Up to date training information for Aussie Rules / AFL Football.
If you watched any AFLW over the weekend then you'll have clearly seen that skill level has again improved across the board and once decision making and tactical prowess catched up then we're in for a real treat.
FYI, a bumper edition of AFLW Insights will drop tomorrow.
Each Monday I'll release the weekly contenders for Kick of the Week and you all can vote for the winner - an eleborate concept for sure.
Let me know who you choose and why.
Here the contenders:
The 3rd and final installment of psychological co-active tips from Dan Abrahams.
Cognitive Player Issues – Paying attention to cues and clues that are irrelevant/noise. Letting your mind wander. Will present as slow decision making through inexperience, inhibition through anxiety and an internal focus of attention too often.
Learning - Promote learning rather than performance in your training sessions via desirable difficulties via the use of variability, spacing, interleaving, less and less feedback and also by creating high challenge training activities you may increase learning through struggle and effort.
Theories of Motivation – Goal setting theory x I want to start. Self determination theory x it’s my choice to start. Self efficacy theory x I know I can do it. Attribution theory x it’s in my control. Achievement goal theory x I just have to put in the effort.
Your Talent - Respect the talent that you do have. Don’t worry so much about what you don’t have v what you do have, and how you can utilise it in a game.
Tactical Creativity – Deliberate play. 1 dimension games. Diversification. Deliberate coaching. Deliberate motivation. Engaging in these steps may help free up working memory.
Disagreeable Players – Ask them their viewpoint. Empathise with their position by outlining the strengths of their arguement. Explain your position. Negotiate solutions. Confirm what the player needs from you. Hold the player accountable.
In-Game Mental Excellence – Attention x concentrating on the task at hand and dealing quickly with distraction. Intensity x executing every task at an optimal intensity (not too high or not too low). Intent x executing every task positively with confidence.
Attention Warm Up – Ask your players to visualise a task. What does a great session look like today? Make your 1st activity fun. Incorporate scanning into that fun activity. Make sure communication is involved.
Self Talk – What do my biggest supporters say about my game? What does resilience look like to me? What small habits increase my confidence/energy? When I’m feeling lethargic, what self-talk can energise me?
Coach to Athlete Questions – What did you see that led you to make that decision? Who can you talk to to get some answers here? What did you experience during that period? When do you enjoy playing the most? How can I be of help in this situation?
Player Motivation – Is attained via experience playing, mastery, values, emotion (pride/guilt), purpose, need for achievement and outcome objectives.
Coaching – Make your captain a part of your coaching staff. Have a leadership goup that is involved in tactical decision making. Learn every players specific motivational drivers. Put psycho-social aspects 1st in training. Put mindset 1st on game day.
Task Cohesion – Engage players in small group meetings. Check the understanding of each other’s roles. Discuss any doubts/concerns. Create solutions to problems.
Low Self Belief Athletes – May have extreme inner thoughts (can’t/awful/disaster/must). Need a learning environment with less information. Will find a model of success useful. Will draw on successful past performances. Need to shift from ego focus to a mastery focus.
Brave Athletes – To teach players to play with bravery ask them to define what brave looks like to them. Have them picture their brand of brave. Help them break their picture down to a few action based words. Insist on seeing them play in the style of those words.
Here's another 15 tips from Dan:
Training Environment – Shapes attitude, energy and effort and each of these aren't simply traits players have or not, they are choices the player has to display or not, and you have to bring it out of them and players will become better at choosing them in their given situation when they have been taught, and learned, the appropriate skills that gave them that capacity.
Zone v Flow – Being in the zone is when time slows down for you and it feels like you have all the space in the world where flow is when time speeds up and you can get a lot done quickly
Uncoachable Players – Accept their behaviour. Listen to what they want and how they wanna do it. Brainstorm with them the benefits of their approach. Negotiate acceptable behaviours and make an agreement. Hold them accountable for their behaviours.
Celebrate Anxieties – Have players share negative feelings in groups. Write them down. Celebrate them. Put them up on the wall. Brainstorm solutions together. Decide to plan to work on these together. Emphasise continued support for each other mentally.
Direct Focus – focus on progression over perfection, process over outcome, small steps over big leaps, the next 5secs not the next 5mins and your best over your worst.
Game Day Coaching – for players who get anxious before games help them set objectives that are specific, controllable (or as controllable as you possible) and positive. Have them breathe correctly. Have them rationalise thoughts (question musts and have to’s). Have a game face. Put mindset 1st on game day.
