Teaching concepts revisited

[VGB]

Hi Nils

• A nasty tailing FC loop.
• Some wide-open front and back cast loops, maybe due to “windshield casting.”
• Some downward directed, wide-open BC loops.

I’ve never seen the last option in anyone but myself trying to learn 170, so I’ll park that. The other 2 are common place engrained behaviours and I would not try and fix the faults in isolation because it’s like wrestling with jelly. My default is to go straight into old way, new way, the new way is usually a variation on Lee’s triangle, near external cue is the tip tracking against the tape until deviating to form the loop, the far external is the desired loop shape.

Quite often giving a cue is sufficient to remove the tail, I guess because you are adding cognitive workload that slows the movement down. The windscreen wipers may get a dose of Amplification of Errors before Old Way, New Way to help the student make the connection between what they do and what they see.

It’s not uncommon to see rotation occurring too soon in the stroke. If so then the line is removed from the cues and I’ll add a marker to the tape to show the point at which point rotation should start in the stroke and I get them to pantomime the stroke in slow motion. The back cast was a bit more complicated until I stole Paul’s frisbee analogy, that has proven to be a massive short cut. If this goes well, I get them back to the aforementioned near external/far external sequences.

Removing the engrained early rotation can be a very difficult and long process. I’ve mirrored a caster with only rod butts in our hand, close enough so that we are almost touching and even in slow motion he could not stop rotating. To be fair to him, this did not show up in his fishing cast, a tidy haul covers many sins. It arose because he was trying CI Task 1 which places constraints on the task.

There is another variation of the tail that is the puncher on the final delivery. This is one you see in stillwater anglers trying to maximise distance. Old Way, new way doesn’t always give you a quick fix with these students because they are covert “feelers”. They may give the appearance of observing an external cue but are still continuing with engrained behaviour. They may anticipate the last fc, panic because they can’t feel line and hammer it to replicate what they expected to feel, or carry too much into the overhang and don’t have the skill set to cope. A brick on a string, or a TT taper normally shocks them out because they feel the apparent mass even though they haven’t got a good line layout.

Mark and I had one at BFCC that allowed himself to be a crash test dummy for some theory work. I doubt he left cured because he saw a quick fix with the line choice, these faults recur if behaviour isn’t changed.

I expect that I’ll think of more bits I should have said later but it’s a start.

Regards

Vince

[Paul Arden]

Hi Nils,

Here are a few thoughts. It actually might be interesting to have a coaching competition casting discussion. Just to dial it down that’s what I’m going to use to talk about cues. The reason for that is I have more drills for beginners than what I’m about to talk about, and all the drills have cues too. So I’m just going to dial it down to a few things. But before I do, I think we need to talk about levels.

I’m totally in agreement with Mark and Vince nowadays in that beginners need to be given drills with lots of freedom of movement and variety. Instead of telling them how to cast specifically, it’s far better to create an environment where they can explore. All I’m really interested nowadays is them initially exploring loops. I’ve been coaching coming up on 28 years now. I wish I could redo the first 24

I’m coaching 35 “students” at the moment. Seven of these are competition casters. But at some point most, if not all, of my high level students learn hoop accuracy and long distance casting, just because I think there are good things to be gained from doing so. And some also learn to teach it, because I have MCI students and some of them are interested in doing so. It’s certainly not necessary for the test but a coach is always a coach and there is considerable interest in the 170.

I broadly think in three levels. Complete beginners who need as much movement variety as possible. Experienced anglers who want to be better casters, which is also about expanding movement, while also trying to instil “good form”, which I’ll come to in a moment, both of which I do concurrently. And there is the third group who some might consider “elite” (although I dislike that term!) who are really at the stage of exploring subtle nuances and exchanging ideas.

Cues and analogies can be different between these groups. Although some are the same.

Now for competition coaching and more advanced casters I really like the 3Ps. (If you haven’t read Nick Winkelman’s “Language of Coaching” I can thoroughly recommend it). Prior to the 3Ps, I used Stance and Sequential Movement (usually lumped together) and Application of Force. 3Ps are Position, Pattern and Power. Position being fluid and therefore can also be used to describe “getting underneath the rod” on a delivery distance cast for example. Pattern is sequential movement but a better term and more accurate I think. Power in the 3Ps is “does the athlete have the strength capacity to do the work?”, but I’ve bastardised that into Power/Force Application, in other words how much, when and in which direction the force is applied. Which I think is more useful for my needs. It’s also “fluid”.

So… let’s first take competition accuracy stroke.

Cues for Position:
darts throwing foot position, weight on front foot

Cues for Pattern:
Standing next to a wall (ok this is more alignment, but it’s directly going to affect pattern)
Lift directly away from target
Backcast: forearm hits a shelf and the wrist flails (thanks John)
Forward cast: squeeze rod grip into heel of the hand throughout the cast (this should bring shoulder into play). If it doesn’t then cue a bell behind the caster and pulling a rope down to ring the bell.

[there are certainly variations between Accuracy Caster Strokes, but this post is already going to be long enough!]

Cues for Force Application:
Throwing a potato off the rod tip (that’s a beginner one!)
Two targets 180 apart.
Line angle from rod tip to target after Lift… follow back for bell above and behind shoulder.
Cast to backcast bell and hold position until the bell rings “ting”
Casting loops through an imaginary tunnel
Cues for hover: start with the fly dead centre in ring and then hover to see what the air target should be relative to the rings. We know this will be the perfect cue to sight for because we started dead centre.
Imaginary mini tornado out of the centre of the ring that sucks the fly in.
I imagine a Gourami swimming under the rings, not too big of course or my knees will start shaking!


