Advantages and Disadvantages of Drills
Drills with and without equipment for serious athletes - a step backward
Source: https://coachsci.sdsu.edu/csa/vol31/drills.htm
Brent S. Rushall, February, 1997. Reply to question asking what are the best drills to be used to promote swimming excellence.
One of the commonest activities in training programs in some sports (e.g., swimming, rowing, kayaking) is the performance of drills, activities that are purported to train in isolation aspects of a total movement pattern. Drills are repetitive training activities which do or do not use equipment. They are intended to stimulate a part of a complex movement (e.g., an upper arm movement) or an elemental segment of a movement chain (e.g., the transition from a take-off to a jump). They train activity parts out-of-context. When equipment such as paddles in swimming, parachutes in running, and “trailing buckets” in rowing are used, the activity elements are distorted because of the requirement to accommodate the non-competition-related equipment. Drills are inappropriate training content for serious or highly-trained athletes. The only exception to “no drills” is when they are part of learning progressions prior to the attainment and practice of some terminal (final) skill.
Each drill that is practiced should be considered to be a discrete activity. The greater the similarity between a total competitive skill and a restricted practiced drill, the greater is the likelihood of negative transfer between the two. The learned drill will compete with and disrupt the competitive skill. The following are known about skill training.
Training resources that could be applied to developing higher levels of a competitive skill are used (squandered) on irrelevant drill activities. Thus, the level of accomplishment that is possible in a competitive skill will be reduced by “drilling.” It is assumed by many coaches that “drill practice will improve an element imbedded in a total competitive skill.” Unfortunately, the manner in which the body learns movements does not accommodate that assumption. For example, learning how to move legs in one activity (e.g., kicking while holding one arm in the air in backstroke) does not produce high-level kicking skill in the competitive activity when the artificial posture and dynamic movement requirements are vastly different. The body constantly attempts to develop specific adaptations/learnings to particular stimuli as a basic requirement for survival. In fatigue, the body seeks to maintain a level of functional output by recruiting extra resources. If there are movement patterns developed through drills which are either cognitively or conditionally associated with a competitive skill, the recruitment will first gravitate to those strengthened options. When fatigue starts, an athlete will start to perform with many characteristics of doing a drill rather than maintaining a high degree of competition-appropriate movement function and performance. When extra resources are recruited in fatigue, the recruitment is not done gradually or by degree. It occurs suddenly and relatively completely so that obvious changes in performance occur. Since drills do not train total function, when a “drill movement” is recruited into a contest it should be expected that performance will deteriorate rapidly, dramatically, and obviously. Drills originally were only meant to be preliminary activities to be used as a step in a progression on the way through to learning a “terminal behavior.” But now they have become training items which means that athletes’ progress is halted at a less than terminal stage of skill development and competing patterns of movement are established.
When athletes develop faults, they need to be re-taught the element in question and the steps that follow that element. It is teaching the element in context of the preceding movements that is important. Instructing the element in isolation (“correction drills”) is poor pedagogy.
Any device (“training aid”) that is used in a drill alters neuromuscular patterning to form a unique movement skill. A device artificially trains competing movement patterns and introduces inefficiencies. Many devices have no acceptable data to support their claims of benefit. Most respectable research shows them to have no value or negative benefits. Since the form to be used in a competition is what should be trained, why would one adulterate that form through distortional (device) training?
Except at very low levels of performance (e.g., when learning a skill) movement elements learned in one activity do not transfer with any benefit to another.
The body does not have the capacity to determine the intention of some training activity. For example, an activity which requires an athlete’s posture to be different to that which will be employed in a competition, although it is “meant” to be beneficial, does not benefit the competition performance. The body learns the incorrect posture for the trained activity and depending upon the strength of specific/relevant training will sustain correct or incorrect postures in a contest.
Since most high level performers are discriminated from each other on the basis of skill efficiency, one of the most important factors for differentiating medalists from non-medalists, the level of performer skill should be maximized. Drill practices and the use of training devices work contrarily to that aim.
Many proponents of “drills” argue that the changes in technique they produce are only minor and are therefore, relatively inconsequential. That might be acceptable for individuals in the early stages of skill learning, but it is not acceptable for highly-trained individuals. Any competing movement pattern or disruption to a highly-refined skill has detrimental consequences. This is why the following coaching lore exists:
“If serious athletes change techniques they have to be prepared to perform worse for a period of time before they have a chance to improve.”
The situation is even more critical for very experienced (senior) athletes when it may be of no value to attempt to alter a technique flaw, the impact of the existing flaw possibly being minimized through years of training. There comes a time in every athlete’s development when skill errors have been performed for so long that attempts to change them would never be effective enough to elevate the performance further. This is particularly so in highly-repetitive cyclic activities such as running, swimming, and sculling.
There is a movement instruction science, in this context it is called “sport pedagogy.” There are principles that are known to be beneficial and others which are known to be detrimental to performance development and change. It is necessary that knowledge of these principles be a prerequisite for any individual partaking in a coaching activity. Ignorance or a lack of knowledge of those principles is unethical and cannot be overlooked in an expedient decision to hire or appoint a coach.
Swimming is perhaps the sport which advocates training with drills (what coach does not have his/her own special activities?) and the use of training devices (special bags are now marketed to carry all the paraphernalia onto the pool deck) more than any other sport. Since swimming is the one “world sport” in which its top performers are regressing rather than improving, it could be argued that this decline has somewhat matched the increased growth in drill training and the use training devices. Most top swim teams in the USA do very little swimming but much finning, paddling, drills, and whatever. It is a mystery why the importance of training competitive movement patterns is so popularly disdained.