Coach to Player Psychology – Memory x tell me about your best one. Imagination x talk to me about your dream game. Perception x how can you see this situation in a more helpful way?
Mindset – You can’t be tough on performance but not tough on mindset so be tolerant of performance, but be tough on mindset which can improve performance through a reduction of anxiety.
Internal Psychology – I must pay attention (focus/concentration) by staying on-task. I must maintain optimal internal arousal. I must execute actions with positive intent (confidence/approach).
Decision Making – Your brain is a predictive machine anticipating moment to moment changes and sensing data in order to navigate/control the body and doing so away from conscious thought. The action/s the brain decides upon are based on your memeory of what’s happened before and your current envirnoment and situation. The predictive brain has implications for athletes because invasion sports has a great relationship between space, players and the ball so to help players anticipate with accuracy and speed, you need to help them direct their attention towards cues and clues associated with the relationship between space, players and the ball. This also helps to build chunks of memory around space, players and ball that will help the brain detect patterns and make optimal decisions in the future. In racquet, bat and ball sports you can help players direct their attention towards clues and cues emanating from their opposition.
Isolation Practice – Is likely important in sport because working memory is limited but isolation practice can strip away the noise and allow for the athlete to pay attention to key details that need improving. Isolation practice engages the pre-frontal cortex by giving voluntary attention and this engages neuroplasticity to create new ways of thinking. It might best work on a psyco-socio level rather then neurologically from cultural acceptance/expectation of isolation practice in the past.
Game Day Preparation - Picture a great performance every single day. Avoid thinking too much about the game 2 hours pre-game. Mentally warm up as good as you physically warm up. Leave the last 10mins for an individual warm up.
Staying in the Moment – Pay attention and commit to constantly detecting cues in the environment. Have self talk cues and instructional triggres to stay present. Have time sensitive tasks to accomplish.
High Performace Mindset – Attention x being on task at all times). Intensity x the correct level of activation at all times. Intent x executing every action with positive intent.
Players Mantra – I am in charge when I play football, not my emotions, not the opposition, not the umpires, nobody but me, and I am in charge of when, and how, I play football. I dominate and own me. I am in charge.
As I've mentioned many times before there's 4 co-actives of performance:
I've actually listed them in order of what I think is most important, especially for local/amateur football, with psychological being my number 2 behind tactical.
My reasoning you ask?
Tactics teach the player what to do and when.
Psychological is the mental state the player is in that will dictate what decisions seem safe and makeable.
Technical is the actual skill required to carry out the decision as guided by the tactic.
Physical is almost a by-product of the first 3 because the better you are at handling them, the less actual physical capacity you need but that is a VERY general way of putting it but we focus on physical easily over the half of the time we train even though it's the least important aspect to focus on and we rarely if ever focus on the psychological aspect.
I suppose coaches more rely on the individual player to take care of the psychological aspect but like everything else if you're not taught how best to do this then you'll ignore it and overcompensate by doing more 400's, essentially limiting performance bandwidth every time this happens.
In the last 18 months or so I've moved to Twitter for my research and at some point early on I came across Daniel Abrahams, a sport psychologist, author and coach from the UK, who posts multiple times a day with very actionable posts (give the guy a follow!) of which I'll do 3 blog pots of 15 points on this week, starting today.
They will be a mix of coaching and player specific points that leave a lot room for you to decode and interpret on your own.
Personally has been the biggest flaw in my game forever as I get extremely psychologically aroused during games and at times training, while not always being able to shut it off in those times when needed and with hopefully jumping into coaching this year, I definitely need to get that in check although last year when I did a fill coaching job for 1 game it seemed I was able to use some of these tips below to regulate that far better where players did mention things to that affect post game.
So far this week we looked at a decent size list of scenarios you can isolate at training then I chose 1 specific scenario from that list and discussed what the it "sorta" looks like although you really just provide what the end result should look like and let your players go about achieving it, noting how different players use different solutions then asking why they use them (what did you see? etc).
Today I've designed a training drill to fit this same scenario that closely replicates what happens in a game, remembering that you can't simulate every action of a game but instead focus on repeated game moments that are seen most frequently and then players can recognise these similar patterns during games and be in a position to make better and faster decisions around it.
I actually used this drill for one of my assessments in the AFL Sportsready Coaching course so below you'll find a quick video of the scenario and then a PDF that has starting instructions, play instructions and different tactics you can have your players use in the same scenario.
