“Wax on, Wax off.”
This iconic saying from the movie The Karate Kid is familiar to many children of the ‘80s and ‘90s. But what does it have to do with clear, effective communication and training your coach’s eye? In the famous scene, Mr. Miyagi uses a principle pattern and creates context in order to teach his protégé proper technique. “Daniel San, show me sand the floor.” Daniel shows him a half-hearted arm wave. Mr. Miyagi, with grace and repetition, shows how “sand the floor” and “wax on, wax off” movements can be a principle action in karate. He is able to take a simple activity such as “wax on, wax off” and—with a twist of a few variables—turn it into a clear, concise, and accessible message.
Mr. Miyagi could have easily used the movement of painting the fence to teach Daniel the art of snatching a kettlebell. To illustrate, the kettlebell snatch requires smooth movement of the arm from the back swing to the overhead position. When painting a fence, you do not want to have a straight arm, as the application of the paint off the brush would be very thin. Instead, you want to be close to the fence—similarly, you want the bell close to the body in order to tame the arc and maximize efficiency. Think about one of the most common drills used to tame the ark, the wall drill: we have a student set up in front of a wall to snatch and not hit the wall, inching in closer and closer, even practicing movements without the bell. I am sure many of you have heard our instructors use this drill or drawn on this example from The Karate Kid yourself to teach the kettlebell snatch.
Any coach can teach a movement but teaching a student to embody the action itself is a whole other beast. For this, the coach must have a keen eye for an individual’s form, fine-tuned attention to detail, and the ability to create relatable, contextualized drills.
The Coach’s Eye Toolkit
It takes a specific set of tools to carve a coach’s eye—play, skill transfer, and deliberate practice are all critical in training one’s eye for movement.
- Play: The idea of exploring movement in order to learn more, collect information, feel more, and improve. At the end of the day, movement should be fun and foster creativity. Don’t confine yourself to other people’s rules. Find movements that work for your body. In the words of Carl Paoli: “Don’t let other people’s thoughts limit yours.”
- Skill Transfer: The ability to take a skill or knowledge and apply it elsewhere.
- Deliberate Practice: A specific kind of practice that is purposeful and structured with the aim to evolve and improve. This requires sharp focus, and the tighter the feedback loop the better. Ideally, each drill should have a clear goal and give immediate feedback, be it from students or video playback.
Today’s new demand for online coaching has transformed a key sensory teaching method—the coach isn’t able to physically touch the student, but they can achieve similar results by using tactile cues in the student’s environment (i.e. walls, furniture, etc.). The greater emphasis is now placed on the two remaining methods: verbal and visual. With this new online structure, it is critical to reassess and refine how we assist our students in improving their awareness.
“…Sometimes it is not so much the amount of knowledge we have on a particular subject, but rather how we gather and influence the information we deliver.”—Carl Paoli
Part 1: Communication and The Coach
Communication
Communication, or the strategic exchanging of information, helps coaches teach effectively by demonstrating ideas and movements verbally, visually, and nonverbally.
- Verbal communication—the language and methods we use to instruct
- Nonverbal communication—tactile cueing, body language, active listening
- Written communication—program on the board
- Visual communication—physical demonstration or visuals on the board
A good coach must be able to communicate in all forms. One key tool that coaches can utilize in every form of communication is context.
Context helps a coach assign meaning to a movement by relating it to concepts that the student can understand. This will translate the essence of a movement, providing relevant information that influences the student’s understanding of the actions they take. The movement table provided in the paragraphs below is a strong tool coaches can use to build context as well as see, scale, and break down a movement. First, let’s dive more into the role of context in communication.
Context and communication
As coaches, it is often difficult to find a balance between clear and effective communication and our desire to share knowledge. We are often eager to get our students moving perfectly, hitting close to all the desired points of performance on the first try while maintaining safety as our top priority. We have an innate enthusiasm to share our knowledge and use our language to cue and correct. By creating context for our students, we develop effective communication skills, make complex moves more accessible, and train our coach’s eye. Context creates a more personal relationship between the student and the skill they are learning.
