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