Hey Coach: Don't Gum Up The System

“Too much concern about how well one is doing a task sometimes disrupts performance by loading short-term memory with pointless anxious thoughts."

You’ve heard it thousands times. 

Someone yelling at a player to keep their head down, stay back, shorten up, keep your shoulder closed, throw strikes, use your legs more, and so on. More likely than not, you have been the one doing the yelling.

For a coach or a parent, one of the more difficult actions during a game is inaction. 

We see something from the bench that can help a player. We want to shout the instruction. But what is best for the player is for the coach or parent to keep their mouth shut.

Consider this: In Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast And Slow, the behavioral economist noted that a person is best equipped to complete a task when they are not consumed with the details of how to complete it.

“Too much concern about how well one is doing a task sometimes disrupts performance by loading short-term memory with pointless anxious thoughts,” Kahneman wrote, almost as if it was directed for the fence-clinging parent shouting from behind the plate or the coach yelling cues from the dugout during the middle of an at bat. 

Too many cues or instructions during an activity -- such as telling a hitter to load their hips, get the foot down early, hands back, etc -- can reduce a player’s capacity to accomplish the overall task. This effect has been studied fairly extensively across a number of activities:

During competition, athletes can get overwhelmed with direction. It can be advice from coaches or from their own head. The more instruction bouncing around, the higher the chance of “micro-choking” -- the act that sport psychologist Gabriele Wulf says happens when our brains override our automatic movements that we’ve trained hard to instill. 

“Thinking about how they move constrains the mind,” says Andy Bass, the Pittsburgh Pirates’ mental performance director, who explained this effect on a recent episode of Ahead of the Curve podcast. His advice? Once competition is underway, it’s best to allow players to perform. 

Hitting, pitching, fielding and throwing are complicated tasks that require thousands of hours of training to instill the right muscle memory to achieve the intended results. Shouting instruction is likely going to gum up the system.

So what should coaches do instead? 

One recommendation from Minnesota Twins minor league hitting coach Matt Borgschulte was rather than discuss mechanics during the game, ask players questions after the at bat (or, better yet, the game) that are focused on the process: 

Were you on time? 

Were you in rhythm? 

Was it a good pitch to hit? 

Same goes on the pitching side. Twins pitching coach Wes Johnson says his preferred method for in-game communication also involves asking questions versus giving instructions. By asking them questions, he says, the player will solve their own problem. 

A last second reminder is not going to help. You can address mechanical shortcomings during practice time. Or -- and here’s a better option -- don’t focus on mechanics at all. 

Players often learn better through constraints-led practice and training, using external goals and targets as opposed to trying to implement mechanical instructions give by coaches. If a practice or drill is well designed, players should make the physical adjustments on their own. 

It can be a difficult habit to break, which is why Bass said that during practices, he would carry around a pitch clicker and count the number of verbal instructions he gave with the objective to limit those instances to as minimal as possible.

During the competition, let the player feel it out for themselves. The next time you feel like blurting out advice from the dugout, stop and try to avoid entangling your players with too many thoughts while they are in the batter’s box or on the mound.