Shooting University

It was great to be invited onto the Constraints Collective podcast to explain how ecological dynamics can be applied in ISSF shooting coaching.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/50QkjXxRe6LlNaBXchbFBz?si=n3187wDbR1-SfLblc1ajXg&t=890

As a coach, your crucial role is to guide and direct the athlete's attention. This guidance is not about providing answers but about helping the athlete search for the most useful information, letting them search for the answer themselves. Educating attention can be done with questioning.

- What can you use to see or feel your sway?
- Where in the body do you feel the effects of sway?
- Does your sway go in a particular direction? What could you change to influence this?
- Are there any muscles that are not relaxed? (can ask about certain areas of the body)
- What are the effects of relaxing these muscles? Can you try to understand why they are tense to start with?
- have you checked if your alignment to the target has drifted (vertically or horizontally)? How could you do this? And what could you change to combat this? What effects do those changes have on other parts of the position?

All these questions are educating an athlete's attention. They do not prescribe a way of doing things but allow for better attunement and search for the most useful information. This information provides an opportunity to act ('affordance' in the research) but only if previously experienced and there is a strong coupling between perceptual and action. None of the questions require verbal answers. The athlete's actions will show an understanding of attunement to the valuable information. This will aid the improvement of the athlete's decision-making, and they will score better on the Diamond game and be able to self-regulate.

Athletes do not want to make bad decisions, so the question ‘Why did you take that shot?’ when an athlete shoots a bad shot is useless; the answer is the athlete thought it was the right decision. This shows a disconnect between the athlete and the information within the environment, and an education of attention is required.

This game magnifies the need for decision-making, training the behaviour not to pull the trigger if the athlete does not perceive the affordance to do so. Implementing this game changes the environment and the task constraints that affect the athlete.

To conclude, the more attuned the athlete becomes to the most useful information, the better they will shoot on the Diamond. Perception of this information will lead to newly adapted, more functional goal-directed behaviours (including better position, shooting process and attunement to the environment).

Reading:
Woods, C. T., Rudd, J., Gray, R., & Davids, K. (2021). Enskilment: an Ecological-Anthropological Worldview of Skill, Learning and Education in Sport. Sports Medicine - Open, 7(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40798-021-00326-6