Learning Environment vs Performance Environment

One of the important concepts that many coaches have a vague idea of but often have an incomplete understanding, which leads to poor usage of it as a practice design tool is the differences between a learning environment and performance environment. Benjamin Keep has a great video on this topic which I have linked in my previous post about Desirable Difficulty. Specifically the section where he talks about the distinction between training and performance. The key point I want to focus on in this post is that making mistakes in a learning environment is okay, and it’s actually what we want to happen cause it’s a sign that learning is happening. While making mistakes in a performance environment is undesirable.

Anders Ericsson talks about this via the now well known delibarete practice where he highlights long term expertise through practice designed for learning and not just executing known skills. Rob Gray has also talked about how the importance of making mistakes and to encourage your athletes to explore.

Ecological Approach, drilling and ideal techniques aside, how often do you see people over correcting their students? Coaches tend to see mistakes as something that needs to be completely stomped out instead of something that needs to occur during learning. This occurs the most specifically in uchikomi and nagekomi practice. It is important for coaches to foster a training culture and environment where athletes feel safe and comfortable to make mistakes and explore movement solutions. Using negative reinforcement every few minutes is most likely going to make the athlete avoid exploring and practicing new movements that they are not comfortable with and stick with things that they can already do well. I’m sure we’ve all seen people try something out, fail a few times and revert to going back to their regular drills that they can already do well. Imagine learning to speak a language where you get embarassed every time for your accent or make a grammatical mistake, very quickly most people would just opt to not speak at all in front of other native speakers.

I’m not saying that you should not correct your students, but knowing when to give certain cues or correction is a vital skill. Too many coaches are obsessed with clean, smooth, repetitive organized movement which is a sign of learning not happening and is most likely the student just performing a movement they can already do. Learning should look messy, though practice looking messy doesn’t necessarily mean learning is occuring. This is one of the difficult parts about coaching that comes from either experience and intuition, or utilizing long term testing in a performance environment as feedback.

In Judo, you often get exposed to this concept via small snippets of wisdom such as

Yet in reality we all know vast majority of students treat randori as a competition, or they will stick to movements that they know will work or are comfortable with. Some will deny it but you can hear it in their discussion with their peers about how they threw so and so or how so and so couldn’t throw them. There’s also the fact that vast majority of people do not compete in Judo, supposedly the statistic floating out there is ~12% compete and mostly kids. Which means for the majority, randori IS the performance environment. This again means after a certain point, people will stop exploring and be less open to making mistakes, especially when they get to a rank where they feel like they can’t be thrown by a lower rank.

Of course there are exceptions, such as when preparing for a tournament, when nearing the competition date you want to design practice to be more representative of the performance environment. There’s also the fact that a performance environment is the only way you can tell whether the student is learning and acquiring skills, and whether what you are doing as a coach is working.

You can use competition as a performance environment, but the problem as we all know is that competition is a separate skill with variables and stimuli you can’t reproduce within the dojo, thus you have to be competing a lot to be able to use it as a performance environment. In fact it’s not uncommon for people to use some smaller tournaments as a very representational learning environment to try new things out leading up to big tournaments. Which means for vast majority of recreational judokas that don’t compete, or don’t compete often, randori has to be the performance or testing environment. The difficult part is changing the whole dojos training culture towards randori and differentiating the two.

That is a paraphrased quote from Jia Yi Chow. Lets think about how we self assess whether we are improving or learning. And also think about how coaches evaluate whether a student is improving, and whether their coaching methods are working.

It’s most likely from one or more of the following

If we are telling people to not try and win randori, and to try new things out during randori, it is in direct conflict with how we evaluate whether they are ready for the next belt promotion via randori. Students know this, coaches know this, so even if you yell at them to try things out during randori, all incentives will push students towards trying to win randori rounds and minimize making mistakes thus treating randori as a performance environment. This is before even putting into account the dopamine rush people get from throwing someone in randori.

If we are using competition results to evaluate whether a student is improving or acquiring the skill we have been trying to develop, then that totally ignores all the other variables outside of our control such as competition anxiety, how good/bad the referee is, age, experience and skill differences, injuries etc.

I’m not saying competition can’t be used as a testing / evaluation tool, but just like any other data you have to put it into context. If the last few months you have been focusing on staying on top in newaza position, but most of the fights never get to newaza does that mean the student didn’t improve that skill or the practice you’ve designed is failure? What if the other person simply has years more of experience in newaza in comparison?

I’m still trying to fully figure it out myself. But basically I believe we need a clear distinction between learning randori and performance randori for recreational Judokas, and the incentives between that and rank promotions need to be decoupled. I won’t speak to competitive athletes since I don’t think I’m qualified to share my opinion on that.

The hardest part is definitely getting the student to drop the winning mentality temporarily, encourage exploration and remove the stigma of mistakes being undesirable during training. Basically recreating a play state. Greg Souders apparently has figured this out in an interview I heard, but he has stated that its a trade secret.

Sources where I got information from / if you are interested in reading more about this topic: