Do you sit down and do a post fight analysis after judo competition?
If you coach, do you have a standard mode or form of communication or a meeting after tournaments?
If you are a student, is there an opportunity for you to provide feedback to your coach after the tournament?
You may be surprised, but as a Combat Sports Consultant I have seen many athletes and coaches miss this very key element to athlete development. As a coach I can tell you right now that that it is a very difficult portion of the training to implement.
Why?
Well, getting feedback from your student or client requires "deep" listening. Deep listening occurs whenever your mind is quiet. Your thoughts are flowing rather than crowding your head with distractions, interpretations, judgment making, conclusions, or assumptions. The goal of deep listening is to hear beyond the words of the other person and yourself, to the essence of what the words and feelings are pointing to. You are listening wholeheartedly.
As a coach, this is really tough because when your student or client is speaking you are going to want to "explain" or "coach" them through their answer so they can "understand" but what you MUST understand is that it is you who must understand.
I can remember a time when I was preparing an athlete for the Olympics and after the Olympic, we had a debriefing session as usual and the athlete told me, "You ruined my life!"
As hard as it was for me to hear, I had to sit down, shut up and listen deeply. It was very difficult. After the client spoke I asked him, "Why did you say that I ruined your life?" He replied, "Because you lied to me. You had me thinking and believing that I could win."
Now, I'm sure that you know that as a coach, it is my job to provide the client with the best chance at winning and i must believe in them and make them believe in the program, in themselves and in what they are doing. Never in a million years did I think this was a bad thing, but I can tell you this, I learned a great deal about high level athlete preparation that day. Why am I telling you this?
I'm relaying this message to you so that you can understand that many times you really do not have a clue of how your athlete or client feels and even if you think you do, you do not, unless you really mine and dig deliberately for such information.
After every judo competition, I email my clients a series of questions and I have post-competition debriefing sessions along with film/video analysis to make sure I understand them completely, how they felt during the competition, how they felt about their preparation and what and how they think the process can be improved. Sometimes they're points are valid and sometimes they are invalid, but they are always VALUABLE. It's always better to know than not know.
What I have found out that is super important is that there are times where what I believe that I am teaching is NOT what I am actually teaching. Meaning, the message that I meant to relay and the message that came across are two different messages. Feedback from the athlete/client allow me to refine the coaching and communication process.
If you do the sport of judo, you must not only scout the competition and prepare physically, you must also improve the communication between the coach and the athlete. One element of this is doing the post fight analysis.
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