I recently heard of an interesting debate regarding the best way to prepare a lifter for the competition environment.
The question was: should a coach deliberately provide possible distractions in the training session, before big lifts, i.e. shouting? OR should the room be calm and quiet for big lifts?
First of all it must be said there are no right ways to coach. There are as many ways to coach/ teach a lift as there are individual lifters.
Also we all know, in sport we work with probabilities. There are no guarantees. So in competition and training we do things that improve the probability of success.
As always, a good place to start when thinking about your sport (either as a lifter or a coach) is to look at the relevant neuroscience and see what it tells us about the best approach. When we perform complicated actions such as the Snatch and Clean & Jerk we are engaging automatic areas of the brain. These parts of the brain are faster and more reliable than other parts. By using these automatic areas of the brain we are increasing the probability of success.
In order to engage the automatic parts of the brain it is better for the lifter to stay calm and not think about what s/he is doing. Distractions (in training and competition) might make the lifter think and or become emotional. This would move the blood supply (and oxygen) away from the automatic parts to the slower and unreliable parts of the brain.
As we all know – the worst thing you can do when in a competition is think about the lift. So I would recommend calm with no distractions in the training sessions to improve the chance of success in training.
How do you prepare a lifter for competition?
At St. Birinus we teach/ coach lifters thinking skills to prepare them for the competition platform. These skills are practiced to help the lifter ignore all distractions and not think about the lift and the consequence of the results. St. Birinus Weightlifting is the only weightlifting coaching provider to teach and mentor psychological skills to improve the probability of success in training and competitions. Last year I met a sports psychologist who worked mostly with professional golfers. He thought our sports were similar, in that the movement lasted a similar time and the thinking skills required are also similar. When a golfer “tees off” the crowd tend to be quiet and caddys/ coaches do not shout instructions or encouragement before or during the swing.
Just some food for thought.
