Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 34: The Cues We Use Pt. 3
763 Plays1 year ago
Welcome to Episode 34 of the Movement Logic podcast! In this third episode about cueing, Sarah and Laurel discuss a specific subset (that’s a circle within a circle) of cues: feedback. Namely, we focus on when and how your feedback cues to your yoga, movement, and strength training clients can be most effective, and how there’s a strong chance you’re not helping them with that all important goal: motor learning.
We also discuss:
- The three stages of motor learning that all practitioners of movement are going through, whether they know it or not
- How the timing of your feedback may be the most important part (possibly even more than the content)
- In what ways your current feedback habits could be getting in the way of your students’ learning (it’s not your fault!)
- What three components you should pay attention to when you are giving feedback
- How to transform your “motor performers” back into “motor learners”
Sarah’s Motor Learning Presentation
Get the Movement Logic Hips Tutorial ON SALE NOW (save over 20%)
Recommended
Transcript
Meta Feedback Discussion
00:00:00
Speaker
So Laurel, what I'm going to do is give you some feedback about your feedback. Are you ready? Whoa. Yeah, it's getting very meta in here. Okay. My feedback to you about your feedback is that you're the problem. I know it's harsh. It's harsh. Now, yep, try breathe, breathe. I'll get you some tissues. Just breathe. It's going to be okay.
Introduction of Hosts and Podcast
00:00:23
Speaker
Welcome to the Movement Logic podcast with yoga teacher and strength coach Laurel Beaversdorf and physical therapist, Dr. Sarah Court. With over 30 years combined experience in the yoga, movement, and physical therapy worlds, we believe in strong opinions loosely held, which means we're not hyping outdated movement concepts. Instead, we're here with up-to-date and cutting-edge tools, evidence, and ideas to help you as a mover and a teacher.
00:00:59
Speaker
Welcome to the Movement Logic Podcast. I'm Dr. Sarah Court, physical therapist, and I'm here with my co-host, Laurel Beaversdorf, strength coach and yoga teacher.
Effective Feedback in Cueing
00:01:08
Speaker
And this is our third episode about cueing. Although, to be honest, I bet we could do an entire season just about cueing.
00:01:16
Speaker
But we're not. We're just doing three episodes. And in this episode, we are focusing on feedback. When, how, and how much should we give our students in order for them to get the most out of it, in order for us to be the most effective. Now, a lot of this I stole.
00:01:34
Speaker
from myself. From a presentation I gave in 2017 on motor learning versus motor performance, so good job 2017 Sarah who had no idea she was going to be doing a podcast and made this PowerPoint six years later. Ideally, the feedback you are giving your students or your clients is going to enhance their motor learning because motor learning is a really useful thing for them to improve and it will end up saving you a lot of work.
00:02:04
Speaker
in the end. Did we want to talk about the difference between motor learning and motor performance
Motor Learning vs. Motor Performance
00:02:09
Speaker
real quick? I know we've done so in previous episodes, but just to bring people up to speed? Yeah. So what is motor learning? Motor learning is your ability to learn something about motors. No.
00:02:23
Speaker
Motor learning is your ability to take something that you've learned, whether it's a yoga pose, a weightlifting maneuver, a piece of dance choreography, and to replicate it at some future point in some different situation without needing any additional help, meaning you've learned it. Motor performance, in contrast, is one
00:02:47
Speaker
time, and one time only, that you have done a yoga pose, lifted a barbell, done a piece of dance choreography, but you were queued, you were coached the entire way through. And were you to try to do it again at some future point, you could not.
00:03:04
Speaker
Or it's just only being able to do it when you're in this part of the room or in this room with this teacher. When the teacher says it this way, there's not a lot of room for you to be able to replicate that movement in any other context but the exact
Timing and Content of Feedback
00:03:19
Speaker
one.
00:03:19
Speaker
That gets you there cuz you're reliant on that. Yeah, what is feedback? That's a great question. What do you think? No, I'm just kidding That's a trick if you're if you ever teach teachers Listeners if you're a teacher and you're a teacher of teachers one of my favorite when I don't really feel like giving an answer is I ask them What do you think the answer is?
00:03:41
Speaker
and then I don't have to say anything. But first let's define feedback. Let's define feedback. So feedback in the dictionary, it is a reaction or a response to a particular process or activity. So feedback has to happen once something
00:03:56
Speaker
either is occurring or has occurred. You can't give someone feedback on a deadlift if they haven't done it yet. So Laurel, how would you define feedback in the context of queuing movement? Do you think it has more to do with the content of what you're saying or the timing of what you're saying? First of all, when you said it is a reaction or response, I just thought of emojis. I'm going to exclusively give my feedback in emoji form. Cringe. Oh. Sobbing. Pooh. Elated.
