How Coaches Can Move Athletes from Mental to Muscle Memory
Muscle memory can provide elite athletes with a significant competitive advantage. When an athlete commits a skill to muscle memory, they’re more accurate, faster, and more efficient. The term muscle memory refers to the ability to execute a skill almost flawlessly without thinking. Unquestionably, it takes an enormous number of repetitions before an athlete commits a complex skill to their muscle memory. So, the question I want to answer today is how can coaches help athletes do this?
The obvious answer would be that coaches must take athletes through a repetitive drilling process in practice each day. However, that’s easier said than done. Repetitive drilling is often boring, and only those athletes who have good concentration skills can get the most out of boring repetitive drilling sessions.
Unfortunately, in this era with 24-hour entertainment in our pockets, concentration skills are rare. So, coaches who only use repetitive drilling to develop muscle memory are not getting the most out of their athletes any longer. This may have worked for old-school coaches in the pre-iPhone era, but those days are gone.
To account for this change in concentration skills among athletes, coaches must fully adopt another tool that athletes do enjoy: video.
Football coaches are known for being masters of video review. Typically, the best football coaches review every play, every player, every practice, and every game every day. Then they take what they learn in those videos and transfer that learning to their athletes.
While this may seem extreme, I suggest coaches in other sports consider the science behind why this extreme method of video review works. This science starts with the research on self-efficacy pioneered by psychologist Albert Bandura.
Using Video Review Sessions to Develop Self-Efficacy and Muscle Memory
Bandura defines self-efficacy as the exercise of control over things that affect your life. I like to describe self-efficacy as the mindset you use to control your destiny.
Bandura’s research shows that higher levels of self-efficacy equate to higher levels of effort and belief in that effort producing results. Moreover, depending on the context, self-efficacy can either go up or down. For example, an athlete who plays basketball can have high self-efficacy on defense and low self-efficacy on offense. Or a wrestler can have high self-efficacy scoring with takedowns, but low self-efficacy escaping when on bottom.
Because self-efficacy has a direct correlation with effort and belief, it also has a direct correlation with results. Ultimately, this means self-efficacy is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Therefore, pushing an athlete to develop muscle memory in a low self-efficacy area is like putting a square peg in a round hole. It won’t work no matter how much repetitive drilling the athlete does. This is why self-efficacy is the key element to help athletes develop their muscle memory.
In sports, seeing is believing. What’s more, belief leads to effort and this combination is what increases self-efficacy. Correspondingly, the first step to developing muscle memory is using video review to get athletes to believe.
Specifically, athletes must use video review to believe two things:
- There are things under their control that can make them better by using muscle memory to be more accurate, faster, and efficient.
- They can turn what they see on video from a mental model into a skill they can master.
Bandura elaborates on these two steps with more technical detail in what he calls the cognitive and transformational phases of skill development. The cognitive phase is where the athlete develops a mental model of what they must learn. The transformational phase is where the athlete converts the mental model into skilled action using the feedback of a coach to eliminate errors.
To summarize, for an athlete to develop muscle memory they must first increase self-efficacy by starting with mental skills. Then convert those mental skills into physical skills.
Video review sessions are the catalyst for developing the mental memory one needs for mental skills. Repetitive drilling sessions are the catalyst for physical skills. Developing muscle memory requires connecting these two together repeatedly until the athlete reaches mastery. However, athletes will only reach this point of mastery once they develop their self-efficacy to the point where they believe the effort to concentrate while drilling repetitively is worth it.