Athlete's Retention of a Coach's Instruction Before a Judo Competition

The aim of the present study was to analyze the instruction of the Judo coach immediately before the competition, in the process of preparation for the fights, looking to (1) study the coherency between the information which the coach transmits and that which the athlete retains; (2) identify the correlation between the coherency, the extension and the number of ideas conveyed by the coach; (3) determine if the retention varies in relation to variables such as the form and nature of the information, as well as the gender and practice category of the athletes. The participants were 11 coaches and 58 athletes of 3 categories: under- 15, under-17 and under-20, of both genders. One hundred and sixteen (116) instructional episodes were observed, which corresponds to four hundred and six (406) information units convoyed by the coaches. The coaches' instructions given before the competition were recorded in an audio and video register. After the coaches' instruction, the athletes were approached by the investigator and an interview was accomplished. To determine if the retention varies in relation to form and nature of the information and gender and practice category of the athletes, the non-parametric statistics, U de Mann-Whitney and Kruskal- Wallis, was used. Correlation of Spearman was applied to verify the degree of association between the coherency, the extension and the number of ideas conveyed by the coach. The results showed that a substantial part of the information was not retained by the athletes and the information coherency was inversely related to the number of transmitted ideas. The coaches were, mainly, prescriptive and the form of the information was not important for the retention of the information. Gender was a differentiated variable as the girls showed more coherency in the retained ideas in relation to the ideas transmitted by the coach. Key pointsThe instructions given by the coach are optimized if the athletes retain and understand them well and should be carefully analyzed by researchers and coaches.The ratio between the number of concordant ideas between coach and athlete (coherency) increased when the number of ideas decreased which raises the question of the adequacy of the instructional strategies used by coach.The prescriptive information showed that athletes were able to express a larger number of ideas in fewer words (larger density) while the combined information caused athletes to use more words to reproduce what the coach said.Gender was a differentiated variable as the girls showed more coherency in the retained ideas in relation to the ideas transmitted by the coach. These results indicate a possible tendency for girls to be more attentive when the coach is emitting information. However, to confirm this assumption more research is needed.