00:04:26
Speaker
Pooh. Face palm. No. When I think of feedback, in the context of queuing movement, you ask what's more important, the content or the timing. I would say both because if the timing is not optimal, the content doesn't matter. If the content
00:04:43
Speaker
doesn't land because it's somehow unclear or inappropriate for the student, then the timing doesn't matter either.
Enhancing Motor Learning with Feedback
00:04:51
Speaker
So they rely on each other and both are probably of equal importance, actually. And I think that it's actually a new thing to think about the timing of feedback for a lot of listeners, because I know it was for me. I, of course, thought about the content of my feedback. And I think that there's two categories of feedback if you're a yoga teacher, especially. One is positive reinforcement. You're all doing great. That was wonderful.
00:05:13
Speaker
And the other is, let's stop the class and or look over at me and let me show you how it's done or actually could you do it this way, some sort of correction.
00:05:24
Speaker
In terms of all of our types of queuing, like if queuing was a... What are those? Venn diagram? The circles? Yeah. So if queuing is the big circle, feedback is a smaller circle inside the big circle of queuing. But I think the circles actually intersect. They don't have to. They don't have to. Really? Yes. Sometimes they can just be inside the other one.
00:05:45
Speaker
Ah, so that's kind of like all proprioceptors are mechanoceptors. Oh, no, not this again. But not all mechano receptors are proprioceptors. So the proprioceptor is the circle inside the circle? Yes. And feedback is the small circle inside the large circle of cues. So feedback is an adjustment to a movement versus an instruction on how to get there. Perfect. And to your point, feedback should be useful.
00:06:15
Speaker
And you may want to slip in a compliment here and there, but that's not the main purpose of feedback. The main use of feedback, as we're saying here, is to improve motor learning. But there are also other possible reasons to give feedback. One might be encouragement.
00:06:33
Speaker
When you first came to class, you had a really hard time balancing in tree pose and now you're doing it no sweat. Or in the rehab setting, when I work with people, a lot of the time they don't remember especially well where they were when they started. And so I might say, when you first came in, your arm only wanted to go to shoulder height and now it's almost next to your ear, right? I'm thinking about working with my private strength clients where I track all their workouts and I can look back like three months prior and go, do you know you are
00:07:00
Speaker
overhead pressing 15 pounds and now your overhead pressing 20 pounds or 25 pounds. Yeah, totally. The other way you might want to give feedback is if you are correcting what I like to call suboptimal behavior, like please turn off your phone next time.
00:07:16
Speaker
or you don't get to touch on me where it hurts on you. Uh, what? Yeah. So that's maybe something that I have to do all the time in the clinic because people are coming in and saying, I've got pain right here. And instead of touching- Where is here? Well, exactly. Instead of touching themselves where it is, some of them will touch me where it is. And- Who are these people? They're men. It's not shocking.
00:07:43
Speaker
They're men. Overwhelmingly, they are white. Overwhelmingly, they are over 60. Oh, that's such a shocker. Yeah, I'm really blown away by it. So one of the reasons I brought up compliments is I had a private student a few years ago, and I guess at some point when we were working on something, I said something like, oh, well done. And they responded with, that's the first time you've given me a compliment.
00:08:08
Speaker
And I realized I had become sort of anti-compliment because of where I started, which was when I was a new yoga teacher, and I thank God that a teacher took my class early enough to point this out to me so I could stop doing it, but apparently I got into this like word tunnel where the only word I was saying about what people were doing was beautiful. Chair post, beautiful. Tree post, beautiful. Down dog, beautiful.
Stages of Motor Learning
00:08:34
Speaker
Everyone, beautiful. And she came up to me and she was like,
00:08:37
Speaker
If everything is beautiful, then nothing is beautiful. And I was like, oh man. And that's such a different type of feedback than the more objective feedback of when you first came to class, you were struggling with tree, now you're bouncing for however many, you know, breaths or minutes or whatever, or your arm was here, now it's here, or you were lifting 15 and now you're lifting 20 pounds. That's a very subjective cue to give. And it doesn't really mean anything. It was almost like my uh or uh, it was like a word filler, beautiful.
00:09:06
Speaker
Laurel, did you have any language habits you were in as a newer teacher that you had to break, like my beautiful story? Yes, I'm sure I did. I think overwhelmingly, though, my language habits were to say way too much, which we'll get into. Okay. So we're going to investigate what are the components that make feedback useful.
00:09:29
Speaker
In order to do that, we have to define our goal, which is motor learning, and that we're trying to get motor learning to happen and not motor performance. This is a topic that we talked about in the other episodes, but there is going to be some topic overlap, and I don't think there's anything wrong about. Let's play a little thought experiment. Laurel, I'm going to ask you to do this as well. I want you to think about, listeners, the students or the clients that you have now, whether they are private students, group class students, corporate, whatever.
