The Performance Enhancing Drug No One Talks About Feedback
i want to talk about our failures
our failures as moving beings
arrested in my embarrassment my shame
my guilt of letting the team down my
cousins would invite me to play football
in their backyards every single
thanksgiving
i didn’t know how to throw football let
alone catch one in fact the very first
time i even saw football
i simply thought you had to kick it
that’s how ignorant i was of the sport
my cousins would attempt to help me by
giving me some type of verbal
instructions to
somehow spark my performance
what they didn’t realize was that it was
during the midst of my distracted
headspace while
i was asking myself the questions
am i gonna drop the ball am i going to
even be able to catch it what if i let
the team down
now my cousins wanted to help right
what was the disconnect between their
verbal instructions
and my ability to successfully follow
them
for us to understand this principle we
have to investigate and diagnose how we
were taught to move
my name is patrick pham and i am a
doctor of physical therapy
at a rehabilitation institution so that
those with a spinal cord injury a
traumatic brain injury
and also a gunshot wound injury will be
able to do
one thing be able to re-establish their
first steps again in walking not only
have i worked
with incredibly complicated neurological
cases
but also with adults who look back in
retrospect
wondering why they relinquish the sport
that they loved
here we are 10 years later twiddling our
thumbs
wondering why are children able to move
better than we
are now i’m here to tell you it’s not
too late
with help from motor or movement
learning scientists
we can employ a few but significant
principles
to help maximize human performance
today i want to talk about verbal
feedback
verbal feedback is the performance
enhancing drug
that is least mentioned and arguably the
most
important for us to understand verbal
feedback we need to understand the types
of verbal feedback
the timing of verbal feedback in
leveraging the autonomy of verbal
feedback
again that is the type timing and
autonomy
of verbal feedback there are three
types of verbal feedback we can provide
quantitative
qualitative and retentive feedback
quantitative feedback informs us of
what we have done it suggests that on
thanksgiving day i was able
to throw the football to christopher
successfully three
out of ten times that when philip threw
the ball to me i was able to catch the
ball
six out of ten times and when my cousin
stacy attempted to trip me
i was able to dodge her foot
nine out of those ten times
qualitative feedback on the other hand
informs us of
how we perform when i throw the football
to christopher
am i bringing the arm back to my ear
extending at the elbow and snapping at
the wrists
lastly we have retentive feedback these
are the long term deposits we make
inside of our long-term memory center is
called the hippocampus of the brain
to see whether or not we have stored
that information for a long-term
withdrawal many years down the line
the issue is this we become either
fixated on quantitative or qualitative
feedback
if for example we become fixated on
quantitative feedback
the individual the athlete the child
will have a sense of
okay this is what feels right three out
of ten times
unfortunately if we never give any type
of qualitative feedback
they’re going to leave frustrated arms
crossed
every single time asking why did i not
improve
so what’s the solution the solution is
this
we start we initiate with quantitative
feedback
to give the individual the athlete the
child the ability to get a
sense of what feels right empower them
with a sense of accomplishment oh this
is how my body
is supposed to feel when it moves
once they get that sense we can now
transition
over to qualitative movement to
describe how they can modulate that
performance
and as we give them the verbal cues the
verbal feedback
to change how to bring the arm back to
the ear to extend at the
elbow and snap at the wrist that will
hopefully
increase our quantitative results or
successful attempts
in between session to session
month to month year to year
we have to afford open-ended questions
to give an opportunity to make the
deposits inside the long-term memory
bank of the hippo campus
so that they can withdraw many years
down the line
by asking questions such as do you
remember what we worked on yesterday
can you show me what we worked on last
week
what did we instruct on two months ago
that we said that we want to remember
again by tapping into those long-term
memory centers to
withdraw those deposits that were made
we know that we have increased
retention and retention is the key
now that we’ve discussed the types of
feedback let’s go ahead and investigate
the timing of feedback again the three
types of feedback
are quantitative qualitative and also
retentive
