Why Missing Shots and Messing Up Can Be The BEST Thing For You

Foreign welcome to the Visionary Ambassador Training Podcast. Appreciate you guys who tuned in today. Apple Podcast, Spotify, Pandora, soundcloud, Google Podcast, wherever you may be listening from. And of course, everybody who's watching right now on YouTube. If you're on YouTube, drop a, like, subscribe. If you're new, drop a comment. Let me know what you think about the episode. You guys have suggestions moving forward, all that sort of stuff. And if you guys are on Apple podcast, do me a favor, leave me a review. Let me know what you think as well. I believe Spotify is doing reviews too. So if you're on Spotify, go ahead and do that for me as well. I always appreciate all of that. So today's episode, I want to talk a little bit about errors. And I posted about this on my Instagram story the other day, and I kind of read that first just to kind of rehash that. And if anybody, you know, if you don't fall, first of all, if you don't follow me on Instagram, it's visiondrivenbasketball. So go ahead and check that out as well. But just so we can all kind of get an idea for that, and I can kind of rehash the points that I made, I essentially posted a picture of a, of a study that I was reading. But basically what I said is that I would argue that in a lot of cases, workouts, slash drills that force errors 40 to 70% of the time can be more beneficial from a skill acquisition standpoint than workouts that have a 70% success rate. And essentially what that means is that those errors lead to neuroplasticity and, and neuroplasticity leads to improvements of a motor skill. And motor skill just means any sort of basketball skill. So errors ultimately are what lead to the improvement of a skill. And so as those errors go up in the drill and the workout that you're doing, the opportunities that you have for neuroplasticity or for your brain to improve for you to become better at a skill go up as well. So that's why I said in some cases, especially with more advanced players, I would rather have a workout or a drill where a player makes 30 to 40% of their shots than 70 to 80%, even though the obsession with that is usually the opposite. And so kind of we're going to get into this point in a second. But a lot of times basketball training is all about makes, makes, makes, makes. And it's all about, okay, I went to the gym today and I shot four. I made 450 out of 500 shots. So that's a good workout. Or I made 150 out of 175 shots. That was a great workout. Or I went and I made, you know, I only made 100 shots out of 210 today. So it wasn't a good workout or whatever. That's. You guys get the idea. Generally, basketball training is so focused on the the number without actually looking at the context behind it. In a lot of cases, shooting for just the numbers in a workout isn't necessarily the most important thing and a lot of times is misleading. And that's a point I'm going to make towards the end as well. But kind of to hop into it, reps are important. I just made a podcast a couple of weeks ago talking about reps and are reps overrated? And how can you make it so that your reps are more valuable. But reps are ultimately important, right? That was kind of the gist of it. Just the way that you get them is what matters the most. But reps are important. You obviously need those to get better. But making error reps, mistakes, mess ups, that's also important and sometimes might be the most important reps that you get are those error reps. So you can leverage those errors to accelerate skill learning or insert skill learning with anything. So to increase the rate at which you become a better shooter or a better ball handler, those error reps can help to increase how fast you can improve in those areas. And the reason for that is that errors cue your nervous systems is two different things. First of all, it's going to cue error correction. And the second thing is that it's going to open the door for neuroplasticity, which is kind of what I just mentioned. All that that means is that your brain is plastic is how it's referred to, meaning that it can change itself. So if you continue to do something over and over and over again, your brain can adapt so that it becomes better at doing that thing. Okay, and what errors Q is it means that, okay, hey, when you make an error, something has to change. So your brain has to figure out what works. And, and that's ultimately what errors do, is they key your nervous system that, hey, something needs to change. And those errors are what opens up the possibility for that neuroplasticity to actually happen. If there's no errors, then your brain never has to change anything because it's already working. You know what I mean? So if we don't find a way to use errors beneficially Then the, the ability for our brain to be plastic and to use that, that plasticity that it has, it's not going to be as high. We're not going to have as many opportunities for that. So in those moments and workouts and drills where errors are high, when you continue to work through that, that's where your brain begins to adapt and your nervous system actually makes you better because of those errors. I kind of want to refer to something, a scientific experiment that was done. It's called the Super Mario Experiment. And basically what happened is that they took 50,000 subjects, so a big study, and they split them into two groups. And basically what they did is they had a computer programming sort of sequence that these people had to figure out. So they would give them this game, and they had to figure out how to code the sequence so that they could move a character through a maze or through a level or whatever. And they split these 50,000 people into two groups. The first group, every time that they would mess up or they would put in the wrong sequence or whatever, they would basically get a message that said, that's wrong, Try again. And that was it. And so they continue to do it, and every time they mess it up, it's, that's