Table of Contents

• The 4-Ingredient Skill Cake

  • Quote of the Week

  • An Even Deeper Dive

The 4-Ingredient Skill Cake

Pat-a-cake pat-a-cake baker’s man / Bake me a cake as fast as you can

In coaching, complexity is constant. That’s why I like frameworks — they help make sense of the chaos. One that I’ve found myself coming back to over and over is what I call the 4-Ingredient Skill Cake. It’s the lens I use whenever I’m designing or reviewing drills.

The 4 ingredients are:

1. Repetition

2. Variability

3. Relevance

4. Challenge

Just like baking, the art lies in knowing which ingredients to emphasise and how to balance them for the outcome you want.

Here’s a deeper look at each ingredient - what it means, why it matters, and how to spot when it’s missing.

Repetition

A fundamental principle of learning is simple: to get better at a skill, you have to do the skill. Repetition drives retention — the ability to retrieve and use the skill later. Because we only get limited time with players on the field, our drills must create as many meaningful reps as possible. If we design a drill for a specific skill but players only perform it a handful of times, we haven't made good use of our time.

Two things I’ve seen that consistently kill repetitions: lines and lecture. They sound basic, but they show up at every level.

Lines — The longer a player waits between reps, the fewer chances they have to improve. Many “fundamental” drills are short and sharp, maybe five minutes long. If a player waits a minute between turns, they only get five total reps. It’s hard to develop a skill they barely get to perform.

Lectures — I once watched an eight-minute tackling drill where each player completed only two tackles because the coach delivered a mini-speech after each rep. Constant stoppages replace action with talk. Players lose opportunities to perform the skill, and coaches lose opportunities to watch players and identify what truly needs coaching.

When designing a drill to maximise repetitions, ask yourself:

1. How many reps should each player realistically get in the time allotted?

2. How will I coach this in a way that protects repetition for every player?

Variability

What separates the best from the rest?

The best athletes can achieve their desired outcome no matter the situation. As Kevin Durant puts it in the Netflix series Court of Gold, “it’s on me as a player to be able to adapt to anything. I think that’s what all the best players do.”

Six-time Super Bowl–winning NFL coach Bill Belichick is even more direct: “adapt or lose.”

Adaptability is widely recognised as one of the most important traits an athlete can have.

If we want to develop adaptable players, our drills must challenge that adaptability and the key to doing so is variability. When designing drills, our job is to create variability. One of the most influential ideas in skill acquisition captures this perfectly: “repetition without repetition.” The aim isn’t identical repetitions, but reps that require players to adapt their skill and find new solutions. We want players working through different versions of the same problem, rather than repeating the same solution over and over.

When watching a drill for variability, two useful questions to ask yourself are:

1. Do the reps look different from each other?

2. Are players generating multiple solutions, or are they repeating the same one?

Relevance

Why do we train?

That’s not a trick question! At its core the reason we train is to prepare players to perform in the game. Not exactly rocket science! But if that’s the purpose, then whatever we do at training must transfer to the game. Otherwise, it’s a waste of time.

Given that training time is limited, it’s vital that coaches consider how relevant their drills are for the players they’re designing them for. In the skill acquisition world, this is known as representative training design.

Making training relevant is a challenge at every level. In the mid-2010s, I was building out kicking drills for players and came across a report titled Challenging Traditional Practice Approaches to AFL Kicking Skill Development by Damian Farrow. It was a genuine paradigm-shifter for me. It became almost a skill acquisition bible as I did more skill coaching.

One table in the report has stuck with me for years. It compared the percentage of different types of kicks at an AFL club in training versus in games.

The discrepancy is enormous. If training looks so different from the game, are we really preparing players for what they’ll face?

Of course, it’s worth noting that we deliberately train certain elements more than others based on priority. Some discrepancy is inevitable. But the differences highlighted were significant - significant enough to ask why training and games could look so far apart.

The conclusion I’ve come to is this: too often, when we design drills for skills like kicking, we start from the skill and move toward the game. For example, we begin with a simple kicking action (players kicking back and forth) and then layer in game-like elements.

I’d argue we should reverse that. Start from the game, then work backwards. Chunk the game into smaller parts until you reach the level you want. When you start with the game, the demands placed on the player’s skill stay aligned with what they’ll face in competition.

This small shift in where you begin the design process has a big impact on how relevant your drills become. It also makes it easier to tailor drills to the needs of specific players. For example, in AFL, the kicking demands of key forwards differ from those of inside midfielders. If both groups are working on kicking, their drills should look different to reflect the realities of their game.

If you’re aiming to design drills that are truly relevant for your players, do two things:

1. Start from the game and work backwards, and

2. Ask yourself these questions:

• What does the game demand of the players I’m coaching?

• Does the drill look like the game and place similar demands on them?

Challenge

Finding the right challenge point is one of the true arts of coaching. Coaches constantly wrestle with a tension: we want to support learning and growth, but we also want the reassurance that players can execute skills cleanly and consistently. That internal pull often nudges us toward creating drills that look successful, rather than drills that genuinely develop skill.

As Mark Guadagnoli writes in Practice to Learn, Play to Win, “people unwittingly set up practice for success rather than setting up practice for learning.” It’s a trap most coaches fall into, because success is visible, comforting and easy to measure.

But as we have discussed throughout, what we ultimately want is retention and transfer. Learning science tells us time and time again: struggle is what builds learning. The struggle is the learning. That means we need to design training environments where players must stretch, adapt, test solutions, and sometimes fail.

A phrase from a skill acquisition I went to has stayed with me:
“Mistakes are the currency of learning.”
This shifts the coach’s job. Instead of eliminating errors, we intentionally design environments that create just enough error for learning to take place.

Of course, challenge has nuance. If the drill is too hard, players become overwhelmed and learning disappears. And with beginners, early success can help motivation and prevent dropout. But once players are more experienced or gain expertise, meaningful challenge is essential.

When designing a drill, you should have a clear picture in your mind of the right challenge point, and an internal trigger for when it’s too easy, too hard, or just right. Here are a few practical rules of thumb used by coaches I’ve worked with:

• Aim for about 70% success (meaning players fail roughly 1 in 3 reps)

• If a player succeeds three times in a row, the task is probably too easy

• If players solve the problem the same way repeatedly, the drill isn’t challenging their adaptability (this is where challenge and variability interact)

Challenge will always involve a degree of art. Human learning is messy, not perfectly measurable, and rarely obvious in real time. But one thing is clear: challenge drives learning, and it must be intentionally built into drill design, not left to chance.

These four ingredients form the foundation of effective skill-development drills. But like any good recipe, the magic comes from knowing exactly what you're trying to create. The coach is the baker: the clearer you are about the “skill cake” you want, the more intentionally you can adjust the ingredients.

Each ingredient interacts with the others. If you want high repetitions, you’ll naturally need to dial down variability and relevance. If you want high challenge, you may increase variability but reduce the number of reps to manage cognitive load. That back-and-forth is the art of coaching.

In the end, great coaches don’t just run drills, they design learning. And understanding your ingredients is what allows you to do it with purpose.

Trevor Ragan from The Learner Lab is excellent at explaining how we can better set up our learning environments.

In this article he uses a Tiger analogy to help highlight three tools for better practice. Keep an eye out for some of the “4 ingredients” that pop up!

Want to discuss anything you’ve read? Email us at [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you!

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