teaching, coaching, instructing or whatever you want to call it. The Mountain Leader Training Boards are all looking towards the creation of a coaching structure, that will run alongside the current qualification, and cover the ‘coaching’ aspect of improving performance whilst the current awards will stay the same to allow the terrain where coaching can take place to be defined (CWA – Indoors, SPA – Outdoors Single Pitch (not lead climbing), MIA – Outdoors Lead Climbing).
It is anticipated that these coaching awards may well include levels 1 to 3 which might be inline with UKCC but might not. The coaching awards will also include coaching navigation and mountaineering skills, as well as traditional climbing skill, and the long term development of an athlete. None of this is linked to the the Olympics in 2012, its just happened that we have jumped on national push to develop a coaching structure that is second to none.
I for one believe that we all have a lot to learn, and that we will never finish that learning. I see new things all the time when i work, sometimes it is my students that show me, others times it is trainee instructors and sometimes it is the people who I consider my mentors. What I think people need to understand is that qualified or not, an instructor, leader or coach will use some of these ‘coaching skills’ however we can all get better at it, and at the end of the day it benefits anyone who wants to be learn and improve. A new qualification in these disciplines can only be of benefit to the thousands of children that are coached over an extended period in many after school clubs, by instructors with little to no understanding of the issues surrounding the long-term athlete development and climbing.
About Mark Reeves
Mark has been an active member of the National Source Group on who examined Coaching in Mountaineering, which made a series of recommendations to the Mountaineering Co-ordination group, who in turn recommended to the training boards many of the recommendations on a possible future for coaching awards, who have since made a commitment to look into the development of coaching awards.
Mark is also nearing the completion of a part-time MSc student studying Applied Sport Science, and has already passed units in effective coaching, performance physiology and sport psychology, and only has a thesis which is researching imagery and rock climbing. If you live in the North Wales Area and would like to be a part of this research and can boulder above V2 he would love to hear from you.
If you take part in the research then you also get a place on a coaching day that will look at mental, physical and technical aspect of climbing performance.