In The Karate Kid, the movements of painting and polishing the car were subconsciously training Daniel for his chosen sport. Karate requires a quiet mind and is an art form of discipline, patience, and practice—it’s easy to draw parallels to the StrongFirst approach to strength, be it via kettlebells, barbell, or bodyweight. Mr. Miyagi was training the brain, establishing movement standards that provided a seamless transition to Karate. Thus, Daniel’s ability to block a punch can be attributed to Mr. Miyagi’s teaching Daniel to “paint the fence.” Mr. Miyagi takes the principle action and gives it a story, allowing Daniel to visualize and learn this movement in the context of his own daily life.
Context is essential to maintain student engagement in our highly disciplined and repetitive craft. In other words, context is key to doing the mundane well.
Same program, different outcomes
This is not limited to teaching individual movements, but also includes training sessions. It is easy for a coach to get different end results and stimuli from the same workout based on how they deliver it to their students and the purpose they convey.
A great example is well-known CrossFit benchmark workout “Fran” which consists of alternating “thrusters” (barbell front squat plus push press) and pullups for sets of 21, 15, and 9 done for time. The prescribed weight is 95 pounds for men and 65 pounds for women. Seeing this on the board at the gym, one would not know what the desired stimulus is unless they are familiar with CrossFit. Even then, they still might not. It’s not until a coach builds context around it and gives it parameters that it develops meaning and purpose. Without this, a student might think, “Well, my thruster is heavier than that, so I’ll go Rx and finish the workout in twelve minutes” when the desired stimulus meant the workout needed to be closer to five minutes.
Another example could be as simple as four sets of three two-handed swings done every 30 seconds. Without a weight or a coach describing how they want a student to feel for those three reps of the swing a student could easily pick up a weight too heavy or too light and not get the desired stimulus and therefore adaptation or performance gains from the piece.
Example of a context and cue
Take the Get-Up, for example. In the roll to elbow, a coach can say, “Drive up through the hip” and get a very different result from saying, “Push your foot through the floor.” This is also an example of applying the coach’s understanding of the principles of irradiation, feed-forward tension, and dominanta (taught soundly in the StrongFirst Bodyweight Certification) to give context and drive a desired outcome—if we understand where energy is going to and from as well as what muscle to use, we can better decide what language to use as well.
- Irradiation: “Squeeze” energy out of different muscles and channel it to the prime movers. Ivanov, StrongFirst Bodyweight Training Manual, 2017 Edition, pg. 9.
- Feed-Forward Tension: Must be able to tense muscles maximally without external load. StrongFirst Bodyweight Training Manual, 2017 Edition, pg. 9.
- Dominanta: Generate tension—but focus on lifting. Focus on the movement and the muscles generating enough tension to enhance the lift. Find the optimal ratio of dividing your neural drive into lifting and tension. StrongFirst Bodyweight Training Manual, 2017 Edition, pg. 9.
Another example is the sometimes controversial cue of “bend the knee” versus “shoot your butt back” for the kettlebell swing. Both phrases are meant to elicit the same desired outcome, but they create two completely different visuals in one’s mind. As a result, they can either lead a student closer or further away from the minimum standard. Coaches teaching the swing to a large group should avoid the cue “bend the knee” because the vast majority will squat rather than hinge. Given that ultimately, the minimum set performance standard is a hinge, not a squat this cue would likely not generate the intended movement.
Training an eye for movement
Now that we understand the underlying principles of communication and context, let’s move on to its application in carving an “eye” for movement.
As StrongFirst instructors, we aim to teach by a fixed set of guidelines and methods—how do we practice this? How do we take it to the next level and improve our effectiveness as coaches? A good coach doesn’t just move well; they have the technical knowledge and know-how to communicate this movement to others. A great coach, by that token, knows how to give the movement meaning and purpose—how to make their student feel and experience the skill and apply it elsewhere.
For the purpose of this article, I am not going to break this down into group class setting, versus one-on-one or online settings. I am going to assume that the people reading this know the StrongFirst principles’ method of teaching. You know how to break down movement, understand basic coaching terminology, use and teach the principles of adaptation and what drives it, and have a basic understanding of how human beings learn.
