What the hell is training?

I wrote a brief article to the cricket coaches I support in my role with New Zealand Cricket. It was centred on Steph Curry and his approach to practice, which I’d recently heard described as ‘deliberate play’. I got a few responses to the article, and the main theme of the responses was 'I get that and I often am looking at ways to create deliberate play (or whatever you want to call it) in our environment, but the biggest challenge I find is getting my players to buy in to that approach’. So that's what I'm keen to explore in this post. I’m growing the audience for it though, as I feel it’s prevalent for any coach, no matter your context. How can you get your players to buy in to a different approach at training?

Rick Rubin (famous music producer), says:

This is such a powerful quote, and it’s been going round in my head a fair bit over the last wee while. Why? Because an overlooked aspect of leadership is helping your people question norms, assumptions and ‘ways things have always been done’. In my context, working with High Performance Cricket coaches, one of their biggest challenges is influencing their players beliefs and assumptions around training, in particular what training looks like. I think players are in the space that Rubin talks about in the quote more often than not. They are taking for granted what training is, what it should look like and feel like, because they are so fixed around what it has always looked like and felt like. Which I think goes some way towards understanding why it feels so hard at times to get them to buy in to different ways of doing things. We're asking them to think about stuff that is invisible to them, that’s unquestioned. It's like the joke about the two fish, where one fish says to the other 'how’s the water?' and the other replies 'what's water?' Water, for players, is how they’ve always trained.

The thing is, we, as humans, are quite bad at knowing what is actually beneficial for us from a learning perspective. Players are no exception. There are numerous studies, from school/university contexts that reinforce this idea. One (from the book Think Again by Adam Grant) asked students two things; which lecture style they preferred and which lecture style they felt actually helped them learn their content. The content they were learning was related to physics principles. Students received a traditional lecture (but by all accounts it was delivered really well), and then received an active, practical lesson which had experiments and problems to solve. They were tested after both for how much they learnt. What the research found was the students rated the traditional lecture as more enjoyable and better for their learning, but they actually learnt more from the practical lesson. The practical required more mental effort, which made it less fun but led to deeper understanding.

I think there is such a good parallel here to traditional training activities/drills (traditional lectures) to deliberate play (the practical lesson). Deliberate play requires more mental effort, often more physical effort and importantly, less success. It might feel like learning isn’t happening, but it is. It may just take a bit longer to appear, but just like the research above mentions, it leads to deeper understanding. It’s leading players to understand why, not just how. If our players know this, I think they’re more likely to buy-in. If they know it will feel uncomfortable and less enjoyable, but they can see the benefit (better long term learning), they’ll be more open. This also requires us (and them) to be patient, to persevere when it looks messy. We may need to ‘sell’ this to our players. If they understand it’s normal to look messy, to feel a bit crap while training and to make mistakes but it’s going to help long term, then we’re more likely to get the buy-in from them that we know we need to really help them grow.

When Apple developed the iPod (something that was new and different), rather than pushing the features of the iPod (e.g. it has 2gb of space) they pushed the benefits (you can carry 500 of your favourite songs around with you in your pocket, wherever you go). Salespeople and marketers know that people don't really care about the features of something, what gets them hooked are the benefits. In fact, it’s almost a rule in sales. Sell the benefits, not the features! The thinking is that by focusing on benefits, you’re:

• directly addressing the needs and desires of the customer

• showing how the product can solve a customers problem

• creating a stronger emotional connection for the customer

Some of the benefits around deliberate play are:

• Transfer of learning - If we are designing activities that replicate performance in games, then it becomes far easier for our players to perform in games. They are experiencing the same situations, emotions and patterns that they’ve seen in training.

• Amplify motivation, which leads to accelerated learning. If someone is highly motivated to learn, they’re far more likely to actually learn

• It can help with the grind of daily training, particularly over a long season. The day-to-day routine of training does become boring and mundane, I would say as much for you as for your players. Incorporating different ideas, games and scenarios are a great way to keep that boredom at bay.

These are worthwhile benefits to share with our players. Who from your playing group doesn’t want better learning, increased motivation to train and less boredom and monotony? But are we telling this story? Are we even aware of this ourselves, or, as Rick Rubin says, are we taking the norms of training for granted because they’re so prevalent?

One of the coaches I’ve been working with over the past two seasons has been pretty bold in his training design this season with his team. He's tried a whole lot of different things, all designed to keep training purposeful, intentful (that's a made up word), interesting and representative of cricket. But, the last time we spoke, I think the exact quote from him was:

And he's right, if we go too far, too quickly, we run the risk of losing the players. It's too foreign to them. It's like if I tried to get my four year old son to tidy up the table and do the dishes after he’s eaten his dinner.... It's too much too soon (although I’m targeting five years old for that ha!) So the question then becomes, what moments can we find to try something new or different, to create that deliberate play that Steph Curry talked about. You'll know better than me (because you know you’re contexts), but we can slowly increase the amount of time or things we try within a session as our players get more comfortable. Start with the final 10 mins of a training, and then grow that to 15 minutes, then 20 minutes. Can one training each month be ‘scenario day’, and then that scales to two trainings a month, then three. I’m sure most of you are doing this type of thing already, which is great. I guess my challenge is can you do more?

So what’s the takeaway here. I think it’s important to understand that your players don’t know what they don’t know, so when you challenge them with new and different ways of training, you’re going to get push back. But you can turn the table on their push back. You can talk to them around the benefits of what you’re proposing. You can talk to them around what to expect and what it will feel like, normalise the frustration. And you can be smart by drip feeding some new ideas slowly, and then looking to scale it up.

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