00:09:56
Speaker
And I want you to pick one person in particular, and the person I want you to pick.
00:10:01
Speaker
is the person who no matter what you say, no matter what cues you give them, they never seem to be able to retain it from week to week. In other words, you have to cue them over and over again with the same cues. And you might be wondering to yourself, why is my student so unable to take direction? Why do I have to cue them over and over again? Are they just movement dummies?
00:10:28
Speaker
Do you have someone in mind? Yes. Now, here's the thing. And I say this, I'm going to give you guys some feedback. If any of my students are listening, it's not you. It's not you. She already told me it's not you. So Laurel, what I'm going to do is give you some feedback about your feedback. Are you ready?
00:10:44
Speaker
whoa yeah it's getting very meta in here okay my feedback to you about your feedback is that you're the problem i know it's harsh it's harsh now yep try breathe breathe here so i'll get you some tissues just breathe it's gonna be okay you're you're probably doing it but you're not doing it on purpose
00:11:05
Speaker
You just don't know that you are inhibiting their ability to actually do any motor learning at all. So you mean that as a newer teacher, when I was saying, great job, everybody, every single pose, and also teaching them every single step of the pose from the ground up and saying six cues for every body part.
00:11:32
Speaker
that I was the problem? I don't understand because I'm working so hard, I'm giving so much information and I'm being really positive in my reinforcement. How am I the problem?
00:11:45
Speaker
She's looking at me like the saddest, saddest puppy left out in the rain, hungry, tired, forlorn, just wants to come inside. The shorter answer is you're doing it by mistake. Because I don't know about feedback. I've never actually thought about it. Well, and I didn't learn this until I went to PT school. I have learned nothing of this in yoga teacher training, so why would you? I didn't know about this until I listened to your lecture in 2017 on motor learning. Well,
00:12:12
Speaker
It's a good thing we're here. So let's get into motor learning in a little bit more detail. As it relates to feedback. As it relates to feedback. These are the stages that your students are going through. As motor learners. As motor learners. Motor learning isn't just like, you saw it once, you got it, you're done. It's a process. And it's a process that takes some amount of time. Right, it's also not even a thing that exists in the world. The thing that exists in the world is the learner, the person learning, right? So whenever we're talking about motor learning, we're talking about people.
00:12:42
Speaker
Yes, anytime you, Laurel, or I, Sarah, or anyone in the world are learning a new physical activity or skill, if you're going to get some motor learning, if you're going to be able to retain it, you're going to go through three stages. Cool. You're not going to be aware that that's what's happening. It's just going to be happening. In 1967, two researchers named Fitz and Posner came up with these three stages of motor learning. So the first stage is called the cognitive stage.
00:13:12
Speaker
which is the part where you haven't retained it in the way that motor learning wants you to retain it yet. You're just gathering information. Like the first time you ever took a yoga class, right? And you're like, oh, my one foot goes here and my other foot goes here and now my arms are up and they're calling it warrior two. Okay. Super broad brushstrokes. So broad. And you're certainly not retaining any of that, right? This is just, or like the first time you took a kettlebell class
00:13:42
Speaker
It's almost like you're developing the concept of something for the first time. Like, oh, that was a yoga class. Oh, that was a kettlebell class. And vague memories of what actually happened in that class. They're only vague. Yes. That's the first stage, cognitive. The second stage is called associative.
00:14:00
Speaker
And you can think about this like, yes, you're starting to make associations. You're starting to develop more detail about things, not just one foot goes here, the other foot goes here. You're thinking about things in relation to other things. You're making comparisons between this shape that we did here is very similar to this shape over here. Up dog always happens after chaturanga. Sure. Does it? Shavasana always happens at the end. There you go. It's the best part of class.
00:14:29
Speaker
Shavasana equals the best part of class. That's the association you're making. Okay, so we're in stage two, the associative stage. You're starting to put things together a little bit, right? You still haven't learned it, learned it. You still have to be really thinking about what you're doing. It's still a little disjointed, but the changes you're making are smaller. You're getting more specific. You could also be adding on to what you've already learned. Yeah.
00:14:56
Speaker
If you learn the deadlift and you learn the setup and then you learn how to do the basic movement and you've done that for a couple of weeks in that associative stage, then when the teacher gives you the next thing to work on, which might be on how to activate your upper body in a different way to support the stiffness of your core. That then becomes associated with the setup and it becomes associated with your relationship to the barbell.
00:15:24
Speaker
so that now these two things are not separate, they're related. I really like that example because what I like about what you said is the teacher may have said that information the first time around, but they were not yet able to really hear it. They were only like, where do my hands go? Now that they understand where their hands go, they can actually take on that level of detail. And it's possible that, but maybe they're teaching a group of people at different stages of motor learning. Exactly. Exactly.