If you would like full access to this training drill than register for a level 3 membership at https://aussierulestraining.com/membership-account/membership-levels/.
Once you've devised your list of training scenarios that you think are important to be successful at to win games, then choose 1 scenario that consistently presents itself during a game to focus on at training, in this case fast play defense.
The concept of defender 1/2/3 isn't new but is probably more a case of what coaches think will just happen during a game but in all honesty you're probably just thinking of your best players who have both the knowledge and ability to carry this out consistently, but for the other 15 or so players on the team, the concept eludes them and team cohesion from top to bottom is greatly affected.
Another reason why a game model is advantageous at all levels of football.
Here's the basic concept of D1/2/3...
To access this training/coaching article and many others then register for a level 1 membership at https://aussierulestraining.com/membership-account/membership-levels/.
As I'm about the nuts and bolts of footy training being as representative of the game as possible, I believe the best way to go about that is through the use of scenarios.
This resembles the game more than cone drills because it trains what does happen, not what you want to happen, which may be out of reach for a lot of your playing group.
When training scenarios there's the Play with Purpose method developed by Shane Pill which simply looks like this:
I deliberately capped players there because what you think might fix the problem might not be how they see the it so during the intervention period is really where ther art of coaching comes into it and how you go about teaching a concept and for your players to actually learn it (game, drill, whiteboard etc).
I've had this note on my phone for a couple of months so I here's a list a variety of scenarios you can train when you go back to training in the coming weeks.
There will be times during a game that you will have number advantages and disadvantages so it's important to train both aspects although we already train a lot of number advantage scenarios already when we add a defender or 2 against 5+ offensive players but in that case the players involved need to alert each other of that and set up accordingly where some simple blocks on the opposition can result in an easy clearance.
For each of these scenarios you should train them in advantage and disadvantage number situations.
GAME SITUATIONS...
To access this training/coaching article and plenty of others then register for a level 1 membership at https://aussierulestraining.com/membership-account/membership-levels/.
The fnal part if this concentration series we'll look at a more integrated, game simulation type drill where concentration, awareness and communication are crucial to the defensive team stopping the the offensive team moving the ball freely.
Players Required: 8 - 16
Balls Required: 1
Space Required: 25m x 60m
Drill Level: Moderate
I'll show you the 3 main layers to this drill then I'll give further information on it below.
If you'd like full access to this training drill then register for a level 3 membership at https://aussierulestraining.com/membership-account/membership-levels/.
I'd seen variations of this before but he called it the "brain surgeon" and it can get pretty tough with all that's going in the drill and how it quick it moves around, putting a premium on being able to focus on what you need to do at each station but also being aware of what's going on around you.
Players Required: 12/group
Balls Required: 2
Space Required: 10m x 10m
Drill Level: Hard
Below also I'll write through how it works in case it isn't a million % clear in the video which I'm sure it isn't!
Here it is...
If you would like full access to this training drill then register for a level 3 membership at https://aussierulestraining.com/membership-account/membership-levels/.
I read a little bit about player concentration the other day and like everything else, if you want your players to have it and, display it on gameday, then if you don't you don't put focus on it at training then the you the coach, is to blame, not the players.
Players Required: 12/group but you could have multiple players on each group and they go to where they kick it to
Balls Required: 2
Space Required: 50m x 20m
Drill Level: Moderate to Hard
Here it is:
To access this training drill and heaps of others than register for a level 3 membership at https://aussierulestraining.com/membership-account/membership-levels/.
In the final part of this Game Intelligence series inspired by this monster article I'll take a look at how movement fits into all this and finally in-game decision making, which is how everything presented up until now presents within a game, why it presents as such and who it presents to specifically.
I've deliberately left anything from the physical co-active out until now and my reason for that is that is because at local/amateur levels of football we think that everything can be fixed with more - more running, more training, more of everything - when in reality more of anything physical should be the very LAST thing you look to because for every add something physical into your regime, then everything is affected mainly from a fatigue point of view.
A lot of the things I've mentioned in the previous 3 parts can be trained by coaches and players of any level and with physical fatigue and joint stress plus they'll have far more impact on what happens game day against those 4 x 400's you did just 36hrs ago.
That being said if players can possess of the things we've already talked about then if you can add efficient movement qualities players who already possess a high processing speed, then on top of that and their elite emotional management abilities, can take in, and process, more information than other players.
As mentioned earlier, information processing takes time that can overwhelm some players but if they can stay calm then they can make smarter decisions, faster.