wrong. Try again. And then the second group, instead of getting that first message, they got a message that said, that's wrong. You lost five points. Other than that, the exact same thing. So at the beginning of the study, they. They told everybody, hey, whether or not you have experience with programming or not, you can figure this out. You just have to find what the right pattern is, what the right sequence for these, these patterns are so that you can get yourself through this maze or whatever. And when you look at the two groups, the first group, which is the group that was told, that's wrong, try again, had a success rate of about 68%, meaning that about 68% of the people who tried it ended up succeeding and figuring out how to do it. And with that second group, the group that was told, that's wrong, you lost five points. That group only succeeded 52% of the time. So only 52% of the people in that group actually figured out the sequence and were able to complete what the experiment was asked them to do. And the key distinction between that is that group one actually made more errors, but that was because there was more attempts when the only distinction was that, hey, you got that wrong, try again. They just kept on trying. So there was more attempts on average for those people in the first group compared to the Second group where they were told that they lost five points. Generally, the issue is that people in that second group were giving up more easily, they were giving up quicker, and they weren't making as many attempts. So it's not that the first group wasn't making errors, it was just that they actually made more errors. But that was what ultimately led them to figure it out at the end. Those errors are what prompted them to change and be able to get to the correct sequence. The second group didn't get a chance to get there because they never were put in a position because they didn't have enough reps and they didn't make enough errors to be able to get there. So when you're trying to learn a skill or get better at a skill, get better at anything. When you're messing up and making a lot of errors, the more mistakes you make, the more plastic your brain becomes, meaning the more likely that you can change your brain and that it adapts to make you better. So when you get that right, let's say you've been messing up making a lot of errors. When you finally get that right, your brain is going to reward that pattern that was correct. And essentially what that means is that it's going to release a lot of dopamine, which is really behind a lot of, like, what motivation is. And there's a lot that dopamine does. But dopamine is such a big part of motivation, but it's also a big part of learning as well. And when you perform correctly, that's where that release of dopamine spikes really, really high. And that's your brain reinforcing that correct pattern. So after those errors happen, you finally get that spike of dopamine, because you got it correct, your brain is going to recognize that and it's going to reinforce that correct pattern so that you're more likely to do it again. And that's where we see improvement happen, is right there. So many, many errors that lead to that correct rep are going to create that mass dopamine spike, which is ultimately what's going to lead to your brain reinforcing that pattern. So let's say that you're working on a difficult sort of shot or some sort of difficult drill that's pushing us out of your comfort zone and forcing you to make a lot of errors or miss a lot of shots or whatever the case may be. When you finally get it right, let's say that it's. It's a difficult shot you're working on. When you finally make that shot after a bunch of misses, you might not be able to tell yourself exactly what you did right to make that shot, but you don't actually have to because your nervous system knows your nervous system going to take care of it and it's going to reinforce that pattern so you're more likely to do it correctly again. And that's where that improvement happens. And when this process of errors, errors, errors leading to correct reps happens over and over and over again in a session, that's where you start to see a lot of improvement happen. Now this is where I need to make a note to coaches specifically. A lot of times coaches love to always give feedback and always give the answer to okay, you should do this or no, that was wrong. Hey, fix that. But a lot of times there needs to be some moments where you allow athletes to self correct and to self organize. Because when you step in and give the right answer or you give them the fix, you don't allow for that neuroplasticity to take place fully where they figure it out. And therefore the actual process of getting better is not going to be as efficient. Whereas sometimes view to step back and let them struggle through it and figure it out long term they're going to have much more of a firm foundation to go back on because they're, they've actually figured it out themselves. Instead of you giving them the correct answer or you giving them always giving them tweaks. Now there's always moments where you may have to do that. There's moments where you know you need to coach obviously, but it's also moments where you have to let them use that function that they have that neuroplasticity and figure stuff out on their own. Athletes need practice using this error recognition signal and being able to self correct and that constant outside cueing. And it's just not as efficient when it comes to long term skill development. So real quickly I want to talk about sleep as well and how that actually plays into this. Because when you sleep, let's say you have a workout where you, you make all those errors very, very error heavy. And then there was correct reps and you repeated that process. And when you sleep, you actually replay those patterns, those correct patterns over and over and over in your mind. So I always say this to my players, I'm like, listen, especially we're doing something