Coaching Feedback – Why Your Athletes Need You to Sometimes Be Quiet

• Correcting every repetition has weak support in research – Many reviews found no clear learning advantage for feedback after every attempt, which gives coaches the freedom to talk less and use those moments differently.
• What looks better in training can trick us – Performance during practice is often an unreliable sign of real learning, and real learning shows up weeks later, in matches, when the coach can’t help during the situation unfolding on the court or field.
• In a match, athletes are alone – The skill of noticing and correcting their own movement is the skill they’ll need under pressure, so training should give them a chance to practice it.
• When you speak to your athlete, say one thing and point attention outward – toward the ball, the shooter, the target, or the space, and away from a long list of body parts.
• Ask first, coach second – Let athletes describe what happened before you add your view, and speak up directly for safety, for beginners, for stuck patterns, and for emotional moments.

The Scene I Keep Seeing in Goalkeeper Training

Over the years, I’ve had many chances to watch other coaches work with young goalkeepers at clubs, camps, and tournaments in different countries, and one scene repeats itself more often than I would like. A goalkeeper, around twelve or thirteen years old, stands in front of the goal while a line of players shoots at the goalkeeper from nine meters. The coach stands next to the goal post, and after every single shot a new instruction comes: keep your hands higher, your stance is too wide, you stepped too late, your weight was on your heels, follow the ball with your eyes, why did you turn your hip, don’t forget your arm, you turned your foot the wrong way. By the tenth shot, this young goalkeeper has received more information than any adult could remember, and far more than anyone could use while handball balls are flying toward them.

You can see how overwhelming it is for them. The goalkeeper starts looking toward the coach after each shot, sometimes before the ball is even back with the shooters, waiting to hear what they did wrong this time. Their movements become slower and more careful, because they’re trying to remember six instructions at once, and a goalkeeper who is thinking about six things has very little attention left for the one thing that matters most in that moment, which is the incoming ball. This is what an overload of coaching feedback looks like from the outside: a hardworking young athlete who is trying very hard to please the coach, and who is learning less than they could.

I share this scene with a lot of understanding for that coach, because I recognize the same urge in myself. The coach sees mistakes, knows how to fix them, and wants this young person to improve as fast as possible. Every instruction comes from a good place. The problem appears when all those good intentions come at the same time, after every shot, and leave the athlete no space to feel, think, and figure anything out on their own.

Why Coaches Give So Much Coaching Feedback

The first reason is simple: we care. When you see a goalkeeper step with the wrong leg or if they pull their hands too low too early, staying silent can feel almost irresponsible, because you know the solution and the athlete is right in front of you. Most coaches came into this profession because they want to help people get better, and talking is the most direct way we know to help.

The second reason comes from the outside. Parents are watching from the stands, a club director walks past the court, and an athlete looks at you after a goal as if to ask: “What now?” In those moments, silence can look like doing nothing, and nobody wants to be seen as the coach who stands around silent while the athlete struggles. So that’s why many coaches talk, partly for the athlete and partly to show everyone (including ourselves) that we’re doing our coaching job.

The third reason took me years to understand. Feedback gives us, the coaches, a fast reward. When we correct something and the very next repetition looks a little bit better, we get instant proof that our words matter. That good feeling is actually real, and it keeps us talking. As you’ll see later in this post, that proof is much weaker than it looks, and understanding why can change the way you think about coaching feedback.

The fourth reason is how most of us were coached when we were young. Many of us grew up with coaches who talked through the whole session, so constant instruction feels normal, and it can even feel like the definition of good coaching. When the model we carry in our heads is a coach who is always talking, choosing silence can feel like doing a worse job, even in moments when it’s the better choice for the athlete.

What Coaching Feedback Actually Is

Before we look at research, it helps to use the same words researchers use. Every athlete receives intrinsic feedback all the time: which is what they feel in their muscles and joints, what they see, and what they hear while they move. The sense of where your body is and how it moves, without looking, is called proprioception, and it’s a big part of intrinsic feedback. Everything that comes from outside the athlete’s own senses, such as a coach’s comment, a video, or a number on a screen, is called augmented feedback. When we talk about coaching feedback, we’re actually talking about augmented feedback.

