When your just about to give up on life because that one student has been failing at a kong mount for the last month with no progress… stop for just a moment and start from the beginning. When trouble shooting a skill there is usually a check list that I will go through in my head that starts with the most basic part of the skill and then works forward till the end result. while every skill is different, along with kids adapting to the skill at a different rate, there are usually three parts to any skill.
The beginning Being the first step it is also the most important as an error in movement at this point means that the rest of the skill is going to be thrown off. This makes completing the rest of the skill even more difficult as now the athlete has to think about compensating for the initial error opposed to thinking about doing the rest of the skill properly. things to look for at the beginning of the skill could be thing like
- how far are they starting for run up
- how far are the jumping from behind an object if they are trying to vault over
- where are they looking as they are entering the skill
- are the arms and legs where they should be when entering the skill
- how is there posture? are they controlling their head or letting it wobble everywhere
The middle This part of the skill usually involves students committing to the movement full in order to get through to the end. Because of this ill usually make sure that a student is actually pushing through a skill. Quite often ill see students that start off with good form but fall short when they are not fully committing to doing a skill.
The end often times if a students has already done The Beginning and The Middle correctly, the end will come in time. If this does not happen sometimes giving students context will help them complete a skill. Ill give two examples of where this could work.
- Problem: A student always falls forward on his precession landings.. Solution: hold a noodle in front of the landing spot and tell the student not to fall forward and touch the noodle as they land. This small amount of context get them to lean back a little more as they land and stops them from flying off
- Problem: students who have slow clunky vaults that look like they are just plopping their bodies over vault boxes. Solution (sometimes): give students a reason to get over the obstacle. Have them vault over in order to run forward and touch a goal point.
While this won’t solve every kids problems i hope that this will shed some light onto the subject of trouble shooting. Remember to be patient with your students as many of them are not as incline to understand movement as we do. Instead of getting frustrated get intrigued as to why they can’t get a skill and remember that we do not do things because that are easy.. we do things because they are difficult.