Why do trainers let their players train with tennis balls in their hands?
We’ve talked a lot in previous blogs about learning styles and teaching styles. But something universal for learning and teaching is that you can learn or teach something implicitly or explicitly. In today’s article, we’ll write about implicit and explicit learning in relation to individual tactics.
Implicit and explicit learning are two forms of learning that are quite the opposite of each other. With implicit learning, you learn without knowing you’re learning it. Your environment forces you to do something and learn the skill/information without being aware of it. The easiest example of this is biking. Every child learns biking through implicit learning, we first put a kid on a bike with training wheels and let them try it, they are forced to figure out how to ride a bike but still have the safety of balance. We don’t first teach them about the theory of bike riding. If we would teach them first how to ride a bike in theory, then it would be explicit learning. Explicit learning is conscious learning, you are aware of what you’re trying to learn. A good example of this is when you’re learning for a history exam. You read the pages of the book or watch a video about the subject to learn the information that you need to learn for the exam. You’re fully aware of what you’re learning.
But you might say, how does this relate to individual tactics? Well, individual tactics you have to learn as well. You can learn these through implicit learning or explicit learning. But at Tactalyse we think that the best way to learn an individual tactic is to combine both. In this way, you get the best of both worlds and you will learn faster. At Tactalyse we do a video session of the match with a player, this is explicit learning, but that isn’t the only thing we do, before every match we send a short video in which we remind the player of the things that we discussed. This is also a form of explicit learning. But the third thing we do, and with what we have had enormous success in the past, is a prime example of implicit learning. We help the player find a reminder that he can connect to the thing that he has to learn. This can be everything, an object, a piece of paper, anything. The clue is that when the player sees this reminder is that he will think of the action that he has to learn. By strategically placing this reminder somewhere, the player will unconsciously be confronted about the action the player has to learn.
For example our player Leroy Fer, the frequency of his head checks needed to improve. Too often he was not having a good perception of a situation and therefore did not make the optimal decisions and executions of individual tactics. As you know perception is the first step of an individual tactic. If you don’t know what I mean by that, then read this article. So we came up with the implicit learning reminder of a crosswalk, he put pictures of a crosswalk in his locker at the club. Every time he opened it, he saw the crosswalk and knew that he had to do more head checks. This worked good and over time the frequency of his head checks grew a lot.
Another example is the one of Joël Veltman. Joël Veltman did video analysis with us, and one of his biggest strengths was his aggressive way of defending. But this aggressiveness was also his pitfall. He wanted to win the ball too bad sometimes. Of course, this is not a wrong thing, but it shouldn’t compromise optimally executing an individual tactic. If you go for winning the ball would mean having a 50/50 chance of winning it or getting a goal against. I think a lot of defenders would decide to not go for winning the ball and make sure they won’t concede a goal. Joël Veltman was still gambling too much in these moments. So without telling him that he should lose his aggressiveness and his style of defending. We first taught him the situations in which he can use this type of defending and how it looks when he’s successful in these situations. We then looked at the gambling situations and why and how that went wrong. So the first two steps at Tactalyse are explicit learning. But to make it a habit and let players learn an individual tactic faster, we combine this with implicit learning. In the case of Joël Veltman, we came up with the idea of putting dice in his football shoe. Every time he puts on his football shoe he would get reminded of not gambling and the things we discussed during video analysis. Joël Veltman became a key player in the style of play of Erik ten Hag’s Ajax that reached the semi-final of the Champions League.
These are the examples of our players at Tactalyse, but implicit learning is not something we found out. This has been used by football trainers for ages. So this type of learning is something that has been proven over and over again. Teams that concede too many penalties, for example, their trainer let their players train with tennis balls, so it’s not possible to hold an opponent. By having a tennis ball in their hand, the players are not able to hold their opponent, thus they are implicitly learning to not hold an opponent.
© Foto Theo Brinkman
Another example would be the training with ropes. Coaches who don’t like the distances in their team let their teams train with pre-measured ropes. If they, for example, want a 10-meter distance between their center back and full back, they let them hold a rope of 10 meters. Every time the distance will go past 10 meters one of the players will get a rip in his hand. In this way, the players implicitly learn to always have 10 meters between them.
Implicit learning is many years old and we at Tactalyse didn’t invent this. We just find a way to use this type of learning for individual tactics.
Summary
With implicit learning, you learn without knowing you’re learning it. Your environment forces you to do something and learn the skill/information without being aware of it. Explicit learning is conscious learning, you are aware of what you’re trying to learn. You can learn individual tactics through implicit learning or explicit learning. At Tactalyse we think that the best way to learn an individual tactic is to combine both. In this way, you get the best of both worlds and you will learn faster.
At Tactalyse we do a video session of the match with a player, this is explicit learning, but that isn’t the only thing we do, before every match we send a short video in which we remind the player of the things that we discussed. This is also a form of explicit learning. But the third thing we do, and with what we have had enormous success in the past, is a prime example of implicit learning. We help the player find a reminder that he can connect to the thing that he has to learn. This can be everything, an object, a piece of paper, anything. The clue is that when the player sees this reminder is that he will think of the action that he has to learn. By strategically placing this reminder somewhere, the player will unconsciously be confronted about the action the player has to learn.
Our player Leroy Fer, the frequency of his head checks needed to improve. So we came up with the implicit learning reminder of a crosswalk, he put pictures of a crosswalk in his locker at the club. Every time he opened it, he saw the crosswalk and knew that he had to do more head checks. In the case of Joël Veltman, we came up with the idea of putting dice in his football shoe. Every time he puts on his football shoe he would get reminded of not gambling and the things we discussed during video analysis.
