When practice doesn't make perfect

In the world of skill development, skills coaching, mental skills training, and practice drills are the typical treatments for overcoming habit pattern errors. Fortunately, quality coaching, training and mental skills clearly improve technique and individuals can perform in the correct way while working with their coach, trainer or sport psychologist. However, the next day when they have to perform independently or when placed under the stress of competition, they seem to have forgotten what they have learned and the same old entrenched misunderstandings, bad habits and technique faults resurface. Even where the individual improves, the improvement is often only temporary or takes a long time to appear.

What coaches and trainers strive to achieve is that the improved knowledge and skills that were learned during training and reinforced by practice will quickly transfer to the real world. Unfortunately, this rarely occurs, or it occurs only slowly, so we have a “transfer of training problem.”

Frequently encountered in sports coaching, the training transfer problem is not restricted to sport. As our case studies show, poor transfer is an obstacle to learning wherever automated skill, knowledge, or behavioural routines are involved, e.g., the learning of mathematics, science, and spelling; athletic and sports performance; artistic performance; driving a motor vehicle; working with computers; speech therapy; overuse and sports injuries; postural problems; foreign language learning; and in management training and organisational change. The key element in all these situations is that the person faces having to change their existing knowledge and skills.

Having to change one's own ways in the face of new and conflicting knowledge is the root cause of the problem. As an old coach once said, “The problem is not learning the new; it's unlearning the old.”

Consistent, habitual errors show the presence, rather than the absence, of learning. Here, what the person knows is how to do it incorrectly. What matters then is not what the person does not know, but what he or she already knows. The first task is to help the person “unlearn” the incorrect information or skill, rather than persist with getting them to practice the “right” way, over and over.

When new information or ideas imparted during coaching disagree or conflict with what the person already knows, this conflict generates habit pattern interference with learning. This interference causes “accelerated forgetting” (Underwood, 1966) of the new knowledge or skill and within minutes or hours, the player forgets what he or she has learned. This accelerated rate of forgetting is much faster than normal forgetting, which normally takes weeks, months or sometimes years. Habit pattern interference does not prevent learning from occurring, it merely prevents the association of conflicting ideas (Underwood, 1966). If there is no conflict between the new and the old, then there is no interference and no barrier to learning. However, a person's mind is seldom a blank slate and the potential for conflict between old and new knowledge is usually high.

Habit pattern interference does not distinguish between what is “right” and what is “wrong”. It protects all prior knowledge and skills from change. It preserves incorrect or unsafe habits just as strongly as it protects correct skills and knowledge. This underscores the importance of getting it right the first time. Performance becomes cue-dependent, and the player falls back to old incorrect ways when the coach's or trainer's presence is withdrawn, inhibiting transfer of learning (Postman & Gray, 1977). This ensures that the faulty knowledge and skills continue to resist correction.

Unfortunately, although conventional coaching, training and education is very useful when teaching a person new skills, these methods are far less effective in eradicating established performance errors. Clearly, we need a better way—Old Way New Way.