By Patrick Morrison

FOR the past two months I have been publishing articles about skill acquisition and when they should be roughly introduced. It also gave a levelled framework for both goalkeepers and coaches to follow when they are trying to introduce new skills at any stage of their development.

By giving them a framework to follow, it allows them a sort of guideline to follow whenever they wish to learn new performance skills.

In the sixth level of my progression model, I quoted “Perfect Performance Practice Creates Consistent Perfect Performance of Critical Movements, In Critical Moments when Performing Under Competition Conditions.” Simply put this means you need to train exactly how you expect to play!

Whenever you are training or working on your goalkeeping performance, it is vitally important that you ensure anything that you do is completely relevant to the goalkeeping position. It also needs to be comparable to the various situations that you will find yourself in come competition. Whenever you train in this way it is called ‘Deliberate Practice.’

Do not confuse Deliberate Practice with Rote Repetition – performing a skill over and over until improvement is gained. Deliberate practice involves attention, rehearsal and repetition which results in textbook skills being learned but unlike rote repetition, they allow for these textbook skills to be developed further into multiple performance skills.

The deliberate practice framework purposely includes activities that are designed to improve your performance and not just the skill that you are executing. These activities are focused on performing the skills in a pressurised environment, so that once you enter competition the same pressures experienced have been previously experienced in your training, therefore allowing you to perform to your optimal levels.

When you are planning your sessions and the first step is to decide what areas of your game you wish to improve your performance of. The next step is to consider the many different environments that this area of your game is performed in, which then leads to the final step of replicating these environments on the training field and executing the skills within that environment.

The purpose of this deliberate practice is to improve your performance of those skills within that competition environment turning your textbook skills into performance skills through adaptability.

This is not to say that rote repetition does not have a place in skill acquisition, of course it does. When learning any new textbook skill, it is vitally important to perform that skill over and over until the body learns how to execute the skill autonomously. Until the skill is learnt in this way there is not much point trying to move forward to turning it into a performance skill.

My point being is that if you wish to progress your performance during competition then your practice needs to be deliberate: it needs to be focused on what you wish to improve, it needs to be measured so that your current level can be highlighted allowing you to know when you have either progressed or regressed.

To give a personal example, during lockdown I set myself a goal of improving my left foot for kick-outs. So over the 12 months of lockdown, I did nothing but complete rote practice with my left foot for kick-outs from the tee. Starting at five metres, I aimed a ball for a target and repeatedly kicked and kicked and kicked until my body became accustomed to the technique that I was trying to instill.

Once I thought I was competent at five metres, I would then move out to 10 metres, then 15, 20 and so on. Over and over I practiced repetitively until I was competent at taking a kick-out with my left foot over 45 metres. I had learnt the textbook skill. Then lockdown ended and teams were allowed to resume collective training.

Up until then my training had been rote repetition but now back at collective training and going into training games and competitive matches, my training focus switched to a more performance driven purpose. Now to transform my textbook skill of left footed kick-outs into a performance skill I needed to change my training into deliberate practice.

This involved executing kick-outs at various distances with my left but now I had included different difficulties and obstacles that I was required to overcome. Now I was putting my textbook skill into practice, into an environment that was going to challenge it and force it to evolve with the pressures that it faced.

By placing my textbook skill into this environment and affording it the time to evolve it allowed me to turn my textbook skill into a performance skill. Deliberate Practice is how skills are combined to create performance, so whenever you are practicing make sure you ‘Practice Deliberately!’

Email: mgoalkeeping@hotmail.com
Facebook: @MSoG11
Twitter: @MorSchGk

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