00:15:51
Speaker
That's associative. You're able to start to put the pieces together. And then the third stage is called the autonomous stage. And you can think about it like it's automatic or you have autonomy over yourself. You don't need someone telling you what to do anymore. You don't need to be queued. That is when motor learning has taken place.
Teacher's Role in Student Autonomy
00:16:11
Speaker
You can go to the gym and go over to the barbells and load them up with plates and do your workout with the confidence
00:16:20
Speaker
that you're doing it, quote unquote, correctly or safely. Yes. So those are the stages of motor learning. That sounds like a bad business model. Well, I mean, as a teacher, don't I always want my students reliant on me? That's how I make money. Do I really want them running off and doing this on their own? I mean, who's getting paid in that equation?
00:16:40
Speaker
Not you. Ladies and gentlemen, Laurel's just here for your money. No. I think the primary goal of a teacher should be actually to make themselves obsolete. And we do that by understanding motor learning. Yes. Okay, so we've got our three stages. Cognitive, associative, autonomous. Now,
Components of Feedback for Learning
00:17:00
Speaker
The thing that happens to all of us, this is why we're in the, it's not your fault category, is it's so, when you see somebody doing something and you're like, that's not right, it is so hard not to just jump in and fix it. Jump in and fix it, jump in and fix it, jump in and fix it. But this can take, this can get in the way of motor learning if you're doing it too often.
00:17:26
Speaker
And what I think is really interesting is the way, cause I asked you earlier, what do you think is more important, the timing or the content? But the timing of your feedback is actually in some ways more important than the content.
00:17:43
Speaker
because the timing of it can actively impede our students' motor learning. Ooh, yeah. What I want to talk about, so we've got this one list, which is the stages that the students are going through. Now we're going to talk about a second list, which is the components that make up your feedback. And that is either going to put your feedback into one of two categories, motor learning that we want or motor performance that we don't want. Does that make sense?
00:18:13
Speaker
Totally. Cool. We've got three components. We've got frequency, we've got timing, and we've got bandwidth. Let's talk about frequency, which is how often. How often are you giving feedback to your students? If you are giving constant feedback,
00:18:40
Speaker
you will create a fantastic motor performer. If you're putting too much salt in your food, you're going to create salty food. Yes. If you want to create motor learning, you are going to be, what's the word I'm looking for? Like salt bay with your salt. A dash. A dash. A smidge. If you give people less feedback, what happens is that person then has to connect the dots.
00:19:10
Speaker
And that active cognitive associative part that they're then going through, right? Remember our stages of motor learning? If you're making them think about what they're doing, they are going to get some motor learning happening. They're going to get this long-term retention.
00:19:30
Speaker
of the content. The example that we were given in PT school is the idea of the overbearing soccer dad, and he's on the sidelines, and he's saying, kick the ball over there, move down the field, get open. I don't know nothing about soccer. You're doing great. What's the thing where you're in front of the ball and you're not supposed to be? You're offsides. Get on. You're offsides. Whatever. And so that's all happening. And then there's one point where the kid, he's totally open to take a shot at the goal, and he doesn't do it.
00:20:00
Speaker
And at the end of the game, the kid comes running over and their dad's like, you were open. Why didn't you take the shot? And the kid goes, you didn't tell me. But so that's the point, right? If you make your students reliant on you, at no point do they have to go through these stages of motor learning because they've got you. What do they have to learn anything for? You're always gonna be there telling them what to do. Too much is not better. So say less to say more.
00:20:27
Speaker
Yes, in this case, less is more. I'm going to let you sit with that because we're going to talk about the next part of it, which is the timing. And as we already said, you can't give feedback before something has happened, so your two options are during the thing or after. If you do it during, you're going to create some fantastic motor performance. Again, the thing we don't want. If you do it afterwards,
00:20:54
Speaker
They now have to start to make these cognitive changes. They have to think about what they were just doing and how they might change that thing. And so that thinking process, again, is going to lead them towards learning. It's going to give them better motor learning in the long term.
00:21:13
Speaker
That might not be easy in a group situation because if you're looking around the room and not everyone's doing a slightly different version of something and it's not the same feedback that you would give to everyone.
00:21:26
Speaker
It's not as straightforward necessarily. It's a little bit easier in a one-on-one situation. But with that said, you can, like we talked about in the last section of Q&A when we were talking about doing demonstrations, you can have everybody stop the thing, look at what you're doing. You can say something like, because I've done this, you can say, a good number of you were here, and I want you to be here. And you demonstrate the two differences on your body, and then
00:21:52
Speaker
Let's go do it again, right? As opposed to running around like a chicken with your head cut off, doing manual cues on every single person, and then you're so tired and you have four more classes to teach that day. Yeah. In other words, your timing matters in the same way, or not the same way, but a similar way to, you know, when you're cooking something, you want to put the oil in the pan before you put the onions. Yes.
