Missy Mitchell-McBeth has more than 19 years of coaching experience both at the high school and collegiate levels. Through her experience working with her four rescue dogs, she has learned important lessons on how to more effectively create motivation within student-athletes. Mitchell-McBeth shares her insights in this Q&A.
What did you learn in training high-anxiety dogs that applies to the training of high school athletes?
For context: I have four rescue dogs, each with varying degrees of anxiety. One of my dogs has such severe behavioral issues that she cannot peacefully coexist with the other three.
Because of their mental health concerns (and my own ethical stance against the use of aversives—unpleasant stimuli that attempt to change behavior via punishment— i.e. shock collars, prong collars, physical abuse like hitting/kicking, and even harsh verbal corrections), we did not have an option to use punitive methods with our dogs.
Science has very clearly demonstrated that punishment is a poor learning tool and, more importantly, leads to negative emotional ramifications. Quite often dogs (and humans for that matter) don’t understand what they did wrong and end up generalizing the punishment to something completely unrelated. Their fear of punishment may be generalized to an object, a person, the environment in which they were punished, or even another dog. We could not risk this happening with our dogs, as it could have led to inter-household aggression, so we learned how to use “force free” (science-based) training principles.
Some may argue with this, stating that aversives “fixed” their dog’s anxiety, but it is truly asinine to believe that inducing pain/fear into an already fearful creature would alleviate anxiety. It may suppress the symptoms of anxiety, but in turn may create fallout of even greater concern somewhere down the line.
In truth, I once viewed the use of reinforcement based methods as mandatory for my dogs, but optional for athletes. When working with athletes, I used punishment in spots because “athletes should just know better.” Spoiler alert: they don’t. Bigger spoiler alert: For many athletes the coach, the environment and training itself gets conditioned into an aversive stimulus. That’s a foolproof method of decreasing motivation where the entire purpose is to increase it.
Circling back to my demon dog Indigo who I said can’t interact with my other dogs. A huge lesson here: Not every behavior, situation, or individual, can be “fixed.” My dog, Indy, lives a wonderful life, just not a typical one.
Likewise, some athletes need to be removed from certain environments in order to find what works for them. That’s not the popular sunshine and rainbows 2023 narrative, but it’s the right one.
Can you briefly explain the foundations of behavioral shaping? How do these foundations relate most to athlete training?
Behavioral Shaping is taking the smallest version of what an athlete is able to do right now and progressively reinforcing incrementally better versions of it until you reach the desired outcome. Here are a few key shaping principles:
- Increase the criteria in small steps so that there is an opportunity for a high rate of reinforcement. This gives the athlete information which causes learning. It also leads to a positive conditioned emotional response to the process of training.
- Only shape one aspect of a behavior at a time.
- When introducing a new skill or criteria, temporarily relax the previous criteria.
- If your method isn’t working, try a different method.
- If there’s technical breakdown, review the shaping process.
- End every shaping session on a successful rep.
What are the first steps in re-shaping athlete behavior when it comes to training? How do you lay out the path to go through behavior training in order to achieve the desired results with your athletes?
The hope is you aren’t having to re-shape athlete behavior. Again, behavioral shaping is meeting the athlete where they are at today and incrementally improving upon that until you’re where you want to be.
But what underpins all of it—whether we are shaping a behavior or a skill—is motivation. On this front, I’m a huge self-determination theory enthusiast. SDT, a meta-theory for motivational studies, says that motivation has three components:
- Autonomy — Athletes (and yes, even dogs!) must feel that they have a choice. What are simple ways we can do this? Give them a choice between two hip mobility drills, plyometric variations, or squat variants. It’s not going to wreck your program Coach…chill. You can also give them the aux,or let them determine when they want to play a “get out of jail free card.” I have a recovery series that athletes go wild for, but we don’t have time to perform this every day. I allow them to practice autonomy by determining which day they utilize it.