The process of efficient movement is a very fast coordination effort of the lower and upper centers of the brain where they access a database of simulations stored in their brain and the more emotional/cognitive resources that are available, the more accurate/quicker the decisions.
This part is very important and SHOULD have huge implications on how you train from now on.
Earlier I said that:
Training = Thinking
Game = Action
This means that at training you can provided with time and constraints (environment, task etc) that can make things easier, harder or slower to develop which is perfect when you are teaching new concepts but in a game situation everything needs to be automatic and it's an actual skill to be able to play like that so players need training time under their belts performing exactly like that.
No player has the capacity to make sense of all of the information that comes in during a game at once so the brain hands over to the subconscious which hits the button on decision making and if you've had a mammoth game and can't remember many specific details of it, then this is what it "looks/feels" like.
An in-game decision is made based on patterns before the brain communicates with our motor cortex on what move to do next (with or without the ball) so while the game is chaotic, there are only a certain number of patterns to recognise.
This results in players being able to develop a memory capacity for the game, its patterns and its (ball/player) movements which is why building game model can substantially improve your team cohesion and on-field performance.
As always though there are outliers and things out of your control (especially during football!) and some things haven't been rehearsed at training (as you can't rehearse every action you come across during footy) but they happen in a flash and require "specialised hardware" to deal with - in this case a highly knowledgeable and experienced brain working unconsciously to make split second decisions under high pressure.
Here's how a split second game action could carry out with everything that has been mentioned in this series:
First you scan using your powers for multiple object tracking to inform you of what pass selections are available.
Then your visual clarity and contrast sensitivity helps you spot an open player through the congestion and against a backdrop of fans.
Your near-far speed enables you to switch your attention between who you want to pass the ball too and who you want to get it past, around, though or over.
With efficient movement allowing for a subtle body manipulation can disguise their proposed movements by forcing the defense to move when they do and the receivers cerebellum (which controls balance/coordinated movement) kicks in, reading the kickers body movement and using that to predict the trajectory and location of the pass.
Reacting to in-game stimulus requires awareness, anticipation, quick thinking and vision which are all subconscious actions of the brain and hours of training can encode a players cognitive system with the software to handle all of this, but you it's on you, the coach, to provide a training environment for this to happen.
On top of processing the chaos you also have to follow the game model so you need to be mentally versatile to many roles and responsibilities quickly, again being rehearsed at training.
This has been a pretty in-depth series so I suggest giving this multiple reads to really get a handle on everything included here as 2020 gave us a time to reset everything pretty much and footy coaching can be one of those things considering it's still in the dark ages at a lot of local/amateur levels.
If you have any questions or want to discuss anything in this 4 part series then just hit me up.
As we slowly develop the holisticness of what Game Intelligence is after parts 1 and 2 earlier this week we look at part 3 which discusses a little about scanning and the visual system.
Performing scanning of the field requires a higher functioning mind to decode, which is fundamental to on-field awareness, we looked at in part 1.
Rather than lose time and attempt to scan only once you take possession of the ball, it's best to scan your surroundings when you don’t have the ball, where you take mental pictures of your teammates, the opposition, whatever space/congestion you see and where all those things are on the ground.
This then enables you to create 3 dimensional map of what’s around you and when you can supplement that with what you've rehearsed in training, knowledge of your teams game model and the opposition report, then you can develop "memory chunks" of information that you will see during the game and can therefore react immediately to.
Every millisecond players are scanning up to 9 bits of essential information - called multiple object tracking - and they’re also taking snapshots for the brain to simulate what might happen next.
Tracking an object requires you to 1st move the head/eyes to the target, which results in a slight overshoot, then you quickly flick the eyes back to the target (get the target centered on the optic nerve) and again elite players beat us novices again here as they can move their heads quicker/with more accuracy and for a slightly greater distance than us = greater accuracy in hitting a target.
Moving to the visual system, it is located at the back of the brain in the occipital lobe and it takes in the information and feeds it to the amygdale and the limbic system, which are our emotional centers.
It's at this time that we then we decide, without conscious thought, do I pass or do I maintain possession, because the picture has changed and it now feels unsafe.
Anxiety/danger involve the amygdale which is part of the basal ganglia while planning ahead/realising the consequences of your actions/interference lie in the frontal lobe, and they both communicate via the cingulated cortex which is connected to memory/emotion.
So there's a ball up and you do a quick scan of what's in front, behind and lateral to you and you know that your fat wingman is free if you can just get the ball out there, except once you get the ball then now you see that a player was a bit late picking them up and they are not as open as they just were before the ball up.