00:22:23
Speaker
you want to go step by step. And so the oil being potentially let the students do the thing. One, they're then going to have something to base your feedback off of because they will have had the experience. And two, you, the coach or teacher, will actually be able to watch them
00:22:46
Speaker
and see what it is that this group, the majority of them, actually need to hear. And three, giving feedback after the fact is more conducive to motor learning is what I'm hearing. That's correct. So there's a lot of good reasons to do it.
Movement Tutorial Promotion
00:23:02
Speaker
Not least of which, your stir fry will taste better. So much better. Sarah, I'm going to totally change the topic here because I have three questions for you. Why do yoga teachers have so much hip flexor pain? Why?
00:23:16
Speaker
are yoga teachers who tend to be quite hypermobile, so tight all the time, and how the heck can all these yoga teachers with yoga butt get rid of their yoga butt, aka proximal hamstring tendinopathy? How does this work? What's the deal?
00:23:33
Speaker
So that's a lot of questions all at the same time and that would be very hard and take up the length of this entire episode for me to answer. So the good news is I'm not going to have to do that. And the reason why I don't have to do that is that we already made a entire tutorial. Five hours. Five hours. Keep it forever. Forever. Review as often as you'd like. As often as you'd like. Five continuing education credits with Yoga Alliance. Those are
00:24:01
Speaker
Important maybe I mean that's up for debate, but anyway. We've done a bunch of tutorials. This is our sixth tutorial and Incredibly it was overwhelmingly our most popular Tutorial when we first launched it last year does this relate to the three questions that I asked you it absolutely does because this tutorial gives really practical
00:24:22
Speaker
answers in the form of movements and exercises to help you understand if these things are happening to you as a practitioner or as a teacher or to your students why they might be happening and what you need to do to help.
Evolving Teaching Experiences
00:24:35
Speaker
And it's not only those things. Wait, what were the ones that you said?
00:24:38
Speaker
Well, it was hypermobility, hip flexor pain, and yoga butt. There are more though, right? So many more. We talk about SI joint pain. We talk about tightness, just feeling tight all the time, even if you're not hypermobile. Sciatica! IT band syndrome. All of these things that are very common for teachers and are exceptionally common for our students as well. Yeah, and it's not just the practical exercises that potentially address some of the symptoms that students might be experiencing.
00:25:04
Speaker
that help fill in the strength gaps that might be contributing to the problem. Spoiler alert. There are some strength progressions that include kettlebells and barbells in this tutorial. There is also some exceptional anatomy instruction. Thank you, that was my part. And so we're putting it all together with the science, the theoretical,
00:25:27
Speaker
and the practical to help you actually have more solutions to offer your students and to be of service to your students in a way that speaks really quite directly to a lot of the problems that they are going to probably come to you with as it turns out. So why are we talking about this right now?
00:25:43
Speaker
because we're having a sale. We've actually discounted this course. You can buy it at a discount, which is less than full price. So we've actually discounted this thing more than 25%, which is probably the best sale we've ever had on a single tutorial, wouldn't you say? Definitely. Yeah. So if you've been wanting this tutorial, if you missed it the first time around, you should
00:26:09
Speaker
snap it up quick because this sale will end, it will go back to full price. So it was around $130, now it's $100. So just in case you don't know, it's me, Sarah, but also Jason Perique, who is a genius, and the co-host of the Yoga is Dead podcast, which I highly, highly recommend you check out. So make sure that you click the link in our bio, head on over to the page that tells you all about what's included, and snap it up before it's gone.
00:26:39
Speaker
Do you have a story about this, Laurel? Oh my gosh, I do. So starting off as a teacher, I took a training that taught me exactly what to say and when to say it, not word for word. There were no scripts to memorize, but there was a formula and I'm not knocking it. It can be helpful in the beginning to have something like that, but the formula was teach from the ground up, start with the feet.
00:27:03
Speaker
then move to the pelvis, then move to the shoulders and talk about one or two or three cues that are important for those three platforms. Teach from the ground up. Well, if you do the math, that's a lot of words. That's a lot of words. It sounds exhausting. A lot of information. And I was doing this, of course, concurrently while they're practicing, but also I was stopping the class and doing it too. So they were getting TMI during and after.
00:27:30
Speaker
Now what's interesting about this is I would often receive compliments from students who would come up to me after class and say, I love how detailed your instruction is.