One cannot beat the principle of specificity for training when getting ready to perform in a serious high-level competition. If the best performance is desired, then a lot of training had better give the body the opportunity to practice and improve in the activities it will be asked to perform in the competitive setting. Drills and training with artificial devices work against that purpose.
Footnote
There are no references listed to this description. The knowledge has been around for at least 40 and more like 50 years. It has not changed since then. It is so well accepted in the psychological literature that no one experiments with it any more. There are likely to be no new discoveries. What is amazing is that so many coaches are ignorant of this information! It should be part of the core-knowledge of coaching education and is so basic that it should be known by any coach, particularly one who derives income from coaching as a professional capacity. Any individual who persists with large amounts of training using drills and training devices should be charged with MAL-practice.
Advantages to drills
This is an excerpt from Rugby Games & Drills eBook by Rugby Football Union & Simon Worsnop.
Simple drills have the following advantages:
- They are easy to set up and organise in terms of numbers and equipment.
- They are easy to monitor.
- Many can be used as purely fitness activities.
- Players are unable to hide in many of them because they are quite structured and tightly-controlled.
Because of the ease of set-up and the closed nature of simple drills, they can often be combined. You can also combine them in such a way that players go from a very closed activity to progressively more open ones and finally finish with a game. For example, when concentrating on defensive decision making, you can have a group of players move progressively from a repeated static situation in which the attacking players hold shields to the same activity in which the attacking players use the ball and finally to an open modified game (see chapter 10 for more information).
You can also use drills with a fitness emphasis to exhaust players prior to a skill drill to test a particular skill under fatigue. An example of this would be to have the players do some up-and-down shuttles up a grid for one minute and then immediately go into a continuous 3v2+2 in which their attacking, passing, and decision-making skills are pressurised. You can combine attack and defence to test the players’ ability to switch from one to the other (e.g., four players could tackle opponents, shields, or bags for a set time or number of tackles and then immediately pick up a ball and work on 4v2+2 for one minute). Skill drills can also be adapted to create technical and physical pressure. Using the work-to-rest principles discussed in chapter 9, you can match these drills to simple interval sessions for conditioning (e.g., repeat a combined skill drill and fitness drill sequence three times).
However, when mixing technical skill and fitness drills, you need to know whether a particular drill develops skill or fitness. In volleyball, Gabbett and colleagues (2006) found that skill-based training improves spiking, setting, and passing accuracy and spiking and passing technique, but has little effect on the physiological and anthropometric characteristics of players. However, the introduction of skill-based games provided the necessary fitness improvements. The results of this study show that skill-based conditioning games offer a specific training stimulus to simulate the physiological demands in junior elite volleyball players. Although the improvements in physical fitness after training were greater with skill-based conditioning games, instructional training resulted in greater improvements in technical skill in these athletes. These findings suggest that a combination of instructional training and skill-based conditioning games is likely to result in the greatest improvements in fitness and skill in junior elite volleyball players (Gabbett 2008).
To receive the benefits of skill-based conditioning games, athletes must perform multiple high-intensity sprint activities using sport-specific movement patterns. The intermittent nature of these games promotes the development of aerobic power as well as sport-specific speed and agility. Your role is to plan skill-based conditioning games accordingly so that the right goals are achieved in terms of rugby and fitness (see chapter 10), and to ensure that they are relevant and applicable to the age and ability of your players. Although there is a place within the field-based conditioning framework for drills, if you see players for a small amount of time each week or deal with children, you must be aware of the potential drawbacks.
Typically what happens is that the coach demonstrates the skill and then provides a large amount of instruction and correction during the drills, but teaches very little during the game. (In a recent study by the Australian Rugby League and the Australian Rugby Union, U10 coaches spent nearly half of their sessions talking!) This method has a number of drawbacks, including the following (Martens 2004):
Over-Emphasis on Technical Skills
In the traditional approach, an over-emphasis on the practice of technique is used at the expense of teaching and practising decision-making skills (i.e., game understanding) and results in drills that require no thinking and often have very little relevance to the game.
Over-Emphasis on Direct Instruction
The traditional approach relies on direct instruction which normally involves the coach telling the players what to do, rather than the players being given situations in which they must solve problems and discover the best method of success.
Away from the backyard, a novice’s first introduction to sport in a club or school environment is generally through the traditional route of a purely skill-based approach of technique to cognition. A number of researchers have questioned this approach (Pill 2006). A game understanding approach, which will be discussed in more detail later, is much better for developing players who can think and act for themselves; in that way, it is also a model of player empowerment. Rather than set up an artificial 3v2 situation and tell the players in advance what attacking lines to run, you could ask the players to beat the opposition by exploring space and options, and then ask them about their successes or failures.
Mindless Factor
The traditional approach often takes the skill out of the context of the game by using a number of drills that are not related to the actual game. The principle should be, practise the way you play, and you’re more likely to play the way you practised. Is tackling a tackle bag the same as tackling a nimble halfback? Is running unopposed through predetermined plays the same as running against a well-organised and reactive defence? It is one thing to practise a technique in a drill when decisions are minimal; it is quite another thing to perform it well in the pressure of a match. Technical approaches to coaching tend to develop skills out of context, whereas game-sense coaching strives to provide opportunities for learning how skills are applied in the complex and changing conditions encountered in matches (Launder 2003).
The use of rigid, structured drills with very little relevance to the game often leads to boredom, a lack of motivation, and drop-out.
Coaches studied by Richard Light in 2004 suggested that to develop player autonomy, training must place them in situations in which they are required to make decisions independent of the coach. The closer training is to the game, the more motivation there is. The further you get from the game, the less players are motivated. Actual games provide low repetition and high motivation, whereas drills offer high repetition and low motivation. Coaching via “game sense” allows for increased repetition within game contexts, which provides motivation for the players (Light 2004).