Researchers also separate two types of augmented feedback. Knowledge of results tells the athlete about the outcome, for example whether the ball went in or whether the save was made. Knowledge of performance tells the athlete about the movement itself, for example how the arm moved or when the step happened. In goalkeeping, the result is almost always obvious, because the goalkeeper sees exactly where the ball ended up. This means that most of our coaching feedback as goalkeeper coaches is about movement, and movement is exactly the area where the athlete’s own body is sending them a lot of information at the same time.

If you’d like to understand the bigger picture of how athletes learn movement in the first place, I explain the two main theories behind every coaching method in my blog post How Athletes Learn Skills: The Two Theories Behind Every Coaching Method. It’s a good companion to this article.

What Research Says About Coaching Feedback

For decades, motor learning textbooks have taught an idea called the guidance hypothesis, first described by Salmoni, Schmidt and Walter in 1984. The idea is that frequent augmented feedback may get in the way of athletes processing their own intrinsic feedback, and that this internal information is important for remembering a movement over the long term. In simple words, when the coach always explains what happened, the athlete has less reason to listen to their own body. In their well-known 1990 study, Winstein and Schmidt reported results that supported this idea, and for many years, the common message in coaching education was that reducing how often learners receive feedback helps them learn more than giving feedback after every attempt.

Then researchers did what good science should do: they checked the evidence again. In 2022, a research group led by McKay published a meta-analysis that combined results from many earlier studies. Based on 61 papers, they found no significant effect of reduced feedback frequency on learning or on performance, and they concluded that most of the studies were severely underpowered. Underpowered means the groups of participants were often too small for the results to be trusted. Other researchers later summarized this by saying that more research is needed, because roughly three out of four studies had too little statistical power and may have leaned toward clear, publishable results.

There’s a second finding in that same analysis, and for coaches it’s the more interesting one. The researchers found no significant performance differences between feedback after every attempt and reduced feedback, during practice or in later retention tests. So the popular message that “less feedback always leads to better learning” is stronger than the evidence behind it, and the habit of correcting every single repetition has no strong evidence behind it either.

Even though it sounds a little bit confusing, this is the point where I see actual freedom for coaches. If giving coaching feedback after every repetition doesn’t reliably help athletes learn more, then we don’t have to fill every pause with instructions. We can use some of those moments for something the athlete will need very much in competition: time to feel by themselves what happened, notice it, and think about it on their own.

Learning and Performance Are Two Different Things

One of the most useful ideas I’ve found for understanding feedback comes from memory research, and it applies to sport very well. In an integrative review, Soderstrom and Bjork explain the difference between learning and performance. They describe learning as relatively permanent changes in understanding and skills, and they explain that during training we can only observe performance, which is often an unreliable sign of whether those long-term changes have happened. Their review also shows that a lot of learning can happen without any visible improvement in performance, and that big changes in performance often don’t turn into real learning.

Think about what this means for the reward many coaches get from talking. When you correct a goalkeeper’s arm and the next save looks better, you’re seeing performance, in that moment, with your voice still fresh in their ears. The real test comes next week, in a match, under pressure, when the goalkeeper is tired and you’re sitting on the bench. This is where coaching feedback can fool us: the fast improvement feels like proof, and the lasting learning is something we can only see much later.

This also explains why a goalkeeper can look excellent in training and then struggle in a match. In training, the coach’s voice carries a part of the load. In a match, the athlete carries all of it on their own, and if they never practiced carrying it on their own, then the gap between training and competition can feel huge to them.

Alone in the Goal: Why Athletes Need to Solve Problems on Their Own

A handball shot from nine meters reaches the goal in a fraction of a second, and in that moment the goalkeeper has no coach. What they have is the shooter, the ball, and everything their body has learned to do. Between one shot and the next, the goalkeeper needs to answer their own questions: Did I move too early? Was I positioned well? Was my weight on my heels? Did I read the shooter’s shoulder well, or did I guess it? Nobody on the bench can answer those questions for them during play, so a goalkeeper who has always heard the answers from a coach has had very little practice asking and thinking about these questions.

Every sport has moments like this. A basketball player stands at the free-throw line with two seconds left, a swimmer approaches the wall for a turn, a gymnast is in the middle of a routine, and a tennis player serves at 5-5 in the third set. In all of these moments, the athlete makes decisions and corrections alone, based on what they feel and see. As coaches, our job is to prepare athletes for situations we can’t enter, not to make our athletes 100% dependable on us.