00:27:40
Speaker
I love how informative it is. So I, of course, took that feedback and I used it to really latch on to the style of teaching even more and become even more confident. And you know, look, I think that's a good thing on one hand because a newer teacher needs a lot of positive reinforcement, encouragement to keep going because frankly it's hard to start teaching, it's hard to learn how to teach. But now,
00:28:04
Speaker
especially having started teaching strength, it's clear in my mind teaching one or two exercises within a super set or one exercise within a set that there aren't a million things you need to be saying and when you do, you really overwhelm people in a way that's completely unnecessary. This became more apparent to me coaching strength than it was as a yoga teacher, which feels more like a choreographed experience.
00:28:29
Speaker
And students are doing the thing maybe once or twice in a class, not like strength where there's repetitions and sets in multiple iterations. So what I've learned now is that when I give feedback to either type of learner, a strength or a yoga student, that I let them do it, I stop and I go, what I saw was this, and I might verbalize it or show it,
00:28:55
Speaker
I want you or perhaps try to move more in this direction or I'll give an external cue like break the weight or drive your feet harder into the floor or squat a little lower to the box, whatever it is. And I found that stopping and giving one piece of information saved me so much time but I saw immediate growth in terms of their ability to
00:29:23
Speaker
Continue doing that thing just like what you're saying right without me constantly having to say it again and again and again so it saves me time and energy and I feel that especially in the context of strength where
00:29:37
Speaker
A lot of folks are coming to learn how to strength train and then leaving with this new skill that they like to go and apply at the gym or in their home practice. And I find that I'm of much more service in helping these people acquire that autonomy using this approach. So total game changer advice right here. But it does require that you let go of control, which may require that you go to therapy.
00:30:03
Speaker
Are we sponsored by BetterHelp this episode? We should be. BetterHelp, if you're listening, would love to take some money off your hands. Okay, so, so far with feedback, we have had frequency, and we know that less is more. Less salt can be more. We have had timing. Oil before onions. Yes, after is better. Not during. Onions after oil. Yes, if you put the onions in the pan before the oil, they're gonna burn.
00:30:30
Speaker
Onions after oil. You're on good soil? Because it's not feedback before movement. I see. Or it's movement before feedback. I was going in the place of red sky at night sailor's delight. Oil before onions. Turkish delight. Something, something. Onions before oil. You're on bad soil. I need a rhyme for onions. I'm going to work on it. Okay. We've got one more component of our feedback, and that is called bandwidth.
00:30:58
Speaker
So bandwidth in essence is, and this again is somewhere you're maybe going to have to let go of the idea of controlling their every move. Bandwidth is how much do you let them get it quote unquote wrong?
00:31:11
Speaker
versus giving them no chance at all to move anywhere than exactly where you want them to be. And there's definitely some teachers that teach that way. They, similar to what you learned of building the pose from the ground up. Everyone's putting themselves exactly where you're telling them to put themselves and nowhere else.
00:31:29
Speaker
So if we think about bandwidth like a radio dial, and let's say the movement or the pose or something is a particular station, you've got them dialed in to that station. So the bandwidth is really low, but that does not lead to learning because they have no idea how they got there. So if you give them a broader bandwidth, if you let them dial up and down the dial of the radio,
00:31:56
Speaker
and you give them more room for, you know, something you might call mistakes, but I would, none of it's wrong, right? It's more just like, it's not where you're trying to get them. That gives them a much better chance to learn motor learning and where the goal is for them to be.
00:32:15
Speaker
And you got to get it wrong to get it right. Well, yeah, it's like my friend Jules Mitchell has a story about this where she took a massage class and really close to the beginning of class, the teacher wanted someone to come up to the front.
00:32:28
Speaker
to demonstrate something and she stuck her hand up and teacher was like, well, aren't you concerned that you're going to get it wrong? Why did she ask them to come up to the front? I don't know. I might be missing some of the detail, but the important part was Jules's response, which is, if I don't get it wrong, how am I going to know what's right? And I will say as well, the things that I got wrong in PT school are the things that I never forgot.
00:32:52
Speaker
Right? So obviously we're not saying let your students hit themselves in the head with a hammer, for example. We're not saying practice. Snap themselves in the eye with a fork. Eat so much pound cake that they throw up. Marry the wrong person. Make really poor life choices. Forget to brush their teeth. Get addicted to meth. I'm just trying to up the stakes.
00:33:20
Speaker
Anyway, we're not saying to do any of those things, right? We're not saying, you know, let's say you have a student who you know has a
00:33:30
Speaker
stenosis in their neck. You're not saying like, okay, we're going to work on some headstands now. Like we're not saying let them do things that you are sure is not going to be a good idea for them. It just, it also blasts open this idea of there's one way to do a pose in particular, right? That you should be fitting their bodies into a pose as opposed to adapting the pose to their body, right? So giving them more wiggle room, letting them feel different spaces, different places.
