Employing Mindfulness in Cueing
Intentionally or not, mindfulness, an aspect of mental skills training, is already wrapped into your cueing and coaching habits. Due to your position as a strength and conditioning coach, you get the opportunity to create and cue around challenges in a way that enhances an athlete's mental game. Weaving mindfulness into your cueing is an easy way to help your athletes learn to focus, while letting distractions go, on and off the field.
You teach fundamentals of mindfulness when you ask an athlete to focus on feeling a muscle group or attend to the execution of a movement while they ignore distractions, like habitual tendencies to move differently. Mindfulness helps you teach athletes to identify whether they're owning a plane or relying on muscles that can move them through a plane, but aren't ideal, or aren't being helped as much as they should be, by synergists ideal for the job.
What is Mindfulness?
Mindfulness = Paying attention in a particular way. You're purposely attending to the present, whether that's the environment or the task you're engaged in, and doing so non-judgmentally (Gardner & Moore, 2004; Kaufman, Glass, & Pineau, 2018; Giges, 2011).
Non-judgmentally means without assigning personal meaning or value to the task, your performance, or obstacles to task execution (e.g. good, bad, helpful, unhelpful, success, failure; Giges, 2011). It is as it is.
- Judging the task: this is too hard, I hate this, this is boring, that set was trash
- Judging yourself: I'm bad at this, I'm a slow learner, I'm not powerful
- Judging obstacles: coach keeps bugging me about technique, I could do it if he'd leave me alone; it's too heavy; not the same equipment as we had in high school; conditions aren't just right
Coaches can acknowledge these responses as normal and inform their athletes that while what they're feeling is normal, a focus on those feelings or thoughts isn't conducive to performance. A coach who recognizes a player is having a reaction to what's being asked of them is sometimes in a position to teach an important aspect of mindfulness. More often than not, sport situations won't be ‘just right.' An athlete who learns to see and ‘let be' (or notice and objectively accept what's going on), face the challenge, and focus on what needs to be done has a valuable skillset. Prompt the player to acknowledge their response to the situation and ‘let it be' while they focus on something that will help performance. Ideally, an athlete will attend to what they're doing, see an error or difficulty, take it for what it is, and respond to it. For example:
- Objective: I attempted a hang clean and didn't sit under the bar
- Optimal outcome: athlete responds to what actually happened and not what cooccurred in his or her head (thoughts [e.g. judgements, worries] or feelings [e.g. anxiety, frustration]) at the time
Mindfulness helps attention go where you want it to go while distractions are ignored and ‘let be,' whether those distractions are internal (e.g. thoughts, feelings) or external (e.g. visual noise, chatter) to you (Kaufman et al., 2018).
How does all this tie into cueing?
When you cue someone, you're looking for mindfulness. You want an athlete to attend to a focus point and behave in a certain way; potentially differently than what's habitual. This requires focused attention while distractions are ignored.
Cueing mindful attention:
When you cue, you probably already use anchors.
Anchors = points of focus for attention that are controllable and always present (Kaufman et al., 2018).
- Internal anchors might be body position, muscle action, breath, center of gravity (Kaufman et al., 2018; Schoenfeld & Contreras, 2016).
- Your body's voluntary processes and some internal senses are constant, controllable anchors.
- Heart rate is a constant, relatively controllable anchor, but only up to a point and with lots of practice. HR is an internal cue we often attend to when we're anxious and can create a feedback loop (e.g. I'm so nervous and I can feel my heart beating fast. I can feel my heart beating fast and that means I'm nervous).
- External anchors might be the bar, turf, dummy, (Kaufman et al., 2018; Schoenfeld & Contreras, 2016), effect movement has on the environment (Benz et al., 2016); velocity of a sport implement, velocity of a target object (Ferrendino & Southard, 2013; Southard, 2002)
- Your body's voluntary processes and some internal senses are constant, controllable anchors.
Cueing Examples:
Internal anchor: feel your feet plant; feel the turf
External, velocity-based anchor: explode off the blocks with as much velocity as possible
Blending anchors to get set, perform before the drill/play: feel your feet/feel the turf. Feel your body position. Explode off the line with as much velocity as possible.
For example: recreate a feeling every rep or every set (in the case of holds). Check in as you go through (halfway point) to see if you're keeping body position and the feeling.
Cueing Summary:
Focus of attention – and the anchor chosen – need to match the goal of the task you (Schoenfeld & Contreras, 2016).
You would do well teaching body positions with internal focus. ‘Feel this. Feel that. Contract these.' Avoid internal cueing for strength and power tasks.
Use external cues for simple power or strength movements, like sled pushes, cleans, dead lifts, bench, squat, medicine ball slams, medicine ball throws.
If you see something dangerous or fundamentally wrong, use your best judgement and cue however is necessary to ensure athlete safety.
General Suggestions for Using Mindfulness in Cueing:
Getting Started:
Introduce mindfulness skills for easy exercises first. Doing something easy with greater focus may be challenging and make it feel ‘awkward.' You can always integrate mindfulness into more advanced skills later. Help athletes learn a fundamental mindfulness skill by cueing: ‘when you notice yourself getting distracted from performance, notice it without judging, and gently turn your attention back to the task' (Gardner & Moore, 2004; Kaufman et al., 2018). Phrase it however you'd like to fit your style, but the key points are: notice distractions, don't judge yourself, the task, or the situation – recognize what is, turn attention back to the task.
Making Corrections that Encourage Mindfulness:
Ask Questions:
Ask athletes what they did right or wrong (Walsh, 2012). When they finish a set, you can ask what was felt (Benz, Winkelman, Porter, & Nimphius, 2016). This may take more time on the front end, but it aids long-term learning.
When you correct a movement, you can show players how to do it differently, have them do it, then ask questions, like: tell me what you felt; were there any differences from what you felt when you did it on your own; if you don't feel XYZ, what does it mean.
Pick Low-Hanging Fruit and Use What's Already Available:
Your cues before and feedback after performance will always be in supplement to the feedback naturally available via the senses (Benz et al., 2016). Building your coaching around what an athlete perceives and how the neuromuscular system communicates enhances the power of your words. It also improves the ability of athletes to self-regulate when you're not watching.
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Mike Stacey is a mental skills coach based in Plymouth, Michigan. He owns Mike Stacey Mental Skills (MS2), most frequently helps hockey players, specializing in work with goaltenders. Contact him with questions or to organize a workshop.
Phone: 814-207-4284
Email: [email protected]
