Movement in sport

When I play 5-a-side football on a Monday night, I am what you might charitably call a 'confidence player'. I'm all about goalscoring, and if my first shot of the game goes in, then I might reasonably expect to fill my boots and go home happy. But if I miss that chance, it immediately gets in my head. What should be automatic after all these years becomes horribly conscious. I snatch at chances, or I take too long. And at the heart of it all is movement – the smooth and powerful becomes jerky and weak.

By contrast, sometimes I watch sporting performances that seem to be all about flow, control, precision. Tennis star Emma Raducanu winning the US Open springs to mind. Now, while at my age I'm mostly aspiring to get through a game unscathed rather than achieve elite levels, you're never too old to improve. And I have access to the people – sport and exercise psychologists – who could be the game-changers for me.

So, how fundamental is movement in sport? What varied and sometimes contrasting approaches do sport and exercise psychologists take in order to improve it? And do their techniques show psychological ideas in practice, both in the sporting arena and beyond?

Inner voice and the 'yips'

I reach out to Dr Mike Rotheram, a consultant at Mindflick who provides support to Durham County Cricket Club. We speak on a Tuesday morning after a particularly frustrating night in front of goal. I try to explain to Mike what's going through my head when that first shot goes awry.

'Skill is not meant to be thought through,' he tells me. 'Skill is meant to just happen. You're bringing thinking in when thinking is not necessary. In a lot of sporting situations, there's too much happening for conscious thought – you just have to react and let instinct take over. Accept that what's happening is what's happening, don't judge the situation that's playing out. The moment you add any level of analysis into things that are meant to be automatic, it becomes problematic.'

So it's about silencing that inner voice? 'Just letting it be there. That's one of the fundamental principles of mindfulness, or Acceptance- and Commitment-based approaches… we all have that inner voice, it's about how you accept it as being there, rather than listening to it, believing in it, indulging in it.'

It wouldn't be the first time it's been suggested I overthink things. 'Some personality types are probably going to be more prone to these movement issues,' Rotheram tells me. 'With Jenn Bennett's PhD, using "performance problems" as an umbrella term for things like "lost move" and "the yips", we saw the impact of maladaptive perfectionism, reinvestment, obsessive thinking. You could argue these aspects are fundamentally important for high performance, but anything done to excess becomes unhelpful. Particularly like the self-conscious aspects of reinvestment – where thoughts become very internal, reinvesting in the experience of something that should be very automatic."

I've heard of 'the yips'. That's always sounded pretty major. 'In its truest sense,' Rotheram tells me, 'it does end careers. Golfers might, for whatever reason and all of a sudden, lose their ability to bring the putter back… or if they do, they get this tremor movement all the way through the putting stroke. In cricket, the bowler will have the ball just end up stuck in the hand. And I've been in darts arenas watching players almost fall over trying to throw a dart.'

To what extent is that specific to their chosen sport? 'We do know that people who have yips in one sport, have yips in multiple other areas. I had a colleague who had the initial yips experience in cricket, and that transferred across to table tennis, to golf, even to just underarm throwing to his son. It's just that feeling of precision and placement and trying to get a ball to arrive in a precise location at a precise moment in time. So the effects of it are more likely to be seen in precision-based sports. Things like cricket, golf, darts… but I think it does show up in other domains as well.'

How does something like that start? 'Certainly from our applied experience, there are a surprising number of cases where individuals have experienced something pretty significant at some point in and around the time of their first experience of the yips,' Rotheram says. 'And if you start looking into the trauma literature, there are small "t" traumas which can be very hard to uncover – things like multiple low-level embarrassments, such as a teacher pulling you up in front of a class – and then big "T" traumas such as the death of a loved one, the loss of a relationship, a work transition.'

Rotheram acknowledges that 'you can never infer causation from these things', and that 'ultimately, what's important is the meaning that person internalises from those experiences – what's traumatic for me might be different from what's traumatic for you. But it's just interesting, so many people apparently experiencing these things at around the time movement disorders begin to play out.'

The gymnast Simone Biles has had her problems with the yips and 'the twisties', and Rotheram says 'it was interesting watching that, given everything that she's been through with the Larry Nassar case'. He tells me that she described those performance problems in terms of 'just not being able to access the routine, something that's been previously just automatic.' Is that the key for me on a Monday night – getting started, finding my right mental place?

Coping with mistakes

I speak with Chartered Psychologist Dave Collins, Professorial Fellow at the University of Edinburgh and Director at Grey Matters Performance Ltd. Can he help me find flow?

