Coordination exercises can be productive, unproductive and counterproductive. That's because next to just rehearsal, there are two special types: facilitating and complicating/consolidating. Each with their own type of objective and timing in the learning process.
Facilitating exercise
A facilitating exercise makes it easier to achieve the objective. It's given to teach the learner a technique they do not yet (properly) have. A simple example is this: if in Plow Turning the learner has difficulty putting their weight on the new outside ski, have them put their hands on the new outside knee, and if still necessary their head over the new outside foot.
Facilitation can come in several forms. Apart from instruction, it could also be the use of material training aids, or cutting up the movement into its possible elementary movements.
Complicating/consolidating exercise
In this type of exercise it's made harder to achieve the objective. It's given to consolidate a technique that the learner already has, but that may not hold under more difficult circumstances. Such as on steep, narrow or bumpy slopes.
An example is this one: have a learner who does a certain technique correctly but who is accustomed to skiing with poles, do the technique without them, to consolidate the balance:
A complicating exercise may also serve as check: does the learner indeed have the correct technique? The learner may think so, but the exercise may show them that they don't. (If then a simple instruction doesn't work, the instructor should of course go back to a facilitating exercise, not remain with complicating ones.)
How to tell them apart and apply them
As you can imagine, if a complicating exercise is given to someone who does not yet have the required technique, which happens a lot from my observations, the result is no progress at best. And that demotivates the person to keep taking lessons.
Although the devil can be in the details, it's not very difficult to tell the two exercise types apart and apply them correctly. Half the work is simply a matter of becoming aware of the two types. The other half comes from a continuous and truthful assessment of the effectiveness of a given exercise. There are two methods for that, whereby we will take the position of the instructor as departure point:
- Close observation of the learner. If you're giving a supposed facilitating exercise, does the learner really improve with it? Or does their total ski movement maybe even get worse with it? If the latter, you're in fact giving a for that learner complicating exercise, at the wrong time.
- Beforehand, determine whether the exercise should be a facilitating or complicating one. Then, after the learner has done it a few times, ask them whether it makes matters easier or more difficult for them.
It happens that for one learner an exercise works as a facilitating one, and for the other learner as a complicating one, while the learners are at roughly the same development level. That makes teaching large groups more difficult, but groups shouldn't be larger than five learners anyway, if a meaningful improvement is the goal.
And given the maximum of five learners, there are several solutions to that problem:
- per stretch or slope, let certain learners do certain exercises while the others pick their own exercise;
- differentiated exercises: different learners do different exercises, focusing on their most important point;
- find exercises that work the same for all five learners.
Change log
- V. 1.1: renamed the page to Improvement VI.
- V. 1.2: renamed the page to Improvement VII; updated video; edited text.
