By: Chip Gosewisch, CSCS, RSCC, FRCms
How does the athlete learn best? How do they retain information best? We use this and put it into the context of their life, what sport they play, and how they move. Cueing helps us, as performance coaches, teach the fundamentals and priorities of movement to help athletes improve performance and succeed in their sport.
Cueing is words used by movement professionals to help you master movement mechanics. This could be to help you learn techniques for your sport or to have proper form on your lifts.
Benefits of Cueing
In one word- Athleticism. By cueing athletes, you’re helping them achieve a more leveraged position, which makes them more athletic, stronger, and mitigates the risk of injury. Cueing allows us to reinforce fundamentals and progress on top of them. Fundamentals never go out of style.
Cueing allows us to create a strong foundation for an athlete and build on it by increasing the velocity or the complexity of the movement. The hope is, with the right cues and foundational training, the athlete will naturally perform the task with the correct form. Over the course of training, we may increase the complexity of the exercise or include reactive components to agility drills. The goal of which the athlete’s body will respond automatically and consistently to leveraged and strong positions. If they don’t, we can see what we need to reinforce as coaches, so they are prepared for competition at game speeds.
For example, linebackers don’t typically do a lot of rotational cable exercises. We use rotational exercises in our programming, so, if the linebacker is not working from the ground up or sequencing the exercise correctly, they will try to muscle through the rotation with just their upper body. We might say, “push the ground down and away from you,” or “drive through that wall”. Other examples include placing the athlete in their natural competitive environment, ideally with the goal of improved training transfer to sport.
Internal Cueing v. External Cueing
Internal cues focus on the athlete’s body. External cues focus on the effect of movement or a target point in the environment. An internal cue when bench pressing may be “push with your chest”, whereas an external cue may be “focus on the bar moving vertically to the ceiling”.
Internal cues do have a time and place- and it often depends on the athlete and what types of cues work for them and involve less complex motor skills. External cues provide less interference to the body’s natural and intelligent motor system.
Performance Coaches
If a new athlete starts training with us, we typically communicate more frequently in the first couple weeks. Hopefully, after that time, we won’t have to cue as often unless we introduce a new movement pattern. This is because our main principles of efficient movement are instilled in them, and, if they need a reminder, we can just interject a quick cue.
Our team meets before groups start and before we implement a new phase. We revise our program to meet our group of athletes where they are. Following sessions and phases, we discuss how the group is progressing and whether or not we need to make modifications.
We need to account for the athletes’ sport, common movements, and how they load, accelerate, and decelerate those movements. Our team works to help athletes get stronger and faster, and, at the same time, we want to make them as resilient as possible in the process. We can’t prevent injuries, but we can take into account the areas of high stress that lead to common injuries and get the athletes as durable as possible before the season starts.
It’s hard to get to the elite levels of sport, but it’s even harder to stay there. Stuff hits the fan at some point during the athlete’s season. When that happens, it can sometimes be hard to maintain full trust and confidence. One of our responsibilities is to continually build that trust in our athletes. We help them build strong foundations that they believe in and trust. We put them in a position for success and build on that every day.