'Our job is to promote an excellent performance, and to inhibit things that might lead to a negative performance,' Collins tells me. 'This used to be simply seen as getting in the zone, into flow. Those ideas are still about – that if you coach people, don't give them too much explicit information, because then they won't be able to fall back on too much thinking about it. But more recent work has suggested you can also push yourself into a situation where you go "Come on, execute, execute, that's better". Modern performance psych is saying, encourage them to let it happen if it's going to happen, recognise the importance of things like rhythmicity, the right emotion, and then work with setting it up so that they've got the skills to cope with mistakes and recover.'

That's interesting, I say, because my flow zone feels very fragile. 'Everybody makes mistakes,' Collins reassures me. 'If you came to me for advice, I'd perhaps say 'You've been playing football for how long? And how many successes have you had? If you miss that open goal, it doesn't suddenly mean you're a complete buffoon.' We'd work out a solution, a little method that you can use to get yourself back on track.'

It happens at all levels. 'I'm working with a very high potential young golfer at the minute, he's 16,' Collins says. 'Very good handicap, plays really well. But if something goes wrong, then his mind's gone. "I'm not going to play well. I'm not gonna have a good summer. I'm not going to get a good university. I'm not going to go on tour." Woah, woah!'

A cold Tuesday night away at Stoke

Joseph Stone, an Associate Professor of Skill Acquisition and Performance Analysis at Sheffield Hallam University, says that 'when we talk about "skilful movement" we mean the ability of an individual to find functional movement solutions to complex problems. An important element here is being able to adapt to different situations as they arise. For example, how might we adapt when playing a 5-a-side football match during a warm, dry summer evening, vs a dark, wet and cold winter morning. It might seem we are playing the same game, but the movement solutions required to effectively navigate those conditions are likely to change considerably.'

Stone's colleague Dr Mark O'Sullivan also makes the point about context, explaining that in recent years there have 'thankfully been attempts to take psychology out of the head and into the world – it's not what's inside your head but what your head is inside of.'

Dave Collins also brings me back down to earth when I begin to fantasise about hitting 10,000 hours of playing time across my life, and turning into Harry Kane virtually mid-match. 'By the way,' he begins, 'Anders Ericsson himself eventually got very fed up with that 10,000 hours figure, saying it was totally arbitrary.' (There was also an American photographer, Dan McLaughlin, who famously quit his job to put in 10,000 hours in pursuit of his goal of appearing on the PGA golf tour, ultimately unsuccessfully.) 

'Unfortunately, your success is genuinely biopsychosocial. Jon, you're a better shape for a pro footballer than I am. I'm built for running into things, hitting things. That's the biology of it. And then of course, muscle size, anthropometry. Some people will have faster reactions than others. They'll have better peripheral vision than others. They'll have better depth acuity. But there's also the social side. Who did they mix with when they were kids? Where were they playing? If they were playing out on a park, jumpers for goalposts, who were they playing with? And what early success did they have?'

Across sports and out into 'the real world'

Collins has reminded me that top-level athletes are 'people who are very peculiar – in a positive and a negative sense – who want to really donate their body to a particular sport. And it's the same in dance, in music, in business. Gosh, it's the same in psychology. People go, "I want to do that". And they don't even necessarily make the right choices.'

But I'm still keen to get at whether movement is foundational. Joseph Stone points me to the Athletic Skills Model (ASM). The website leads with a quote from founder René Wormhoudt, about his time with AFC Ajax in the 90s. 'I saw that they were good footballers, but not athletes. As if they could play a beautiful piece on the piano, but they were not musicians.'

Along with Prof. Dr. Geert Savelsbergh of the VU Amsterdam, Wormhoudt put together a new talent development model, originally intended only for sports but now translated into various domains and target groups 'for the talent of each mover'. Movement, and the idea of 'movement poverty', is at its heart. 'We not only move too little, but often too one-sidedly,' warns the website. 'This is a social problem that has consequences for important issues such as health, fitness and creativity, as well as sports performance. This leads to disturbed motor development, therefore increasing the risk of health problems and injuries.'

Stone is pleased to see what he calls a 'deeper integration of experiential knowledge (i.e., that gained by "doing") and empirical knowledge'. He says 'While the ASM recognises the importance of specificity of practice, the methodology is based on the key principle that we must first experience a range of sports and physical activities to build a solid foundation for all-round athletic development that can empower individuals for more specialised training and performance. Indeed, the motto of the model is "first the athlete, then the specialist". This may account for why some elite athletes can switch from one sport to another with what seems relative ease.'

