What is deliberate practice in curling?

Established training techniques. Curling coaches make use of established, and effective, training techniques to enable athletes to slide on the Line of Delivery (LOD), throw hit weight, apply rotation to a stone correctly during the release, and generate effective vertical force when brushing.  These are all fundamental skills that must be perfected in order to achieve success in competition. In curling, NCCP-trained coaches have access to a wide variety of coaching materials and a selection of evaluation tools with which to measure progress. Coaches can derive practice plans, augmented with observation, that suit an athlete’s ability and stage of development.

eXisting skills as building blocks. Deliberate practice involves building on and adapting existing skils by focusing on specific aspects of those skills and improving them. In curling, achieving accuracy when throwing hit-weight shots requires sound mechanics that should first be mastered at lower velocities. Similarly, solid brushing mechanics should be practiced at draw weight before applying those principles to hit-weight shots, so as not to lose the body position and optimal biomechanics that produce maximal vertical force. Building on fundamentals mastered with simpler shots is the key to making progress.

Pushing the Envelope. As the article states, “Deliberate practice takes the learner outside their comfort zone because it requires constant attempts at skills that are just beyond their current abilities. These attempts involve near-maximal effort mentally and sometimes physically”. A good example in curling is altering one’s delivery to move their hips further behind the hack in order to generate more power for hit-weight shots. For athletes who rely only on leg drive, with minimal movement, to generate hit-weight power, moving one’s slide foot further back through the delivery’s backwards motion can be challenging. However the challenge is largely mental. Making the change requires concentration and self-awareness, but after some practice the movement can begin to become automatic. Similarly, in brushing, it takes considerable concentration and athleticism to incorporate the optimal biomechanical position to generating vertical force, not only when being the inside brusher closest to the stone but, perhaps with even greater difficulty, when being the outside brusher. Feedback from instrumented brushes, accompanied by video, is essential to improving brushing technique along with effective and consistent practice. Adopting mindfulness techniques to cope effectively during competition is yet another example.

Enhancing mental representations. “Deliberate practice leads to the development of ‘mental representations’ about the task and how it should be performed. Mental representations can be thought of as ‘apps’ in the brain that help ‘run’ the task. Through extended deliberate practice, performers acquire ‘killer apps’: more detailed, sophisticated, and effective mental representations.” In a curling context, these mental tasks include the internal modeling of all of the aspects of a curling delivery. With deliberate practice, athletes can develop more sophisticated, higher levels of the mental representations of the delivery so that they can focus on the shot, rather than the details of the delivery (for example, ensuring the optimal placement of the slide foot through the backwards and forwards motions during the throw).

Responding to feedback. “Deliberate practice involves obtaining individualized feedback and responding to it, leading to modification of current attempts at improvement. Experienced and well-informed instructors such as coaches provide much of this feedback early in learning”. In curling, athlete feedback can be provided in a variety of ways. In brushing, an instrumented brush can be a game-changer in coaching, but even without an instrumented brush video analysis provides very useful feedback. Aside: at your next practice, video your players brushing a stone from the front; see how often they actually brush in front of the stone, especially if they are the “far” brusher. End of aside. Feedback can also be provided by the players to each other, or through the use of drills that are scored so that progress can be measured and tracked over time. Feedback provides the mechanism with which to both modify performance and identify areas where performance is weak, or inconsistent with the others on the team. One example of this is comparing rotations for all of the athletes on the squad.

Total application and focus. “Deliberate practice is intentional; it requires the performer’s full attention and effort in attempts to improve. One cannot simply ‘go through the motions’ when performing. We propose a ‘lunch test’: If you find yourself thinking about your lunch during practice, that’s not deliberate practice.” Being focused in practice is something I have written about previously, especially with Junior and university athletes. Given that, today, teams are frequently not co-located and must, therefore, travel for practice it makes sense for all of the players on the team to give practice 100% of their attention, and be fully engaged. Moreover, simple repetition is unlikely to maximize engagement. Elements of blocked, distributed, and random practice [5] are essential to provide enough variety in a set of tasks so that athletes remain fully engaged throughout a practice.

Specific goals. “Deliberate practice involves well-defined goals related to improving a specific facet of performance, which is often an area of current weakness; it is not aimed at some vague overall improvement.” As mentioned above, feedback, either from a coach or from other objective measures, is helpful to both identify weaknesses and provide evidence that progress towards a particular goal is being made. These goals can be individual goals or team goals. Coaches can use drill scoring, video, instrumented brush output, or various other objective measures to determine the best approaches to improving performance, and provide ‘stepping stone’ interim goals along the way.