The best pro in the sport taught me wrong!

The best pro in the sport taught me wrong!

Often the best athletes in a sport don't make the best coaches. I was reading the book Blink the other day and it talked about Andre Aggassi's advice on how he puts so much top spin on the ball. When explaining it to his coach and other coaches he stated that by turning his wrist over as he hit the ball it gave him the top spin. Well the coaches believed this (after all Andre was one of the best players in the world) and started teaching their students this. Well, an interesting thing happened, there was a huge ride in wrist injuries amoung young tennis players. After careful motion analysis the coaches saw that Andre's wrist never moved, the "top the ball motion" was actually generated at his shoulder not his wrist.

Reading this reminded me of all the movements in riding that I now explain quite differently than I did 5-10 years ago. The skill hasn't changed but after years of study I realized that I was often explaining the outcome of doing it correctly but not the actual fundamental skill. Effective coaching involves breaking skills down and being able to explain them to a diverse group of people. One of the best aspects of my job is after 20 years of coaching I am still learning how to explain skills better. The learning of skills continues too, after 11 years of coaching mountain biking I am still learning a lot of little details on how to do skills better/easier/with less effort.

The moral of the story, don't believe everything you hear, even it comes from an "expert".