- Competence — Athletes (and dogs) need to feel like they are good at something or that what they are tasked with is making them better. First, as a coach you need to clearly communicate criteria. No one feels competent when they don’t know what’s expected. Next, review our first principle of shaping: increasing criteria at a rate where athletes can be successful. Yelling at and punishing athletes because they couldn’t meet a poorly defined or poorly planned expectations is a time-tested way to diminish feelings of competence.
- Relatedness — Athletes (and yes, still dogs) need to feel a sense of connection. This really doesn’t need an explanation: Relationships matter!
If you have an issue with athlete motivation, the first place I would look is at which of these three components of SDT may be lacking and ask yourself what might be done to improve it.
What are the best ways to stop unwanted behavior that don’t involve harsh criticism or implementing forms of punishment?
It’s very important to remember: Genetics and prior learning are enormous contributors to the formation of unwanted behavior. Not everything can be stopped or fixed. Nonetheless, the optimal strategies to stop unwanted behavior are:
- Behavioral Extinction. Ignore the behavior and it goes away. Clearly some behaviors cannot be ignored. But in the case of unwanted verbal behaviors extinction can work wonders. Let’s take the situation of an athlete escalating to the point of yelling and being disrespectful. I can assure you it gets worse if you return fire. But what if you bite your tongue and respond calmly? The athlete often quickly realizes they look a mess to their teammates, and they didn’t get the response they wanted from you. You didn’t ignore them, but you ignored the unwanted behavior.
- Train an incompatible behavior. This means that athletes can’t be doing A while also doing B. If A is an unwanted behavior, then train them to perform behavior B in its place. An example here is teaching athletes to coach each other. Given specific criteria, this prevents them from wandering idly around distracting other teammates. Instead, they are focused on the task at hand. Ultimately, we want to redirect an unwanted behavior into one that is appropriate in each scenario.
- Put the unwanted behavior on cue. Don’t like whiny athletes? Me either. Give them the space to whine at the start of the workout. Let them get it out of their system. Then move on. Same goes for the ever-controversial athlete dance party.
- Change the underlying motivation. This can be a challenge because we often can’t even evaluate our own motivations adequately. As a result, making suppositions about the motivations of others can be dicey. But in the case of athlete laziness—which is probably the biggest challenge we face—the root of this is that it often feels better to be lazy than it does to work hard. So how do we change that motivation? Record, rank, and publish is one way. By introducing the carrot of PRs, we no longer need to use our stick (yelling, running them, etc.).
In truth, behavior is extremely complex and often must be modified through a multi-faceted approach.
How do you create a process that your athletes can use themselves for matters outside of athletics…a lifelong skill for future challenges?
Athletes and children (and also…dogs) who are trained primarily through positive reinforcement tend to be more enthusiastic learners who aren’t afraid to think outside of the box and provide creative solutions because they don’t fear being punished for being “wrong.”
Conversely, those who are raised and trained using primarily punitive methods tend to be cautious and self-doubting, or “playing not to lose” as we often say in sports. This has the potential to transfer to all facets of life.
From a training perspective, quite often as high school strength and conditioning coaches, we are a person’s very first exposure to training, which for most will turn into exercise shortly after high school. Do we want them to associate this with punishment and negative emotions? Or positive ones that lead them to want to continue participating in a lifetime of healthy activity?
The answer to that question should dictate whether we select more punitive, or more positive reinforcement based methods.
Missy Mitchell-McBeth is currently the Texas Assistant Sales and Business Development Director at Power Lift, and is the owner of SaFe Iron, LLC a consulting company that teaches coaches how to prepare athletes for the demands of sport using simplified strength and conditioning systems. In addition, she co-owns the Conditioning Project, an online training community that improves the health of coaches through a balanced approach to training and is the Director of Sports Performance at Fieldhouse Volleyball Club in DFWi. Mitchell-McBeth serves on the board of the National High School Strength Coaches Association overseeing the Southwest Region.