Rather, what I am going to do is give you the tools you need to improve your coach’s “eye,” improve your communication by using context, and practice training both your eye and communication through deliberate practice and the concept of play.
Deliberate practice alone will not keep you engaged and showing up, but it does allow for exploration. Start with context, then add deliberate practice to refine your skill, and then add “play” to explore with a developed eye and refined communication.
This diagram illustrates the key concepts required to train your eye as you develop as a coach. What links these all together is the coach’s ability regarding the aforementioned “skill transfer.” Skill transfer also refers to a movement being used for performance, i.e. feet position for the general public versus a rower in the swing.
It is well understood that simple, clear, and compellinglanguage with deliberate inflection and selective bouts of intentional silence are key to mastering the art of clear, effective communication. For a coach to be simple and clear, they must be familiar with the general points of performance and minimum standards set for safe, effective movement. But if we add context the instruction it becomes compelling. Context helps us build on the movement and give it more meaning. A story in our mind and body, or even just a visual, will help a coach break a movement down to different levels for different purposes or audiences.
Movement table
The first “tool” in training your eye is a task given to me by my first mentor, Logan Gelbrich, theowner of Deuce Gym and the Author of ‘Going Right’. This tool helps a coach learn the basic minimal standards of performance and safety, and it teaches them to have a simple, consistent explanation of why one does the movement. He asked me to complete a table like the one below for the six foundational movements in the gym’s program. This table can be applied to any movement and is the minimum requirement for any coach, in my opinion. For the purpose of this article, I have used the kettlebell swing as our example.
Simple enough?
NOTE: * With Common Fault & Correction, give one verbal and one tactile cue and correction for each common fault. A demonstration is practiced via video testing or in person.
Part 2: Tools for the Coach’s Eye
Play and movement
Over time, I have experienced new forms of training and worked with athletes from an array of sports, including rowing, rugby, volleyball, jiu jitsu, horseback riding, hockey, and dance. In order to understand their sport and how I can help them, I added additional columns to the table above to help me build a more in-depth understanding and take my view of movement from a macro view to a micro view.
This was also around the time I had the pleasure of being taught by Carl Paoli at one of his Free+Style seminars, where he opened the weekend with one sentence that unlocked a key learning device for me and drew on my love of movement and play. I may be paraphrasing a bit, but my takeaway was this: “Stop looking at movement and look at the shapes the body makes.”
This is when “play” became important to me, shifting my review from a textbook understanding of skill and movement to a physical map of sensation and a mental image of the movement and its principle patterns. This requires an understanding of skill transfer, context and deliberate practice as well as an ability to scan movement from a wide-angle lens down to a pinhole and back. This opened my mind to the art of movement and how we learn—I started to see movements inside movements. I started to feelmovement.
As children, we explore or “play” in order to learn. And we learn our most by engaging all of our senses. Our brains develop most in the early stages of crawling, because this is when the majority of our senses are being stimulated at once—our sense of touch, sight, hearing, and possibly even taste (if you find something intriguing on the floor). We are motivated to move because we see an object we want to know about. As we begin to walk, fewer of our senses are engaged because we are taking up less surface space and our line of sight is now much higher.
As a coach, once the basic understanding of movement is there, I see the concept of “play” requiring a coach to do the movement, feel the movement, observe the movement in others, scan the movement, and then try different ways to progress, regress, enhance, or apply a movement. This is when we can find new ways to coach, drill, or apply a movement and give it more meaning and purpose for our students. Play requires observation, action, context, and deliberate practice to see if what we think actually works.
I went from seeing the basic view to a much more highly detailed movement allowing me to teach a student to see beyond the textbook understanding and move well with the least deviation from the set standard. Experiencing the movement helped to give it more meaning and allowed me to better communicate a feeling that the student could relate to or apply to a greater context in their chosen field or goal.
I will continue to use the swing to illustrate this. Please note that each level includes but does not illustrate the previous level.
