ABSTRACT
The primary objective of every coach is to guide the learning process, encouraging progressive improvements in practice performance that transfer to the competitive environment. When a gap emerges between the performance observed in practice and competition, an athlete is often labeled as ‘choking.’ However, from a skill acquisition standpoint, this gap is also a reflection of the quality of the learning process. Thus, coaches are encouraged to actively monitor and assess learning outside of the context with which learning is meant to take place (i.e., practice). From a sport coaching perspective, this is as simple as benchmarking an athlete’s performance in practice versus competition. While a gap may have to do with susceptibility to anxiety and worry, this cannot explain all underperformance. Thus, coaches can use this as feedback to adapt their teaching and their approach to designing learning environments. Equally, a strength and conditioning coach can benchmark their effectiveness by having their experienced athletes perform a given lift without any initial instruction. This serves to see what information has been retained, and can be applied without the explicit guidance of the coach, highlighting any implicit learning that has taken place. In a way, the quality of the learning observed within the athlete acts as a constraint on the way the coach deploys explicit and implicit learning strategies. For example, an athlete that has difficulty transferring performance in practice, when a coach is present, to the competitive environment, where the coach is absent, may depend too much on explicit guidance. Similarly, an athlete who is struggling to understand a drill or make progress within a given lift may benefit from explicit information that externally guides their attention towards the desired outcomes. Thus, while all motor learning must find a resting place within the implicit memory system, the pathway taken to get there will be highly individualized and guided by the seamless integration of explicit and implicit coaching strategies. All these themes are discussed in detail within this chapter.
