Bringing game-like scenarios to training

ACT ON WHAT THEY SEE

England’s Abby Dow has the ball in hand and must read the physical cues of a defender. Which way are their hips facing? What speed are they travelling? Then she can decide to keep running the direction they are, sidestep, pass or kick.

Perception and action coupling is where a player sees something and then acts in response.

They take in information (perception) and partner (couple) this with an appropriate action.

To allow our players to build toward a level of skilled performance, we need to make sure we provide plenty of meaningful opportunities for them to firstly perceive and act and then create these couplings ready to be recalled in the game.

Being able to perceive and act is based on what the players see, hear and feel - so, to be ready, they need experiences which stimulate all of these areas to act.

TRAINING TIPS: Use fun hand-eye primers to get players ready for training and matches. Things like juggling, group passing games with different types of ball and rebound drills are all useful when they have scoring and competition involved.

PRACTISE THE PROCESS TO THE SOLUTION

Owen Farrell’s footwork is slightly different for each kick

‘Repetition without repetition’ is integral to taking any game or skill-drill work you do to the highest level.

No technique ever looks precisely the same. Even on a closed skill, like a goal kick, a biomechanical analysis would show there are several deviations each time.

Think of all the other decisions players must make, and the skills needed are more open in how they are performed. Trying to create situations that repeatedly look the same will not allow players to have the necessary adaptability to the variety of cues they have to pick up on.

So, instead of aspiring to recreate the exact same situations and solutions, run practices which put players in situations they are familiar with and recognise.

Use slight variations of the start point and small modifications to how the problem looks, so it is ‘similar, not same’. The player improves because they are not repeating the solution.

For example, when practising making a short pass to a player coming into the line at speed, players should repeat the process of finding a solution - adjusting the pass to take into account the variations of the player arriving, such as their pace and angle.

To be able to reach higher levels of performance, players need ‘behavioural flexibility’, a term referring to the way in which a skilled performer applies varied approaches.

TRAINING TIPS: If you are focused on playing from turnovers, try using two balls to constantly restart the game.

Then, select a location to feed the new ball into enough times to provide the players with familiarity so they might start to find tactical solutions.

From that location, you can select different ways to feed it in to adjust the defence – you can feed it high for an uncontested catch, or along the ground for a grubber kick.

TRAIN THE WAY WE PLAY

England’s forwards practising “bone-on-bone” in a maul - though they are wearing shoulder pads

‘Train the way you play’ is a good principle - yet many training sessions don’t have enough game-specific experiences being replicated within them to help with this or other aspects of performance.

When the top players are building match-related fitness, they will have a programme that enables them to do multiple sprints at distances which suit their different playing positions, multiple wrestles (close contact) and repeatability of both (endurance).

Their team training sessions will incorporate these elements so they perform these physical skills both in isolation and mixed with other technical or tactical skills in drills and games. This means they will have reached the physical levels needed to be more likely to perform the technical skills under pressure.

TRAINING TIPS: Plan your sessions with the match in mind. Write out all the positions in your team and think about each of the physical tasks you want them to be able to do, the nature of them (speed/strength/endurance) and for how long.

You might think a prop needs to be able to do 15 maximum-effort sprints over 10 metres for ball carries. Then, when you plan and review your sessions, look at how many times the props have had a chance to do this in the games and practices you plan.

Don’t just make them run sprints - that’s boring!

THE PROBLEM WITH PROBLEM-SOLVING

England women training, with a player going to ground after a touch. Will this transfer into the game?

We all love the idea of setting problems for players and giving them deep learning experiences where they find ways to be successful.

But if we look at the way our brains work in general, especially those of adolescents, we need to accept this idea is flawed and adjust some of our expectations of how we expect players to perform.

The celebrated work of Daniel Kahneman breaks down our brains’ functioning in two ways - via system 1 and system 2. They do slightly different things but are, of course, connected.

• System 1 looks after subconscious actions and reactions, heuristics which are shortcuts that our brain creates to save energy and get stuff done.
• System 2 is how our brain considers and deliberates - the conscious thought.

Based on this, it is therefore obvious that we are asking players to play problem-solving games and commit to actions in moments of decision-making to create success.

We want players to have success when they need to apply system 1, but they need to engage system 2 to make sense of the problem.

TRAINING TIPS: Use problem-solving practices, but reduce all the extra noise your players are having to decipher to get to the bit where they feel success.

Simplify the practice design, so there are not lots of things which the players might need to consider, things which would engage system 2.

Ensure there is a scaffold for decision-making, that players have ideas on how they might go about solving the performance problems inside any practices you design.

Take pauses and promote player timeouts which allow players to consider how they and their team-mates make sense of these simplified practice variables.

THREE KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. Coaches should plan their sessions in such a way that players can produce in games what they do in training.
2. Players should practise the process to the solution instead of repeating the solution.
3. Coaches should plan their training sessions with the match in mind and incorporate game-specific experiences to help with performance.