You will notice that the foundation of the original table is there, but we have added layers that help to build context and show you movement in motion. In turn, this helps you to scale better or even substitute a movement if required to help a student relate to, see, and feel a movement.
“Seeing” movement plus skill transfer
The kettlebell swing for rowing. When I teach my teenage rowing students the swing, I break down the rowing stroke into its parts, showing them where the swing or another movement is in each part of the rowing stroke. The rowing stroke is comprised of a hip hinge and squatting movement through the recovery, catch, and drive sequences. Athletes must learn to quickly generate force while maintaining proper position and alignment. Similarly, in the swing, they must learn to quickly relax and absorb the force of the bell for the next repetition. These are all performance aspects of the swing. Showing and explaining this to students helps illustrate the movement and teach them how it will improve their performance in the sport of rowing.
The below table is an example of how I build context for my students and help them to better understand the movement, its application and its “why.”
Less obvious is the transition of the kettlebell clean, which can be seen in the transition of the ring muscle-up but in reverse motion. A coach can use this comparison to help a student understand the transition of the muscle-up or use it as a strength tool to help the ring muscle-up. This is also a great example of seeing movement inside a movement and seeing a shape as opposed to just the movement itself.
Movement and skill transfer
Being able to see movement in other areas of life, sports or other movements doesn’t just help the coach’s ability to coach, see, correct, and give context—it can also help a coach teach a movement that might be out of their wheelhouse. For example, consider an Olympic lifting coach or kettlebell coach teaching the muscle-up. Being able to see beyond just the start, transition, and end position equips a coach with more ways to break the movement down, draw from their specialized field and transfer it to another.
I draw, for instance, on a time when I was teaching CrossFit and had to teach the muscle-up. I was new to coaching and heavily relied on demo to get people moving—it was a great way to get more people moving faster, as the vast majority are visual learners and I didn’t have to worry about using simple, accessible language. To this day, I cannot do a ring or bar muscle-up. But I can teach it. I can break down the movement into segments and turn a series of drills into a progression, helping my students master the move without ever seeing me perform a full demonstration. I’m only able to do this because of the time I spent dissecting the different movements and muscles involved in the muscle-up. I could then break the move down into points that were easy to explain, had a meaning or purpose that students could relate to, and could achieve real results. Not everyone wants to be able to do a muscle-up, but it’s safe to say that everyone would at least like to be able to push and pull their own body weight.
By adding meaning to what we teach, we don’t just get students moving; we can also better pick the drills and ideal progression with which to teach the movement. Context alters one’s behavior and helps us achieve more effective communication—something the StrongFirst principles and methods of teaching ask of us. Context also helps a coach build in safety and have more control over the outcome by determining which information to share and when.
The above table will be especially helpful when teaching a group class and speaking to a broader range of students. Our very own StrongFirst Certified Senior Instructor, John Spezzano, said something along the lines of, “Only 10% are advanced athletes, 80% are the general public, and 10% have no idea!”
Another great example of seeing shapes over movement in order to help a student is the get-up. If we take a bird’s eye view of it, we can see a relationship between pyramids and the positions our body goes through during the sequence. Just like pyramids are known to be the strongest, most stable shape, the get-up is seen as the ultimate expression of strength. Just like the pyramid is centered around one point, so is the get-up. The body moves around the arm holding the kettlebell, which is our central axis. You can see in the images below how the body makes a series of right-angle triangles. This can be seen throughout every stage of the movement, not just in the stages shown below, and can help a student achieve better movement and placement in the different stages.
Once we have this view and knowledge at our disposal, it’s time to stretch ourselves, get creative and practice becoming even more efficient. We do this via our second tool: deliberate practice. This concept, along with the concept of the art of practice in general, is said to have been first developed by professional golfer Ben Hogan and has since evolved and been written about by many authors.
Part 3: Train Your Eye and Improve Communication via Deliberate Practice
Deliberate practice-Aim-Drill-Feedback
Before diving into this, it is important to understand that a drill is like putting a microscope on a particular part of a movement. Drills, or repetitive training activities that may or may not use equipment, stimulate one part of a complicated movement or one segment of a movement chain. As discussed in the book “Practice Perfect,” these activities draw on both the practice and psychology elements of successful training. For a coach, it might mean adding or eliminating a cueing style or limiting your words to teach a movement. A drill is designed to highlight and place emphasis—the aim is to stretch the person doing the drill.
