One of the great keys to enjoying and succeeding at sport is being able to balance your abilities and skill with your instinct.
By Simon Lewis
HOW TO HARNESS SPORTING INSTINCT TO RULE YOUR CHILD
It’s important to develop your child’s technique as well as their technical and tactical discipline… so you need to help them add to raw street-smarts to their technique and tactics. Technique and training is easy – hundreds of textbooks, magazines, websites and coaches provide it – but street-smarts means getting out more with a wider selection of different players of different ages and abilities under a wide range of conditions so that your child learns to adapt to some of the different conditions and competitors they will face in their career. This is brilliant training for sport and life in general.
Encourage them to play with older kids in the park, or play with kids below their ability but who play a tougher, more rugged version of the game. Your kid needs to compete against and play alongside players of different styles and approaches so that some of that can rub off in good ways when required. Play against the rich kids, play against the poor kids. Play against older girls. Every opponent and situation offers you opportunities to learn and progress… particularly if you’re in tune with the need to learn, rather than just mindlessly going out determined to win every encounter at all costs.
They will, at the same time, also learn by seeing these other kids making mistakes, naturally, and in terms of your role as parent-mentor-coach (PMC) there needs to be some counseling so that your child doesn’t break wild and lose all technique and discipline… or to prevent them from going the ‘other way’, where they might lose all their natural flair and power. You as PMC need to reinforce the lessons your Little Star will have learned or been exposed to out in the big wide world of sport.
SKILL VS INSTINCT TRAINING
There is a big difference between skills training and instinct training. Instinct training needs to be match simulation and should be done in a 100% scale environment with similar situations as you would encounter in a match. For instinct training you need to be in real situations with a real goal (soccer goal, rugby posts, cricket wicket, golf fairway, tennis lines) that you attempt to hit while the sweat pours and you run between shots or passes. Your body and mind needs that reinforcement of what it’s doing and what results its actions produce under pressure.
A rugby flyhalf should take a kick at poles and, if the kick is over, he should run back to his own half of the field before running to the next spot to take the next kick at posts from. If he misses he should run to the 25-yard line and ‘prepare’ for a counter-attack. Such reactive training ensures that the player practices his kicking under match circumstances, with his muscles aching and his lungs pounding. That is a form of instinct training, and it needs to be performed to build big match temperament and to work on technique under pressure of time and physical fatigue.
Skills training is where the player stands in one spot and simply kicks ball after ball in an attempt to groove a technique, build confidence and muscle/memory learning. That is the first step and is essential for building a technique, but to perfect the technique for match situations you have to include some form of instinct training so that your technical flaws are exposed under strain and tiredness.
© SIMON LEWIS • The Ball magazine
simon@theball.co.za • www.theball.co.za