O'Sullivan is also calling for knowledge integration, going back to the 1960s to highlight ecological psychologist James Gibson's distinction between perception of information for affordances (knowledge of), and perception based on second-hand information (knowledge about). 'I have written about that in terms of the integration of player development frameworks,' he tells me. 

'Coach education courses have tended to prioritise knowledge about the environment, trivialising opportunities for coaches' (and athletes') direct and primary experience to grow their knowledge of the environment. We are seeking to readdress and integrate this balance into our coach education courses at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences and will hopefully have a paper coming out soon where our students learn to coach (knowledge about) and coach to learn (knowledge of).'

What it means for sports psychologists

I begin to ponder what all this means for how the modern sport and exercise psychologist works. I ask Collins, is it a problem for your work if the most basic message is 'thinking is bad'?

'Don't ever quote me as saying thinking is bad!', he replies. 'Let's take Olympic weightlifting as an example. I want a certain rhythm. I hear that rhythm. I feel that rhythm as I do it. I'm priming myself to make that movement. Halfway through, I don't go 'now I need to move my hips to an angle of 43 degrees'. But I've got a rhythm and that primes me. So there are holistic "sources of information" type thoughts, which are really good, and I can do them before the moment. But there's also a high potential for negative thoughts, negative self-talk. "Oh my god, If I miss this, I'll look a complete twit. What's my coach gonna say?" So it's not a case of thinking is bad. But a lot of thinking can be bad.'

For Mike Rotheram, it comes down to 'appropriately formulating and identifying individuals who in certain conditions are going to be more prone to some of these situations, and giving them the appropriate psychoeducation that allows them to switch off that conscious brain or to work with it in an appropriate manner. 

'Often, an event happens and we end up reacting to it. A lot of our work needs to be really proactive and on the front foot in that sense, because you can predict a lot of these things are going to play out. And that needs to be very tailored. There's definitely a danger with certain types of individuals, you end up doing stuff with them and actually do more harm than good.'

Another important part, Rotheram says, is helping to 'close that gap between training and competition. That links to Dr Mike Stoker's work, trying to systematically expose individuals, so that pressure becomes almost normalised.'

Rotheram also notes that the modern sports psychologist often takes an interdisciplinary approach. 'If there is trauma involved, we might bring in clinical psychologists. Where the sports psych adds real value is the reintegration back into the sport, almost bringing that graded stress back into the environment. Some of my experiences have certainly given me more of an appreciation for how clinical psychology and sports psychology can work well together. There's this argument that there's an umbrella term of practitioner psychologists – a level of training we all share before we specialise.'

'Put the thing in a kiln'

This is all very interesting, but I've got a game next Monday and I still feel a little short of practical tips to keep the goals flowing. Collins does point me to a number of aspects, suggesting I check out Karl Friston's 'free energy principle', and 'active inference': 'It makes sense that cricketers often say that catching in the slips is actually easier than further out in the field'. He highlights the importance of anticipation and Geir Jordet's work on visual exploratory behaviours. When I coached youth football, I was fond of telling them their most important muscles were in their neck, to constantly scan around before receiving the ball. Perhaps I'm not practising what I preached/am too focused on the shooting side of my game!

Ultimately, it seems to me that a main route to better movement is through what Collins describes as the Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT) angle, of 'Calm down, don't catastrophise'. I'm still interested in how those ideas translate into the actual work sports psychologists do with their clients. In recent years it has seemed to me that there is an increasing trend, in sports psychology and beyond, for practitioners to let go of some of their 'expert positions'. Collins thinks that's an interesting statement. 'For me, "it depends" is the highest level of expertise. To know that it depends. And as you get better and better, the nuances – that's why my company is called Grey Matters – become more and more subtle. And you become cleverer at dealing with and catering for those nuances.'

So, if I was playing football in the Euros this summer, or at the Olympics, would I still be working with sports psychologists on the details at this point? Collins says 'You've got to start thinking about your performance as being like pottery. All the physical training and the technical stuff is like saying "We'll have a handle there, we'll put a spout there, we'll take that handle off and add another one"… at some point, you've got to stop tinkering. You've got to put the thing in a kiln. Otherwise, when you come to fill it, it will just collapse. And so will your performance. As coaches, psychologists and athletes, we'll tweak and tinker, because there are gains to be made. But then there comes a moment where we go, "We're going with that. That's what we've got'" The desire to keep tinkering, tweaking and refining is something that coaches, teachers, bosses, all of us, need to resist.'