00:33:59
Speaker
Something else that rhymes with aces is aces, and that's going to help with motor learning. Now, what if you get the student who's always asking, is this right? Am I getting it right? Is this the right way? What is the right way? I want to know the right way. I came to learn the right way, Sarah.
00:34:19
Speaker
What would I say to that person? I'd say, I'm so glad. You know what's going to help you learn the right way? It's feeling all of the ways. And that's actually proven in research. So that's what we're going to do.
00:34:31
Speaker
Very good answer. Thanks. Sometimes I just give them what they want. A person who wants to know what the right thing is also wants to be right. I love that the person who wants to do it right wants to be right. This is a complete aside, but people might find this useful. One of the earliest tricks that I learned as a PT was how to make it sound like it was the person's idea to do the thing.
00:34:55
Speaker
and using language like, what do you think if we try this with this TheraBand? What do you think about that? And then they say, okay, and now it's their idea. It's a really good trick. I recommend using it for any private setting, anything.
Engaging Students Through Feedback
00:35:12
Speaker
Laurel, I want you to cast your mind back, not too far, don't worry, just to the beginning of this episode where we were all imagining that one student
00:35:23
Speaker
Laurel students, this is none of you. We're imagining that one student that you have accidentally, through no fault of theirs or yours, turned into a motor performer. Is this too late for them? Are they stuck? Is that it? No. I just have to let go. Let it go. It's not too late. It's never too late. Fortunately for them and for you. But what's going to have to happen is you're going to have to change the language you're using.
00:35:53
Speaker
reduce it. Yes. So you're going to have to use our three categories of frequency, timing and bandwidth. And one of the things
00:36:04
Speaker
Also, though, you will have to change is the content, and what I recommend doing is rather than just telling them things, start to ask them questions. For example, one of my favorite ones, and I use this possibly in an obnoxious way, but it was a lot of the time when I was just tired of giving them the same cue over and over again, is I'd say something like, what's the cue I gave you for this last week?
00:36:25
Speaker
And more often than not, people were able to come up with it. They just weren't in the habit of having to think at all. So you want to get them in a thinking place. And so the best way to get them thinking is to ask them questions instead of just telling them what to do. It could also be, do you remember what we worked on with regards to your shoulders in this pose last week? Yeah. Or what are you noticing about how this feels right now? Oh, I feel like my shoulders are up in my ears. And what did we talk about last time? That I should drop my shoulders.
00:36:55
Speaker
Yeah. This reminds me when I was teacher training a lot and I'm working with a bunch of students who are learning to practice, but also students who are learning to teach. One of the ways that we would workshop teaching, but also workshop poses, which I found to be very valuable was I would stop and have everybody come gather around a couple of the teachers in training and have them both do the same pose. Maybe it's plank pose.
00:37:23
Speaker
And then I would ask the students who are teachers who are watching, what do you notice is different? And I would often also ask them not to speak, but to think before they speak. And then I would call on different people. What do you notice is different about the way this person's approaching plank and this person's approaching plank. We also set some ground rules like what you say
00:37:45
Speaker
cannot include this person is doing it better or worse. It has to be objective and rooted in what you could actually notice objectively, say if you took two pictures in a magazine and compared them. In other words, this person's hips are higher, this person's hips are lower, this person's elbows are doing this or that. So we're not assigning value judgments to it.
00:38:07
Speaker
And what would happen from this is that I would get so much higher value responses from the teachers in training where they started to connect the dots between maybe what Q would be better for this person and what Q would be better for this person. And then the people practicing plank would look at each other
00:38:28
Speaker
and then think about what they were doing and start to connect the dots between what it is they were feeling and what it is they were seeing, and it was just an incredibly valuable workshop tool.
Neuroplasticity and Feedback Adaptation
00:38:40
Speaker
That's great. I love that. I'm going to steal that. Yeah. In other words, you want to force their hand a little bit and get them to engage cognitively, get more involved in what's happening as opposed to just doing what you're telling them to do.
00:38:58
Speaker
Now, another thing you can do is go into the idea of neuroplasticity, the ability of your brain to create new connections and tell them by having you work on this yourself and not me just telling you what to do every moment, we're actually expanding your brain's capacity. Now, this is a know your audience.
00:39:24
Speaker
thing because if you're teaching a bunch of people who are like, I'm not what I'm here for. I'm here to flow and sweat and I don't want to think. In fact, I'm here not to think. I think yoga teachers can relate to this especially. We live in this weird inter-world of being everything to everyone all the time. Not everybody in your class, your yoga teacher, as you've probably noticed, is there to learn. A great portion of them are there to escape.