the first time, like you got like you're going to struggle with this right now. This is hard right now. But I guarantee the next time we come back to this, it's going to feel so much easier, even though you haven't done it since today when it was hard. And I see it all the time, and I love pointing that out to them because that's literally just neuroplasticity. That's literally just your brain adapting and getting better. Because as you sleep, those patterns are reinforced like we talked about, and you come back and you've actually had time to process it and now everything feels a lot easier. So that's again why those error reps are so important. Because when you get that correct rep and that dopamine spike hits and your brain begins to reinforce those correct patterns over and over and over again, that is built upon when you sleep and you come back to that and it feels a lot easier because you've had the opportunity to go back and reinforce those patterns. So sleep, sleep is a big part and I'll probably go deeper into that at some point. But I also want to talk about this idea of uncertainty and why uncertainty matters as well with our workouts and with our drills. So there's four things to think about. There's when we talk about what you are as a player, right, there's uncertainty, or not even just as a player, but with a skill as well. So you have uncertainty, you have certainty, you have mastery, and then you have virtuosity. And so what this means essentially is that when you start, let's say, shooting, when you're a beginner, as a player, you're really uncertain with your ability to shoot the basketball, okay? You aren't confident in yourself or your ability to make shots. That's what a beginner is like. You start to get better at it, you practice and you start to develop a little bit of certainty. Okay, I can hit that shot. I'm comfortable when I, you know, are in this part of the, like this part of the court or I go off this many dribbles and I'm comfortable shooting this shot, you have a little bit of certainty as well. And as you get better and better, you reach a level of mastery over certain type of shot. We could say maybe you're a really, really good three point shooter and you've reached a certain level of mastery over that. And then the next level to that is the level of virtuosity. And that's where you start to introduce uncertainty back into the mix so that you can become better. So by the way, and I'll give a shout out at the end again, I got, I actually started to think about this a lot. Listening to Andrew Huberman he was a neuroscience professor at Stanford, was talking about this, and he had a great podcast talking about all this stuff as well. So make sure you check him out if you guys are interested in this sort of stuff. Andrew Huberman is great, but he was talking about surfers, right? So with surfers, the great surfers, they. The ones who've achieved mastery and are at that level of virtuosity, they are out looking for waves that they know they can. They can conquer. They want to go out and find the big waves that are like a little bit. That give them a little bit of uncertainty because they know that that wave is what's going to make them have to be at their best. It's going to push them to the farthest extent of what they're capable of doing. And that's where if you're in that virtuosity phase, that's why uncertainty can be such a big deal. So great. You know, you can take that with surfers. You can take that with literally any area. Mountain climber, if you're a great mountain climber, you're not going to go out and do your local hill. You're trying to go to Mount Everest or insert any sort of major mountain. You know, that's just another example of trying to add in that uncertainty. And so what that uncertainty does is it makes them better and it's necessary for them to continue to level up. So as a basketball player, where this can be relevant, I think, is that adding uncertainty is important when you have mastery over a skill. So if you're a great shooter, finding ways to make things more difficult and to add uncertainty back into drills is a great way to expand that capacity to perform. So one way to do that is just by, let's say, for example, changing up the footwork you have to shoot out of. So making that way more difficult, maybe unnecessarily difficult, so that you can expand that capacity. And now you're more comfortable hitting shots when it's really, really difficult. Or maybe you're really, really good shooting the basketball uncontested, but you add in a contest to your drill. So now you have to actually be able to shoot with that coming. And that adds another level of uncertainty to what you're doing. But that uncertainty is what makes you have to be better. So finding ways to add that uncertainty back into workouts, I think is really, really important to leveling up and continue to become better, especially when you've reached a certain level of mastery, or at least proficiency, I think, over a certain skill. And so we talk about what this means practically for basketball, right? For basketball trainers, players out there. There's really four things I want to talk about. And the first thing is that makes and misses in workouts are not surface level. Right? You can't put too much weight in workouts, in drills on the makes and the misses just outright. Sometimes that matters, sometimes it doesn't. But a lot of times those misses and those mess ups can be just as valuable as the makes when you understand the science behind getting better at a certain skill. And that leads to number two, which is that I think there's a ton of value in drills that promote uncertainty and therefore are going to cause errors. Okay. Like, I'll say it to some of my players. Sometimes I'm like, listen, my goal is to make you miss shots today. Like, I'll just point blank say that because a lot of times that is my goal because I understand the value of those errors and the value of them having to figure it out when it's really, really difficult