What seemed an easy and safe option if got possession of the ball has now become a much harder and less safe option and now what you're going through emotionally can affect what you decide to do.
If you're feeling "on" or have had pretty good success making that same play before then you still might try and pick off that fat wingman option, knowing that although the risk is high, so too is the pay off.
On the other hand if you're having an off day and have messed this play up before resulting ina turnover and goal, then you'd probably err on the side of caution and keep the ball in more safer area's in this particular instance.
Elite and experienced players don’t have a 3rd eye but the 2 they do have are exceptional with vision far surpassing novice level players in regards to clarity (seeing detail at a distance), contrast sensitivity (being able to detect an object against a background) and near-far quickness (being able to change eye gaze/attention between near and far distances).
Just from this post alone it's clear that what the coach see's from their angle is not what the player with the ball see's from their angle and is not what a player trying receive the ball see's from there angle.
As a coach you need to ask many different questions, and many different types of questions, when you have player/s who can't seem to solve a problem at training or in games.
Come back tomorrow for the final part of this series.
I've just done a much long overdue update of the directory pages for each section so here they are:
- 116 posts
- 21 posts
- 66 posts
- 53 posts
In part 1 yesterday we looked at what Game Intelligence is and how elite and experienced footballers use it to their advantage.
Today we look at awareness.
From an early age you’re looking to see if a kid has spatial awareness which could present as positively handling play in congestion or finding dangerous space in open play.
As they get older, you start judging them by their position/s and what their specific roles and responsibilites are such as a half back does they know when to press up to play a forward half game and do they know when to drop back in defense by reading the play unfolding ahead of them.
As a coach you're also generally looking to see if they can take on instructions from yourself and then to themselves adapt during a game and all of it's thousands of actions.
Players need awareness of themselves, what's going on around them and how they fit into that but they also need to know what everyone is doing around them.
With these 2 sets of information they can than fit their own movements/actions into the chaos to create some form of advantage for them and/or their team
For example if a teammate has marked the ball about 60m out from goal then the next kick inside forward 50, the most important kick in football these days, will make or break your scoring chances.
As a forward option closer to goal you need the awareness of the following:
Once you've ascertained what they're going to do, or what you think they're going to do, then further awareness is required:
All of this takes place in a matter of seconds and looks awfully complicated with plenty of moving parts which is very true.
So how can we get our players to run through this sequence repeatedly during a game in just a matter of seconds?
Check back in tomorrow I suggest.
The crux of this series of posts is about Aussie Rules Football Game Intelligence, what it is, how's it used and how you can develop it with your players and coaches.
Essentially, the better your understanding of the game then the better your decision making can be during the game amist chaos and unpredictablility.
Game intelligence is a product of coaching and experience and if you haven’t been exposed to either then you won’t develop an IQ for the game and this is a coaches responsibility to their players.
Physically we're always thinking that our players need an extra meter on the field but they really need an extra meter it in their heads.
Game intelligence isn't about thinking, it’s about bypassing the thought process and going straight to the action unconsciously.
Training = Thinking
Game = Action
Great soccer coach Johan Cruyff once said "You play sport with your head, and your legs are there to help you," and that's how we need to start thinking at local/amateur levels of football.
Let's now take a look at what elite/experienced players develop and possess as they master the game of Aussie Rules Football.
During training they will observe the actions of those around them activating the brain’s mirror neurons that store information to use later on to either incorporate into their own game, or to predict what their opponent is going to do next.
They can activate more area’s of the brain than novices such as when they see an opponent heading towards them and they are better at anticipating their moves.
Experienced players develop a "checking" system that suppresses the urge to react instinctively. making themselves likely to fall for deceptive movements from the opposition.
Top players watch one another and pick up cues that others can't see while novices watch the ball with the greatest downfall of this being that if you watch the ball too much then you’ll be a low level processor as the ball is the cue, but player movement is what you need to tune into
Once you have optimised your motor skills (kicking, running, handballing etc) then that allows the brain’s cortex to switch off during a game, handing over to the subcortical circuitry, which is much faster and this frees up bandwidth for you to carry out game model based duties - this is known as executive function.
As you'll see in the next post, there's so much going on at all times you need to be able to compartmentalise every little thing that is going on and then attune to the most relevant and important information at that specific moment in time.
The best players don’t just control their emotions, they channel them and in the absence of emotional intelligence, technical/tactical intelligence are rendered useless.