Cues for 5WT Distance

Position:

Like standing on a snowboard, bend the knees.
Weight shift to rock the boat.
Foot position is imperative since the angles both facilitate as well as block torso rotation and the alignment allows weight shift direct to targets
Shift to bent back leg, like a prizefighter (OSD)
Move “underneath the rod” for the Launch

Pattern:

170 Backcast like frisbee on vertical
Pullback to set pickup OSD backcast, initially learned using cues: flicking a towel, or bendy ruler or “wasp swat”
Stroke must be domed, learned through Wiper Drill.
Hauling backcast like Karate chop directly away from rod. Chop someone’s head off! Forward cast like “chicken wing” to put bend in elbow (chicken wing drill).
Turn thumb out/ haul twist “thumbing a ride” backcast, brush thumbnail past shorts on front cast.
Finish arms fully extended like aeroplane wings
The Launch: get underneath the rod with a bent knee and explode up from the ground
Cradle Grip: “like clicking the fingers”

Force cues:

Two targets one 15 degrees above the horizon and the other the horizontal on the backcast (can be moved)
Rod butt passing perpendicular on backcast (to time rotational hit&haul)
Second section of rod coming into view on forward cast (as above)

In fact in full flight, which really should be happening by the third delivery in a competition, I only want: backcast target, rod butt perpendicular (or later), check loop, front target, top third of rod appearing, check loop – as cues.

Forward cast (back to training): aiming rod butt through to target.
Reaching out and curving rod butt over target. Casting rod tip over tree directly in front.
Casting loop over tree.
Reaching out and touching the tree.
Dunking a basketball
Drawing a line down from the clouds in front to the target “Excalibur.”

Breathing - used to be like swimming: in, hold, out, in, hold, out – but we don’t swim like that anymore!

It’s endless. There a numerous cues and analogies for every part of every movement. If the first cue doesn’t work we find another and try again. It’s just pure invention (and fascinating!) and the 3Ps allow for us to direct our attention to what we want to mould.

Cheers, Paul

PS this may be the longest post I have ever written

[Paul Arden]

There is another variation of the tail that is the puncher on the final delivery. This is one you see in stillwater anglers trying to maximise distance.

Ah-ha! I agree. They need to be taught torque after the perpendicular! Very common cause of tails in my experience too.

Cheers, Paul

PS I think I need to lie down now

[Bernd Ziesche]

Paul,
I assume "after perpendicular" does not mean you started rotation in the perpendicular position.
I would have thought you apoly torque as soon as you rotate your rod around the center of rotation.
So what exactly you mean here?

Are you teaching to correct different causes for a tailing loop to beginners compared to MED enthusiasts or is it the same causes?

Looking at your answer to Nils his question makes me wonder, how long your lesson is or how many you need to correct the tailing and open loops?

[Paul Arden]

The timing of the “Hit”, Bernd, in competition distance. Answering some of Nil’s initial questions on cueing. Nothing to do with tails!

Tailing loops I don’t fix by cueing. I rebuild the stroke. And if they are particularly prevalent then I’ll teach how to make them on command and control them.

Cheers, Paul

[Bernd Ziesche]

Paul, I have taken your answer into the physics department on SL.

[Stoatstail50]

Given the reference to error correction, this is a teaching concept that needs to be revisited.

Whether in the classroom or on the field, the major goal of instruction is, or at least should be, to equip learners with knowledge or skills that are both durable and flexible. We want knowledge and skills to be durable in the sense of remaining accessible across periods of disuse and to be flexible in the sense of being accessible in the various contexts in which they are relevant, not simply in contexts that match those experienced during instruction. In other words, instruction should endeavor to facilitate learning, which refers to the relatively permanent changes in behavior or knowledge that support long- term retention and transfer. Paradoxically, however, such learning needs to be distinguished from performance, which refers to the temporary fluctuations in behavior or knowledge that can be observed and measured during or immediately after the acquisition process.

The distinction between learning and performance is crucial because there now exists overwhelming empirical evidence showing that considerable learning can occur in the absence of any performance gains and, conversely, that substantial changes in performance often fail to translate into corresponding changes in learning.

Perhaps even more compelling, certain experimental manipulations have been shown to confer opposite effects on learning and performance, such that the conditions that produce the most errors during acquisition are often the very conditions that produce the most learning. Such results are regularly met with incredulity, whether in the context of metacognitive research in which people are asked to make judgments about their own learning or during informal conversations with researchers, educators, and students. It is, however, the counterintuitive nature of the learning–performance distinction that makes it so interesting and important from both practical and theoretical perspectives.

I’m interested, Nils, in how instructors use performance error as a mechanism for learning. An error being some deviation from objective achievement. Obviously in the early stages of learning the range of expected error is far greater than that at the expert end.

[VGB]

Perhaps even more compelling, certain experimental manipulations have been shown to confer opposite effects on learning and performance, such that the conditions that produce the most errors during acquisition are often the very conditions that produce the most learning. Such results are regularly met with incredulity

[Paul Arden]

This is undoubtedly the point. I wrote somewhere else that people who call themselves “slow learners” would be better to call themselves “thorough learners”. Something quickly learned can also be quickly forgotten. I would think therefore it’s the process of learning that makes something robust. Self-discovery, facilitated by us, is the environment I would like to create.

Cheers, Paul

[Stoatstail50]

Self-discovery, facilitated by us, is the environment I would like to create

Me too.

A lesson is just a guided practice session, each drill within it is a takeaway for independent practice.