feedback there are different
times we can provide feedback for
example
if i was left arrested in my frustration
after thanksgiving coming home
i may ask mom and dad to
go ahead and hire someone a coach
perhaps
to help me with my agility skills
as they help me with my agility skills
she may tell me
i may increase my agility by working on
hurdles
and as i start to jump over these
hurdles
i may start to trip over each hurdle
as i start to trip over there’s her
those hurdles
that’s when she provides said feedback
it’s basically dictating that this is
the green zone
and anything outside of the green zone
is an erroneous movement pattern which
for
our sake we’ll call it the red zone so
anytime i start to trip
over those hurdles into the red zone and
i am no longer performing an
optimal movement or motor learning
pattern
then that’s when we can go ahead and
offer that feedback
we could even wait to summarize the
feedback waiting to the very
end of the trial or the session to give
said feedback
we could delay the feedback waiting
maybe five to ten minutes
after the trial to ask how do you think
you did
these are things we could see
improvement on
we could even fade the feedback starting
in front loading ourselves with lots of
verbal feedback at the beginning of the
session but
as time elapses we start to taper off
and draw the feedback away
unfortunately the type of feedback that
my cousins provided for me
was absolutely catastrophic feedback
this is the type of feedback we are
all familiar with it’s when you go to a
high school football game and we see the
coaches yelling at their athletes at
their students
to try to modulate their performance in
the midst of
their distracted headspace
what we have found both anecdotally and
scientifically
is that there is a human impossibility
to be able to dual task or do two things
at once to modulate the performance
in the midst of go time
so what have the motor learning
scientists or movement learning
scientists
taught us they have taught us that the
longer we wait the higher the retention
to allow for
more deposits to be made inside of the
brain
inside the hippocampus the long-term
memory center
but even if we give quantitatively the
perfect amount of feedback
and then we tell them how to
qualitatively improve
and we even time the feedback perfectly
so that they can maximize their amount
of retention what if they didn’t want to
change
this leads us to the autonomy of
feedback autonomy is the lifeline that
says this is why i wake up and do what i
do
and we need to start asking ourselves
these questions
early on in the activity
for example in addition to my
thanksgiving performance
my brother wanted me to be able to play
football with his high school friends
while i
was in elementary school as an
elementary school student
all i wanted to do was play tennis i
wanted nothing to do with football
so as we would review run plays
practice throwing around the football
what type of repetitions do we suspect
i made deposits toward i put in
cheap repetitions and if we have the
amalgamation of multiple cheap
repetitions
guess what type of results we yield we
get cheap
results cheap repetitions lead to cheap
results
the neuroscientists have told us time
and time again
that practice does not make perfect
rather
practice makes permanent i’ll say it
another one
another way practice does not make
perfect
rather perfect practice makes perfect if
we practice
perfectly that’s how we we are going to
make those deposits of
uh perfect uh repetitions so that they
yield into
expected results
this is the importance of leveraging
autonomy
if we take our imposed demands and we
project them
onto an individual athlete a child who
does not want to
improve on
whatever the movement motor learning
performance
skill is then they will be unmotivated
to want to capitalize on that
performance
give them the opportunity to leverage
the autonomy to let them
choose what they want to improve on or
which sport
and instrument they want to work on
and that will inform their abilities to
maximize their performance
today we talked about our failures our
failures as moving
beings we have told ourselves that we
are not gifted enough
not talented enough not able to play
football like some of my other cousins
were able to play
we were able to shatter those views in
place for ones that set us up for
success
the next time that we keep ourselves
captive to the couch telling ourselves
look i’m not getting off this couch
because i’m not able to move like
he or she is able to move
let’s be very careful take the time to
identify
and diagnose the story
perhaps we were never taught to
have the proper type timing and autonomy
of feedback
let’s go ahead and look to the
re-engineering of
human movement verbal feedback to
enhance
our performance this is the performance
enhancing drug that no one
talks about and with that said
what type of feedback do you have for me