Fast track your snowboard and ski skills by understanding CHUNKING!

I was recently pondering two questions: 1) Why do good riders not necessarily make good teachers? and 2) What can we do to be better teachers?

In answering these questions, I was inspired by reading ‘Bounce — the science of success’ by Matthew Syed. The area of research he discusses is not fully understood yet, but there are strong correlations that I’ve seen borne out in real life lessons. I bet you will too. Let’s delve into ‘chunking’!

What is Chunking?

You will be familiar with the phenomenon of someone growing in their understanding and application of techniques and tactics as they gain mastery of their chosen sport. You may be less familiar with the mechanics of how this takes place. One important process whereby all the individual requirements of a task are collected into groups — chunks — instead of separate elements can be described as ‘chunking’. You can see it in action when you watch someone achieve feats of memory; remembering pi to an incredible number of decimal places. Whilst still challenging, this is achieved by ‘chunking’ the data into bundles — chunks.

Your brain — just like a computer — can only perform so many actions at a time. If you are doing something for the first time, your brain has to perform each task individually. This makes it much harder to achieve, resulting in un-coordinated, slow, sequential, non — adaptive movements. As your brain gains familiarity with the various movements, it groups them together into chunks. This allows your brain to process everything faster, resulting in the quick, progressive, adaptable movements that characterise mastery.

These ‘chunks’ are actually connections between neurons in your brain. As you gain experience, these pathways thicken; like a byway becoming a highway. This allows the data to transfer faster; think of beginners as DSL, and pros as fibre optic broadband.

Here are some hallmarks of a snowsports participant before and after chunking:

MOVEMENTS: Posture, balance, co-ordination, pressure, edge, rotation.

Unchunked movements

Chunked movements

TACTICS: Control of line, control of speed, adjustments for snow, adjustments for terrain, D.I.R.T.

Unchunked tactics

Chunked tactics

Now that you understand what chunking is, we can move onto answering question 1;

“Why do good riders not necessarily make good teachers?”

One of the traits of an Instructor is the ability to watch someone else, then make a diagnosis and prescription based on what they’ve seen. Expert performers may be used to watching a video replay of their performance, and making adjustments based on what they’ve seen. They are less likely to have experience of watching beginners and intermediates ride and suggest solutions to those problems.

Movement Analysis (MA)

As you gain mastery in the field of movement analysis, you begin to chunk in a useful way; instead of seeing individual elements like arms waving and overly bent knees, you begin to see patterns. From experience, you begin to be able to — at a glance — categorise someone as having a particular performance issue, and diagnose a solid solution to that inefficiency. I remember watching more experienced instructors split about 150 children into their ability groups a few years ago, and wondering how they were doing it so fast. Years later I had a mastery moment when I realised I was doing the same myself!

This is where training, certification and experience come in. They educate you not just in analysis of your own performance in its constituent ingredients, but also how to make changes to another person’s riding after watching them perform. If you work at it, you will naturally become more proficient not just in the diagnosis of inefficiencies, but the prescriptions and communication of them. That is one of the reasons teaching snowsports is so satisfying for me; we’re always getting that bit better somewhere.

Expert induced amnesia

Another reason good riders don’t necessarily make good teachers is something called ‘expert induced amnesia’. This is something most who have risen to the level of Instructor have experienced. You ride down the mountain, just doing it, not really thinking at all; maybe even thinking about something else entirely while you negotiate the trails you are on. You couldn’t at the end of the run tell someone exactly what it is you did — you just did it! The phrase ‘friends don’t let friends teach friends’ rings true partly because even (and perhaps especially) the best riders don’t think about what they are doing. They are not thinking about their technique. This makes it very challenging for them to break it down from the chunks back into the individual parts for someone else. They’ll say things like “just point it straight down the hill”, or “just lean into the hill a bit”. We can’t help but wince because you can see what they mean, but it’s an inadequate explanation.

Remember the first time you had to go back to basics to perform elementary demonstrations? You had to break open those chunks in your head and tweak the individual parts again. At first it feels a bit like trying to remember something from your childhood. But then with practice you become capable of regaining individual control of the separate elements of your performance. This experience helps prepare you for breaking it down for other people.

In summary, it’s not to say that great riders can’t make great teachers. It’s just that they don’t necessarily correlate. Because of the MA chunks they need to develop, and because they need to learn to unchunk their performances in order to teach it to others.

“What can we do to be better teachers?”

This will be published very soon.