and how that's going to translate to them being better into my, into my third point, which kind of ties into both of those things that we have to have a learning versus performance distinction. So workouts are not about performance. Right? Performance is you going out and in a game, like when I. When you're playing a game, that's where performance matters. Like how you perform, how you play, the outcome of what happens. That's where it matters, right? That's where you want to make as you want to make every single shot. Right? That's where we want high performance. But that's not always the case when it comes to workouts. When it's a workout, the focus should be much more on learning and what promotes learning the best. That's errors and messing up and then finding those correct patterns and reinforcing those correct patterns, the optics and how things look. A lot of times need to be put in the backseat when it comes to workouts. That's why I said before a workout where you make 40% of your shots might be better for you long term than a workout where you make 70%? Again, depending on how far outside your comfort zone you're pushed. Was there a level of uncertainty that was added to those drills that forced more errors? Because if that's the case, chances are that's probably going to lead to you being better actually long term than a workout where you weren't really pushed out of your comfort zone. There was no uncertainty and there was no real need for your brain to Adapt or become better because what you were doing was already working. So that's why I think that that performance versus learning discrepancy like, needs to really be understood, especially by trainers out there. It's not always about going in and, hey, we got to shoot this percentage today. Maybe some days it is, but some days it's also about, okay, how can I make you miss shots so that you have to get better, you have to adapt, you have to figure it out. And, and then once you do, that's where your, your capacity to perform gets better. And that's really what, what workouts are all about. It's about when I'm, when I'm learning. When we're in a workout, in a drill, we're about expanding your capacity to perform so that when you actually get to the performance, you have much more capacity to work with. So you're able to. Maybe your ceiling was, you know, hitting four shots in a game, but we're trying to increase that ceiling so that your ceiling is hitting eight shots in a game. And that's where it pays off come performance time, when our workouts are focused on expanding that capacity. So the last thing I'll say to coaches specifically, and then I'll give some of the players as well as a coach or a trainer, don't give all the answers away. Don't feel like you always have to step in and tell them what to do or tell them what to fix. And even though sometimes it might be like, uncomfortable, like you see them struggling, missing, missing, missing, sometimes that's the, that that right there is where you have to just let them keep reeling a little bit. Because if you stop them in the middle of that struggle before they figured it out, and then you give them the answer, that's the worst thing that, that can happen in that moment because then they don't get those benefits of the, the neuroplasticity with their brain figuring out the correct pattern that dopamine hit and then them being able to have that recall the next time. Okay? So you have to be careful with over queuing and over coaching and doing too much. Sometimes the best thing to do is just sit back, let them figure it out. And again, it might mean that training is a little bit uglier, practice is a little bit uglier, workouts are a little bit uglier, drills are a little bit uglier. But again, the ultimate goal is expanding that capacity to perform. And when we understand the science behind it, a lot of times the struggle is what does that. And if you want them to play their best come game time, that's what they're going to need is a higher capacity to perform. And players for you guys understand that you have to be okay with struggling sometimes and you have to be able to figure things out. And one thing that I say and really like when I talk about players who are the best, it's just the players who are able to figure it out. You know, I can't. Your coach, your of your team can't be on the court for you. So there's moments that happen every game where it's about you being able to figure it out and stuff's going to happen that isn't planned. You're going to have to hit a shot that maybe you haven't worked on explicitly, but are you able to adapt and figure that out. And that's where working through struggling and working through misses and understanding that that's actually good for you long term. When you figure it out, that's where that, that understanding is important for players to have as well. And that's ultimately what's going to be best for you long term. So a lot going into this, again, shout out to Andrew Huberman, which is where I got a ton of information from, from his podcast. So again, you guys are interested in that, make sure you check that out. But I think that understanding the science behind getting better has so many valuable implications for coaches, trainers and players as well. I think if you guys understand what actually goes into all of it, that you have an idea of how to challenge yourself and, and ultimately how to make yourself the best player long term as well. So like I said, if you guys are on YouTube right now, drop a, like subscribe if you're new, drop a comment, let me know what you think. If you have any questions, recommendations for future podcasts, whatever. If you guys are on Apple podcast, drop a review. Let me know what you think of the show and everybody else, make sure you follow me on Instagram. Like I said before you guys have any questions, DM me, drop a comment, whatever the case may be with that, I appreciate all you guys who listen, everybody who's been supporting. I'll talk to you guys soon. Peace.