I think everyone likes details better, but that doesn’t necessarily make them better for development. Also details is kind of a blanket term. I’m not talking about macro details. I think it’s very important to explain how something can work, what the goal is, and some broad strokes, but the deeper you get into fine details the more problems we will see in the long run.
in my years coaching I noticed this (I used to be very detail oriented in instruction), but there have actually been double blind peer reviewed studies on it in recent years. They have found that in the short time frame athletes coached with extreme attention to detail can see seemingly faster improvement in the first few months, and that athletes coached by a constraints led approach start to take over in the long run… but that’s just at first glance. The real value is in performance under pressure.
Under pressure the athletes coached with detailed instruction absolutely flopped across the board compared to the athletes coached with a constraints led approach who mostly performed at the same level under competitive pressure as they displayed without anything on the line.
They believe the main reason for this is that learning details from an expert instructor can help you find your groove quicker, but it’s just that, you’re groove that you have to learn, and when the pressure is on the details you were told are what you tend to go back to, and it brings you back down to a day one beginner level running your instructors words through your mind rather than just focusing on what you’ve been actually doing. This is one reason why many athletes who are killers in the gym can sometimes under perform in competition.
Nikolai Bernstein ran a study in Russia in the 20th century trying to figure out the perfect mechanics to swing a hammer. So he found the absolute best blacksmith in the country and measured the exact motions of his swing, and the muscles used in the kenetic chain expecting to find a measurable pattern. They found that their subject perfectly hit his target with every swing with the perfect amount of force and no wasted time or movement, but they unexpectedly found that he never swung his hammer the same way twice. This kind of made them throw away the idea of a “perfect technique” that needs to be repetitively practiced and opened up the doors to the idea of instead using constraints and a goal to force people to be able to repeat the perfect result rather than try to copy a perfect technique.
in training people find their way to results, but if they were trained to learn a perfect technique they tend to think back to that when it matters most, throwing them off their game a bit. An d a bit can be the difference between success and disaster when it matters most.
I train my athletes mostly in a way of trying to get repetition of a perfect result by giving them strict constraints and rules to follow, rather then explain the perfect way to do a technique and have them repeat that. Some details can help lead to breakthroughs and quicker improvement, but I sprinkle them in sparingly these days:
https://www.researchgate.net/figure...e-arm-and-hammer-movements-are_fig1_285324801