Giving ‘knockout’ feedback: How do boxing coaches provide feedback between rounds?
“… it is interesting that feedback that has been found to enhance motor performance was more often used during winning rather than losing bouts”
- Halperin, Chapman, Martin, Abbiss, & Wulf (2016)
Why is this topic important for coaches?
Blog 1 explored the idea that building awareness of how we communicate can help us to develop our coaching craft over time in a purposeful and targeted way.
This paper presents a similar method of examining coach communication to the paper in Blog 1.
Many of the readers of this blog coach a team invasion sport: football, rugby, basketball and the like. We typically spend lots of time watching coaches in our own or similar sports, but we can also learn plenty from observing coaches in a completely different environment.
This paper allows us to do just that – it presents an interesting view of ‘game day’ feedback from an individual combat sport, where the interactions between coach and athlete can be quite different to those found in team sports.
What’s the paper about?
In the sport of boxing, coaches communicate with their athletes in the one-minute rest period between each round of a fight. The feedback given by coaches to their athletes in this rest period is the focus of the paper.
How positive or negative were coaches? Did they give their athletes autonomy, or give strong and controlling direction? Did the feedback help the athlete to focus externally, or internally? These are the questions this paper seeks to answer.
The paper also compares the types of feedback observed with the types of feedback that research often finds to be most effective.
What did the researchers do?
The researchers recruited 12 coaches at a national boxing championship and recorded them giving feedback to their athletes between the rounds of a fight. The types of feedback used were compared to rates found in a review of research about effective feedback. The researchers also compared the feedback given in winning bouts to feedback provided in losing bouts.
What did they find?
Coaches gave an average of 8 ‘pieces’ of feedback to their athletes after each round, and this figure was similar in both winning and losing bouts.
Coaches gave more positive feedback than negative overall. In winning bouts, the rates of positive feedback nearly doubled.
The majority of coach feedback was controlling rather than autonomy-supportive. This means that coaches were less likely to allow the athlete a sense of control, and more likely to give instruction without providing the athlete with choice.
An example of autonomy-supportive feedback given in the paper was: “Let’s try and not go back too much, ok?”. In contrast, an example of controlling feedback was: “Back her up as much as you can”.
Coach feedback more commonly encouraged an internal focus of attention rather than an external focus.
Internally-focussed feedback leads athletes to focus on a body part, such as “chin down, hands up”. On the other hand, externally-focussed feedback directs the athlete’s attention to the effects or results of a movement. For example, “aim your hooks to his body”.
The researchers also made the observation that the types of feedback most commonly used by the coaches weren’t always aligned with what the research says about effective feedback. For example, many studies suggest that externally-focussed feedback can be more effective than feedback with an internal focus.
So what?
This study provides great insights into how feedback is given in a short and intense situation – the 60 second break between a round of a boxing match.
The finding that coaches give an average of 8 pieces of feedback each break is an interesting one. We don’t know how much of this feedback was heard, or used, but findings from other studies suggest that some of this feedback won’t ‘land’. Boxing coaches reading this might consider experimenting with providing less feedback, focussing around 1-2 key points or themes.
With only a 60 second window, it seems that coaches might feel the need to give more controlling feedback. This makes some sense – in such a short time period, there isn’t a great deal of opportunity to ask really good, deep questions and provide the athlete with choices. It’s possible that these coaches give much more autonomy-supportive feedback at training, with the luxury of more time to explore solutions with their athletes.
A unique finding from the study was that feedback changed depending on whether the bout was won or lost. Coaches become more externally focussed, more autonomy-supportive, and more positive during winning bouts. It is exactly this pattern of feedback (external, autonomy-supportive and positive) that researchers suggest is most beneficial for learning. So, when the athletes in this study were winning, coaches gave ‘more effective’ feedback than when the athletes were losing. We can’t say with certainty that the feedback ‘caused’ the athlete to win, but it’s still an interesting pattern to observe.
Questions to reflect on in your own coaching:
What can I learn from coaches of sports other than my own?
How much feedback do I give my athletes during competitions? Do they use it all? Can they use it all?
What types of feedback do I tend to give to my athletes during competition?
What would be the impact of giving less feedback? More?
How do I support my athletes’ autonomy during competition?
How does the scoreboard impact the feedback that I give?
Want to read more?
This post is a summary of the paper ‘Coaching cues in amateur boxing: An analysis of ringside feedback provided between rounds of competition’, written by Israel Halperin, Dale Chapman, David Martin, Chris Abbiss, and Gabriele Wulf. The full article appears in Psychology of Sport and Exercise, and was published in April 2016:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1469029216300462