It doesn’t take a lot of deep thought to realize that the question above is a trick question.  We can’t get the best result with repetitions OR guidance, we need both. However, lets examine this a little bit more closely.

We've all seen coaches who seem to love the sound of their own voice.  Their practices feature more time than necessary with skaters on a knee listening to them explain how things should be done.  Don’t take this to mean they are not providing valuable information, but it can certainly mean that kids are tuning out and valuable icetime is being wasted.  This is a practice design with a ton of “guidance” but limited repetitions.

Some coaches and organizations, on the other hand, harbor a belief that things can be learned simply by aimlessly doing things that are similar to the skills you want to learn or simply by “moving around” in an environment that may help promote key skills.  In a sense it is believed that, in this way, skaters will “accidentally” learn high quality skills with minimal guidance from coaches.

Lets be clear.  There is no question that some benefit can be had from this type of “training”.  In fact, unstructured play would fall into this category and it is an important part of the learning process that all players should seek out.  Yet, this does not mean it needs to be part of our practices as it can be sourced at a park in the winter, in the streets in the summer, at 3v3 rinks during their leagues, as well as at open hockey.  Note that this is a practice philosophy with a lot of repetitions and minimal guidance.

But we are all busy and even when not overly busy, icetime still is not cheap, so we want to be efficient.  We want a rate of improvement that is reasonably close to optimal given the constraints.

In other words, we want to see improvement as fast as we can given the limitations of kids’ attention spans, social distractions, limited time on ice, busy schedules, physical fatigue, mental fatigue, and more.  We can only do so much in a given week before we push into the overtraining mode and that is assuming there is even time in most weeks to get to that stage given our busy lives.

The cases of the “coach who loves the sound of his own voice”, and “let the environment do the work so they get a lot of reps and don’t coach them” are extreme examples.  Our best bet lies somewhere in between.  This leads to a balance between the two extremes and to find the right balance we should factor in more information about how people (kids) learn skills.

How do we find the right balance?  That question will drive part 2 of our Repetitions or Guidance article.