Mind Your Mindfulness - Applying Gallwey's "Relaxed Concentration" in Sport Training
Plus Bonus Motor Learning Opinions
W. Timothy Gallwey shares a personally important coaching epiphany in chapter 1 of his book, The Inner Game of Tennis:
I was beginning to learn what all good pros and students of tennis must learn: that images are better than words, showing better than telling, too much instruction worse than none, and that trying often produces negative results
We have all felt these at some point in our coaching career, that talking and trying create more problems than they solve. We have felt those feelings and then most of us have continued on our way without changing our coaching methods too much. But Gallwey didn't. He integrated ideas from D.T. Suzuki (ego-mind), Abraham Maslow (peak experiences), and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (flow) to create his idea of “relaxed concentration”. He draws attention to how judgmental athletes tend to be of themselves as they perform and goes on to point out the effects that this judgement tends to have on their performance as well as on their self image. To move out of this judgmental frame, he encourages experiencing performance as it is. This is done by allowing performance to happen without interrupting it with thoughts of what should be or what didn't happen. Today, you may better recognize Gallwey's “relaxed concentration” as “mindfulness”. Mindfulness practices revolve around noticing rather than directing thought. If an athlete doesn't know what their body is currently doing, how can they be expected to make changes?
A typical coach's response to this is to say, “but I am telling them what their body is doing” and my reply is that you are substituting your observations for the athlete's. You are saving them the effort of noticing (and thinking) for themselves and dis-empowering them by doing so. This is how learned helplessness is learned, even though you weren’t trying to teach it. In contrast to helpless athletes, autonomous athletes can problem-solve more effectively and can collaborate with coaches to find solutions that they either couldn’t find or haven’t found alone. So let us do the work to empower our athletes and see what they are capable of.
“Doing the work” means asking athletes to notice what their bodies or specific parts of their bodies are doing. They'll need some guidance from us at first to get the hang of it. They'll ask you to do the noticing for them, to which I usually reply, “it's your body, you tell me what it did.” You can get them to notice by asking them questions as opposed to telling them what just happened. Generally, I ask questions like, “can you show me what your body looked like at contact.” As they get better at recreating that, I can make the questions more specific like, “where was the ball relative to your hips?” This empowers them as they learn to trust their own senses, particularly their kinesthetic awareness. As they're learning, they'll tend to use evaluative terms like good and bad rather than descriptive terms that demonstrate an awareness of positioning, timing, etcetera. Rather than tell them that they're describing it wrong, I will re-frame their words by asking, “what did you feel that makes you say it was good/bad?” This gets them thinking more in terms of what is rather than what they think should be.
As they get better at noticing and describing what their bodies are doing, then, together with them, you can build mechanisms for creating changes. You can take a specific aspect of an action and ask the athlete to vary it in some way, like asking them to drop their hips lower and notice how the feeling differs from previous reps. You can ask athletes to picture the change they want to make or model the change without actually executing the skill, such as, “show me where you want your hand to be at contact.” By creating an image and a physical model of the skill they wish to perform, they can then execute the skill, notice what they actually did, and compare that to the image/model that you constructed together. Athletes will tend to describe what they did in binary terms, meaning that they either felt their hand in the “right place” at contact or not.
You will likely notice athletes using more judgmental terms than descriptive ones when comparing. Athletes will tend to say that the most recent rep was better or worse than the previous one instead of higher or lower or other more-descriptive terms. As before, you can re-frame these into questions that move them back to descriptive terms, like “what did you notice that made you like that one more?” Then you can go back to having them model what they felt like at contact, etcetera. To save time in the feedback loop you are creating between coach and athlete, you can set up different numbers that describe different states or relationships like “one means you contacted the ball in front of your body, two means you contacted it even with your body and three means you contacted it behind your body.” Then the athlete can give a number after each rep instead of giving a more complete description of the rep thereby increasing the number of reps that they can get in a short period. There shouldn’t be a “right” or “wrong” number, just different numbers that serve as shorthand for different feelings and movements. The emphasis isn’t on doing it a certain way, the emphasis is on noticing how it is actually being done.
You can also introduce new skills to athletes by having them observe the skills in others. You can show them a few reps of a new skill and then ask them to repeat what they saw. You then take advantage of their now-developed skill in noticing their own actions and comparing those actions to the ones they observed. You will notice differences between the athlete's version and ours. You can draw attention to those specific parts in the same way discussed above. You may need to model a few more contacts and ask the athlete to watch that specific part of the movement to help them create an image to apply.
So far this describes how you can use mindfulness in training but how can you transfer that to competition? The answer is that you remind them that they have the power to decide what to notice about their performance as well as the power to decide how to interpret what they notice. You can encourage them to be proactive about picturing and feeling the next skill that they will perform. When you see them reacting to their last touch, you can help them re-frame by asking them what they noticed about that touch. You are reinforcing the same mental skills that you built in practice, which helps them recognize the value of those skills. You are also creating an effective way for the athletes to move through stressful situations (see my post about failing faster) by creating a framework for their thoughts.
Incorporating mindfulness into your coaching style and into athlete learning and playing requires a shift in how you interact with them as well as a shift in how they think. These shifts will require time in the practice environment so that the extra processing can take place. As you and the athletes become more proficient with mindfulness, the process of giving, receiving, and assimilating feedback will become faster. As athletes learn to picture and feel what they want to do, the coach's act of reminding them to see/feel the thing they want to create replaces the coach's modeling of behavior during competition. The end products are athletes that are more empowered and engaged in their own actions.
I first published the above in 2018. When I moved my blog to Substack, I used the move as an opportunity to revisit many things I wrote in the past. While I have edited what I first wrote, it is almost entirely the same as it was then. I present those thoughts as they were so that I can tell a story that begins with when I first read Gallwey. But, I also think it is useful to share some thoughts as I look back.
If you read this post and found yourself having strong opinions about how I structured the activities, feedback, and interactions, you may be a motor learning nerd. I acknowledge the shortcomings and differences between what I wrote and the canonical versions of information processing, ecological dynamics, nonlinear pedagogy, OPTIMAL theory, focus of attention, language of coaching, etc.. I’m not trying to dunk on any of these ways of thinking, nor am I trying to faithfully adhere to one school of thought. (The latter admission is yet another shortcoming.) I respond to these valid criticisms in two ways.
First, to me, the most important theme in this post is athlete empowerment. I willfully place that goal above philosophical consistency in this case. I value both things but, because this subject demands that I place one above the other, I chose empowerment. It is possible to simultaneously empower athletes and maintain a consistent view on motor learning but then I’m not writing about Gallwey’s ideas anymore. So, rather than write a critique of Gallwey’s methods from one side or the other, I wrote to honor another value that I hold dear, supporting athletes learning about themselves. If you read this valuing motor learning more highly, you didn’t do anything wrong. But I ask you to reread it while asking yourself this question, “does this encourage coaches to support different kinds of athlete awareness?” It might not do so in your favorite way but that brings me to my second response.
I stand by the ideas I present not because they are philosophically consistent but because I think they represent an interesting and practical transition between different modes of thought. I don’t believe that Gallwey’s ideas are a magical middle way that coherently integrates IP and EcoD views but I do think that a coach can transition from one view to the other following Gallwey’s lead. Some would say that what I’m suggesting is using an “it depends” approach, in which I use whatever philosophy I find convenient in the moment. I say that Gallwey provides a bridge. Bridges are not substitutes for solid ground, one moves across a bridge fully aware that they are in a more precarious position. The point of a bridge is to move across it, not live on it. I accept that using the coaching moves I illustrate takes me off philosophically solid ground. I am willing to do that in order to move somewhere more solid. I think that there is something in this post that everyone can use while still remaining aligned to their motor learning beliefs. The question to me, at that point, is do you want to cross the bridge?