00:39:50
Speaker
and a great portion of them are there to be entertained. And depending on what your skill sets lean toward, you probably attract one of those three more than the other. Give feedback to the learners, in one example is what Sarah just gave about neuroplasticity, to the people who are there to escape
00:40:07
Speaker
and you get that sense, you probably teach a sweaty flow to a great playlist. Think about ways that your feedback can have to happen after the fact while maybe they're in child's pose or resting or in some type of resting-esque asana where you can just slip in a little, I noticed when we did the flow the first time, a lot of this happening, we're gonna do it again, I'd like you to focus on this, and then let them escape. But then when the moment comes for them to apply that skill, drop it hard.
00:40:34
Speaker
The third type, the people who are there to be entertained will just lean into your sense of humor, or whatever it is that they are entertained by, and allow your feedback to come through who you are that they find entertaining. And also, your class will ultimately be self-selecting, and the people that want to be there will stay. Oh, yeah. That's what I've learned. Well, you are a magnet, and therefore, you should just be yourself. But you, depending on what, it doesn't matter what kind of magnet you are and who you attract, you can give feedback.
00:41:03
Speaker
applying these components. Definitely. You certainly can. So another way to do it is to start to connect shapes that are similar. For example, did you happen to notice that your down dog is an upside down version of your boat pose, right? And so this lets them, again, make these associations and help them actually start to learn or
00:41:24
Speaker
Let's say you taught a hip hinge and then they go to do a deadlift or a squat, you can be like, hey, are you noticing that you are also doing a hip hinge while you're doing all of these other things? This is how you convert the people there to escape into learners and the people who are there to be entertained into learners.
Summary of Feedback Strategies
00:41:43
Speaker
Everybody is all three types, maybe, or at least everybody starts to be there.
00:42:03
Speaker
he really wasn't there for motor learning. He really just wanted to move and it was gonna happen if I was there and if it wasn't there, it wasn't gonna happen. So I sort of made peace with that early on. And I remember one time I went in to sort of do a hands-on adjustment. I think it was like maybe in a down dog, I'm not even sure. And he said, I'm not ready yet. And I was like, oh.
00:42:15
Speaker
to learn because you're not interrupting the reason they're there to teach them.
00:42:24
Speaker
He said, I'm not ready yet. And so I was like, well, OK, tell me when you're ready. So then he kind of moved himself around a little bit more. He made some adjustments. And he said, OK, now.
00:42:35
Speaker
And so I was actually getting in the way of his motor learning because he was practicing that bandwidth all by himself without even me cueing him to do it. Sometimes I actually use that now with people. I'll say if someone's doing like a bridge pose and when they do it every time their one hip is dropped lower and they're having pain on their opposite low back, and I'm like, this might be part of the reason is they don't have a sense of where they are in space. So I'll say, come into a bridge, put yourself where you think I want you to be, and then tell me when you're ready. And so they will.
00:43:05
Speaker
And usually, they're a lot closer than I might have assumed had I jumped in sooner and fixed, quote unquote, fixed them. So encouraging bandwidth that way can be as simple as put yourself where you think you should be, or some sort of language like that is not that hard to do. Tell me when you're ready. Tell me when you're ready. So as a sort of like roundup of what we were just talking about, because I know for some people, this is a really new idea, and we threw a lot of terms around.
00:43:35
Speaker
Motor learning is a goal. When students are going through motor learning, they're in one of three stages, cognitive, the very beginning, associative, kind of putting pieces together, autonomous, they've got it. And then when you are giving feedback, there's three components of your feedback that you really, really want to pay attention to. One is the frequency. How often are you doing it? Too much salt, no good. One is the timing.
00:44:04
Speaker
Are you doing it at the same time? It's not gonna help. You need to do it after. Onions after oil. Yes. And then the third one is bandwidth. Give them space to move around so that they know where
00:44:19
Speaker
you don't want or they don't want to be and where they do want to be. So listeners, I hope you enjoy this episode and that it's given you some new ideas around how to give feedback or even what feedback is. And I really do encourage you to try some of these strategies out for yourself and see what happens. And then you can put that in your review of our podcast. Yes, you can. I know to you listeners, you can check out our show notes for links to any of the references we mentioned in this podcast.
00:44:46
Speaker
Thank you so much for joining us on the Movement Logic podcast. It helps us out enormously if you like this episode to subscribe. And then while you're there, hit five stars. One person gave us a four star review. I'm really sad about it. What? I know. We were like fully at five and now we're at like 4.9. Anyway, help correct that. I think that person just got confused. Hey, Sarah. What?
00:45:10
Speaker
Let it go. I can't. Anyway, please rate. And if you have a little more time and you want to write us a review, we really love them. And you can do that as well. And so you can rate and review and subscribe on Apple Podcast or wherever you're listening. Wherever you're listening. Where are you listening? On Apple Podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.