Deliberate practice for the coach
- Aim: Improve coach’s vocabulary and tactile cueing.
- Drill: Pretend your students are blind or blindfold your students.
- Feedback: This can come from those participating or observing in real time, from another coach or from playing back a video of yourself coaching and practicing this.
Deliberate practice for the student via the coach
- Aim: Improve student’s hip drive in the snatch and reduce pulling the bell with the arm.
- Drill: 3-5 reps of one-arm swing with a heavy kettlebell then immediately perform five snatches with a test-size bell (e.g. 24kg bell for a test-size bell of 16kg. You must know that your student can safely swing this larger bell prior to suggesting this drill).
- Feedback: The heavier bell demands more hip drive to be explosive. When the student then goes down in bell size to snatch, they are used to using a bigger and stronger hip drive. This way, they will automatically do it with the lighter bell and feel that the bell floats at a much higher point without using the arms. That’s the point where you redirect the bell by punching the sky to finish the snatch.
Benefits for the coach
Every training session is planned and has a purpose for your student. It should be no different for you every time you teach. Set a goal or skill for yourself to work on, so that you are getting practice and feedback. This is also a great way to ensure that you stay present during your session.
In addition to just getting feedback in real time, it is also great to record yourself. If you are working on avoiding negative language or reducing the number of words you use to describe each step, you can just record yourself and play it back. This will also help you build your confidence if you are camera shy. Better yet, have someone watch you and give critical feedback, because they will always see something you missed. When your eye is sharper, it is easier to know what drill to apply and why. This also helps you start to think outside of the box on different ways to progress and revamp.
We all know that change happens when we step outside of our comfort zone and that strength is built by placing our bodies under controlled stress. Our mind is no different. It needs to be stretched in order for us to become better coaches.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are ways other than just watching YouTube or Instagram over and over again to train your eye and build a stronger mental representation of a movement. Familiarizing yourself with these movements and applying them to other activities will give you a deeper understanding and build better relationships with your students, no matter their level, by relating to them via context.
Context enhances a drill, helps you know what terminology to use, adds feeling, and makes the move more relatable for the student while you train your eye and learn to see movement in motion. Context helps you find or create a drill or correction and navigate the fine line between safety, performance, and technique. Context helps you put to practice the art of skill transfer, as evinced by the “painting the fence” scene in The Karate Kid.
This framework: Context over Cue, Deliberate Practice and Play linked via Skill Transfer helps a coach know what is relevant in their toolbox of drills, cues, progressions, regressions, points of performance, and the rest of their bank of knowledge to share with their student. It helps a coach stop going down a rabbit hole or overwhelming the student with too much information. At the end of the day, we only absorb what is relevant to us and our goals.
In his 1973 film Enter the Dragon, Bruce Lee tells one of his students that throwing a kick is like pointing a finger at the moon—don’t focus on the finger, or “you’ll miss all that heavenly glory.” The movements discussed here follow a similar logic. A good coach teaches students not to focus on the swing itself, but the movements that comprise the swing and the “emotional content” that drives the swing. After all, performance isn’t as simple as moving your limbs or moving a kettlebell—it’s about taking a comprehensive view of the swing, contextualizing the movements, and connecting the body to the mind and the spirit.
Everything comes back to the “why.” Movement is art. And performance is where art and science meet.
Sources
Logan Gelbrich, Mentor and author of Going Right.
Carl Paoli, Co-Author of Free + Style.
Dweck, Carol S. Mindset. Robinson, 2017.
Lemov, Doug, et al. Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better. Jossey-Bass, 2012.
Cooper, Chris; Belanger, Tyler. Ignite Enrichment Through Exercise. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012.
Orlick, Terry, Ph.D. In Pursuit of Excellence. Human Kinetics, Inc., 2015.
Well said. Great information..
Well written article thankyou
Excellent article.