Learning To Move

And other things that would seem to help us play volleyball better.

Alright, the Spring of Learning continues as we go from Winkleman February to Rob Gray March.

Rob Gray is a smart guy. He wrote a book. The book is good. It’s called How We Learn To Move. You should read it.

When I planned this 3-month arc of content, I knew I wanted to address 3 books, Winkleman’s The Language of Coaching, Rob Gray’s How We Learn To Move, and Fader and co’s Coaching Athletes To Be Their Best. I figured the Winkleman articles would be the easiest. While TLoC has some great summaries of motor learning theory, at least half the book is basically a recipe book for making up practical movement cues. It lends itself well to practical practice application. But How We Learn To Move is much more theoretical. How then, do I translate that into coaching advice?

I decided that what I will NOT do is attempt to summarize the book. It’s a great book and it’s not very long. Just get it and read it. Also, Rob Gray has hundreds of hours of podcast audio available. Any summary I do is going to be less than ideal, especially when things get theoretical. If you want the theory, get the book or listen to Rob Gray direclty on his podcast.

What I will do is share some practice methods that have been inspired by, and I believe also supported by the research presented in, Rob Gray’s books and podcast.

Opportunities To Self-Organize

Hopefully it doesn’t violate my own no-summarizing rule by saying that a (the?) central theme of Gray’s work is the concept of self-organization. As I translate this into practical terms for volleyball coaches I think of it like this:

Opportunities To Self Organize
Opportunities For Athletes To Find A Movement Solution Organically Through Trial And Error Rather Than Reliance On Explicit Instruction

I think there’s lots of times for explicit instruction as you coach a volleyball team. In fact, I think there’s a certain segment of the coaches-who-are-into-learning-how-to-coach-better population that is surprised at how explicit I am at certain times. Yes, I will give explicit serving targets to players. No, players don’t get to decide the team’s serving philosophy.¹

As I said in a previous article:

One reason this is a challenge for youth players is that their capabilities evolve quickly from say 13 to 17. The game is quite different at those two ages. The easiest way to see this is in Sideout. At U-13, you choose serve. At U-17, you choose receive.

This means that some of what the game teaches you at U-13 is false at U-17! Some examples:

At U-13, if you have to send a freeball, you want to send it to deep zone 1, but at U-17, I’d rather send it to the short 2/3-seam.

At U-13, rather than send a freeball, you want to get a hand on the ball and hit a downball. At U-17, I’d rather set the ball over the net to a good spot than hit a downball.

At U-13, I’d rather not cover my hitter, because the ball will almost never be blocked, but it will be dug back over a lot and I’m often not big/fast enough to cover the court if it gets dug back over. At U-17, the ball will be blocked more than it will be dug over so I better get good at covering.

There’s a bunch more of these examples and you may not agree with every one. That’s okay, my system might look different in a few years. The game continues to evolve.

Players will self-organize in less-than-ideal ways. Or, they will have been explicitly organized by previous coaches in less-than-ideal ways.² So I'm here for the explicit instruction.

BUT.

When it comes to movement quality, movement efficiency, movement fluidity… that’s where self-organization rules. And that’s where How We Learn To Move has impacted me.

I’ve written before about the Goldilocks Method. I love this method for teaching just about any skill. I also find it a great method for allowing an athlete to self-organize into better movement quality. To me, the ideal I’m shooting for is to define the boundaries for an athlete and to then let them experiment within those boundaries.

Tactically Explicit, Technically Implicit

The line I like to walk is to be very explicit tactically, but allow the players to develop skill and touch implicitly. For example, let’s talk about middle hitting.

Tactically, we want:
(1) The middle to hit the ball at the peak of the set (before the ball starts to descend).
(2) The hitter at the peak of her jump.
(3) The hitter to be at full extension.

I used to talk more about what step to be on. And that’s a good ballpark. You can’t accomplish (1), (2), and (3) if you’re on the second step of a 4-step approach. But whether you need to be on a “hard 3” or a “soft 4” or somewhere in that vicinity? That can come down to some individual difference.

Some players have a deeper knee bend when they jump, and they take a little longer to get off the ground. Some players have a quicker jumping style where their step-close is faster and they get off the ground quicker.

Also: players that jump higher take longer to get to the peak of their jump. A 12” difference in jump height is a 0.1 second difference in the time that it takes to get to the peak of the jump. When we’re talking about a quick set that’s only in the air for a half-second or less anyway, that can significantly alter timing.

What this looks like is a coaching method that many of you have probably already tried:

Coach: “Okay, I want you to be way early on this rep. Like, already jumping as she sets.”

Player: (Does it)

Coach: “Okay, now I want you to be late. Like, not even quite on your 3rd step.”

Player: (Does it)

Coach: “Okay, this rep, do whatever you want on this rep.”

Player: (Starts browsing Tik Tok)

Ok, so sometimes self-organization backfires, but you get what I mean. This is the Goldilocks framework where you have an explicit target from a tactical or systems perspective, and you help the player understand the boundaries, and then they experiment within those boundaries to find the solution.

One of the keys with this method is also the opportunity to cycle through a few rounds of this. That variability helps the player get a better understanding of effect of timing variations.

There’s another critical piece to this: the player also has to let herself self-organize. Many players have too strong of an explicit voice in their own head. They are trying to command their own bodies in the same way that a micro-managing coach would do. We know that External Focus Of Attention improves movement speed and accuracy.

Therefore, half of the benefit of this 3-rep cycle is that you introduce some variability around a not-quite-known point that the player will experiment toward finding. The other half is that, by explicitly defining the boundaries, the player has freedom to put her focus more externally on the third rep and just allow her body to find the solution.

When we need a critical sideout in a match, we don’t want a player’s spotlight of attention down at her feet, we want it up, seeing the ball and the opponent block. Incorporating this 3-rep cycle where the athlete has the spotlight a little more proximal on the first 2 reps and then farther away on the third rep also trains this quality.

Have you experimented with any of this idea of self-organizing within defined boundaries? Are there any areas of the game that you want to use this concept but don’t know how? Drop me a comment.

1. Although, in the grand tradition of every rule contains its negation, players are always allowed to, in the moment, ignore the plan and make a play but… you better make the play when you go rogue. And you better have a good reason for it.

2. Every club coach just nodded thinking about the dumb stuff their players’ high school coaches taught them. And then every college coach just nodded thinking about the dumb stuff their players’ club coaches taught them. And then every National Team coach just nodded…