THIS HAS TO BE THE NAIL IN THE COFFIN OF CONE-BASED TRAINING DRILLS

                                                   

I've been banging on about the inadequacy of cone drills for years now but they still seem to be in fashion at all levels of football but if this doesn't change your mind on them then I don't know where to go from here!

I've also just finished up reading a solid read, being How We Learn To Move by Rob Gray, a skill acquisition specialist I've been following on Twitter for a few years now.

I've also compiled 97 notes and 4,333 words from the book that I'll post after the AFLW season is completed as it's a 5 part-post for sure so I'll post them all in a row when the calendar opens up.

Chapter 11 of the book is titled "Youth Coaching" The Problem With Cones and Making Practice Fun Again" and in it he talks about the the process the brain goes through during competition:

"After a light hits your eyes and is converted into an electrical signal that travels to the back of your head it arrives at the visual cortex where it splits off into 2 parts – the dorsal stream that goes to the top of your brain and the ventral stream that goes to the bottom, with each brain area doing vision for action and vision for perception respectively.

What this means is that one is using visual information to help guide actions while the other is using it to allow for passive perception and verbal responses.

When you ask an athlete to perform a decoupled task where they are perceiving without action, they will be using a different parts of the brain (the vision for perception/ventral stream) then they will be when they play their actual sport (the vision for action/dorsal stream)."- page 161.

So it's official, cone/unopposed drills are not preparing any player for the rigors of game day, rendering most of the training we see essentially useless and a waste of time (harsh language duly noted) and as a club and coach it is your responsibility to ensure you are providing the best coaching for each every member of your club and if that means switching your current training methods on their head, then that's what it means.

Training the function of one part of the brain them expecting to improve a totally different function of a different part the brain, and thus performance transfer from training to games, is not in the interests of your club or its players.

You can't expect your players to improve and grow if the club and coaches don't so grab yourself a copy of this book to totally transform your coaching method/s and a level 3 membership consisting of 100's of game representative training activities that will push your players' dorsal stream to it's edges and beyond.