High Performance Sport Skill Instruction, Training, and Coaching. 9 Powerful Principles for Athletes to Flow and Get in the Zone

INTRODUCTION

Are you a pro athlete in the making, but don’t know how to make your way to the next level of your performance? Do you have all the talent required to excel in your sport but have no clue on how to hone your body and train your mind to the level needed to compete at the highest of levels? Well, I’ve got some great news for you, because that’s exactly what I’m going to coach you through in this book.

There’s a powerful way to learn complicated motor skills that isn’t covered in the traditional methods of coaching. This way embraces the power of not only the body but also of the mind, to make full use of the powerful biological system that is the human being. It allows us to flow our way into the zone of peak performance, enabling us to learn and excel as athletes, as well as in all areas of our lives. And this is the breakthrough process I’ll be coaching you through in this book.

By covering nine different principles for improving and excelling as an athlete, we’ll go on a learning journey of how to perform at the highest levels for your chosen sport. Through these potent principles, you’ll gain a thorough understanding of the potential that we humans possess. And, as we develop your knowledge and skills, you’ll learn how to trust in not only your own physical capabilities, but how to tap into the unlimited potential of our subconscious minds as you develop the ways and means to automate your motor movements, enter into the flow state, and get into the zone of peak performance in every practice, game, or competition. The best news is that these principles are universal and can be applied to any and every sport, whether played individually or as a team. They are also relevant to every sportsperson, whether they are a beginner or well on their way to reaching the level of a professional athlete. You have the power within you to achieve great things. Let me show you how.

Without further ado, let’s dive right on into the way to become the pro athlete that both you and I know you are destined to be.

1

THE BIG PROBLEM

When it comes to learning the skills that are needed to become a pro at a sport or to take your game to the next level, there’s a common problem that most people fall victim to. This misconception stems from the belief that meticulously and accurately defining the mechanics of a physical skill is the best way to learn it and reach higher levels of performance. This is the way that most of us are instructed when learning and improving a skill. But, as logical and reasonable as this approach may seem, it can cause much less progress than you expect, and far more headaches than you deserve. Let me tell you why.

The key flaw in this way of learning new skills comes from its ‘mechanical’ approach to defining how the human body works. We are not clunky contraptions of scrap metal and, as much like a supercomputer as our brains may be, they’re not computers. In fact, our brains are far more powerful. Many studies done on skills acquisition have shown that the learning and performance process is far more automatic, if not natural, when we go in for athletic, physical movements rather than trying to understand the nuances, the ins and outs, of every move that we make. Our brains and nervous systems are incredibly resourceful. Rather than overwhelming them with analytical information, we should arm them with performance-based data, such as the way it feels like, or what we see, when doing the action we are trying to learn.

The optimum way to perform athletic actions is to do them as naturally and automatically as possible. This cannot be achieved if you are trying to over-analyze every movement that you make. When you reach the stage of being able to perform a skill or action ‘automatically’ in a sport, you’re onto a winning formula and are then able to move confidently on to the next level of your performance. This should be one of your main goals of training and is often thought of as one of the defining characteristics of a true athlete. This is how I overcame the Big Problem of skills acquisition and became an expert in any sport that I set my body and mind to and it is how you can too.

In this chapter, we’re going to go over the basics of how our bodies learn physical skills. Think of it as your introduction to the way that an athlete’s brain (such as yours) works, and as your guide on how to evolve in any sport through the use of motor skill learning. Let’s get you over the mechanical clunkiness of over-analyzing and onto the right path for successfully and efficiently refining your skills development process.

SKILLS ACQUISITION 101

When we think of improving our performance as an athlete, we’re mainly talking about refining our motor skills. These are the skill sets that define our body’s ability to complete certain actions and manage our movements to achieve specific goals. As we learn to perform better at skills such as running, weightlifting, perfecting that golf swing, or even just reaching for your cup of coffee, we are improving our control of the motor that is our body. This is what motor learning, or skills acquisition, is all about.

What is Motor Learning?

At its core, motor skill learning refers to the practice we go through to learn how to carry out actions or specific movements quicker and more accurately. To learn a motor skill, you need to practice it over and over again during many training sessions until you reach peak performance, or the plateau, for that skill. When we reach this stage, we should be able to now do that motor skill without having to focus on the movement or concentrate on the action. In other words, we’ll be doing it automatically. As we’ll get to in a little bit, this is the stage of performance you should aim to get to for every skill that you learn and practice. In other words, acquiring a motor skill is a combination of learning and experience.

Learning

There are two ways that we learn motor skills. The first is known as the fast phase and deals with any skill that you can improve in quickly and effectively during a single training session. The second is known as the slow phase and is for skills that require a more gradual, steady improvement over many training sessions until you reach the performance plateau. Knowing whether you are practicing a motor skill that requires fast phase learning or slow phase learning is key to developing an effective training regiment, ensuring that you get the best bang for your training bucks or time, and making sure that you don’t injure yourself in the process of learning it. It will also help you to keep motivated and not get downhearted at the small amount of progress made over a single or a couple of training sessions. This is especially true if you haven’t worked your muscles or body in the way that this motor skill requires before, which is always going to be the most learning-intensive of practice sessions.

Experience

In terms of practice, training, and experience, we can split skill acquisition into three stages. They are:

1. Encoding

This first stage of experience in motor skill development involves practicing the movements and actions to learn what they feel like and how your body needs to work. The encoding stage is often linked to the fast phase of learning, as you should see quite a bit of progress in your encoding sessions. As the name suggests, when we encode, we are aiming to experience what it’s like to do the movements of the motor skill and to begin converting that experience into muscle memory, or at least storing the way that it feels in our brains for future reference.

2. Consolidating

After we’ve encoded the skill we’re trying to learn, the next thing to do is to consolidate. Consolidation means that you bring things together into a single, more coherent, whole. In terms of skills acquisition, this means putting together the different movements you have encoded into a single motor skill, sometimes even combining different motor skills together to do so. This generally happens between your training sessions and is often a completely subconscious process. This is great news for you because it means that the best thing you can do for this stage of motor learning is relax, recover, or even sleep. When we are relaxing or sleeping, our brains aren’t concentrating on a million different things or interpreting a bunch of sensory inputs so that we can continue to make sense of what’s around us. This means that it’s the perfect time for it to focus on consolidating what we have learned or practiced that day. In terms of the fast and slow learning phases, consolidation can be thought of as the space in-between them, or even as the glue that links them together.

3. Retaining and Recalling

The final stage of learning a motor skill is called retention. This stage is more closely linked with the slow learning phase and happens both during training sessions and during