When we step back sometimes, we give athletes the chance to build the ability to coach themselves: to notice, to question, to feel, and to correct. That ability grows through practice, just like a save technique or a free throw. A session where the athlete is sometimes asked to figure things out on their own is a session where they practice this skill, and good coaching feedback can be designed to support that practice.

How Much Coaching Feedback Should You Give?

The honest answer depends on who is in front of you, and the first thing to look at is their level. A beginner who is just learning a movement for the first time doesn’t yet know what the correct movement should feel or look like, so they need more demonstrations, more explanations, and more guidance. An experienced athlete already has a clear picture of the movement, and for them, many small corrections usually add noise more than help. As an athlete becomes more skilled, your role can slowly move from explaining toward asking them well formulated questions and observing.

The second thing to look at is how much information one person can use at a time. In the scene I described earlier in this blog post, the goalkeeper received six or seven instructions within only a few shots. No athlete can work on six things at once, and young athletes especially can’t. My own rule in training is one thing at a time: I choose the one element (or max two) that matters most right now, and the other things wait for another day. This keeps coaching feedback clear, and it tells the athlete exactly where to put their attention.

The third thing is timing. Feedback given immediately after a movement, before the athlete has had a moment to feel it, takes away their chance to process their own intrinsic feedback. A pause of a few seconds, or a short question first, gives the athlete time to notice what their body just did. I’ll show you exactly how I do this in the routine later in this post.

Where to Point Your Athlete’s Attention

What you say matters as much as how often you say it. Research on attention compares two types of cues. An internal focus directs the athlete’s attention toward their own body, for example “bend your knees” or “lift your elbow.” An external focus directs attention toward the effect of the movement or toward something in the environment, for example “explode toward the ball” or “get to the corner before the ball does.”

In 2021, Chua and colleagues published a big set of systematic reviews and meta-analyses on this topic. They concluded that an external focus gives advantages for both performing and learning motor skills, for children and adults, for people with and without clinical conditions, and for novices as well as experts. The effects they reported ranged from small for performance to medium for learning and retention.

The skeptical part of me wants you to know the whole picture. A later reanalysis of the same data by McKay and colleagues, published as a preprint, found moderate to strong evidence of publication bias, and argued that attentional focus has varied effects that are, on average, small or close to zero. So researchers are still discussing this question. My own view, after many years of coaching, is that external cues cost nothing to try, they’re short and easy to remember, and they keep athletes connected to the game. Try them with your own athletes and watch closely what happens, because your athletes will show you what works for them.

• Handball goalkeeper (high shot): internal cue: “lift your arm faster,” external cue: “beat the ball to the corner.”
• Handball goalkeeper (ready position): internal cue: “keep your weight on the front part of your feet,” external cue: “be ready to move toward the shooter.”
• Basketball (shooting): internal cue: “snap your wrist,” external cue: “drop the ball just over the front of the rim.”
• Swimming (pull): internal cue: “pull harder with your hand,” external cu: “push the water back toward your feet.”
• Soccer goalkeeper (catching): internal cue: “spread your fingers,” external cue: “make a wall behind the ball.”

When you prepare your next training session, write down one external cue for the main exercise before you step on the court. Having that one cue ready makes it much easier to give short, clear coaching feedback in the moment, and much easier to resist the long list.

Ask First, Coach Second: A Simple Coaching Feedback Routine

This routine comes from my coaching practice and from ideas in motor learning research, so please treat it as a tool to test and adjust for your own athletes. It works for a goalkeeper in handball, and it works just as well for a sprinter, a volleyball player, or a young footballer.

1. Let a set run without technical comments. Give the athlete five or six repetitions with no corrections about technique. Encouragement is always welcome, because a nod, a smile, or a short “good read” costs nothing and keeps the athlete feeling supported.
2. Ask one question. After the set, ask something open and simple: “What did you feel on that last one?” “Where was the ball when you started to move?” “Which save felt the easiest, and why?” One question is enough, and it tells the athlete that their own observations are very important.
3. Listen to the whole answer. The athlete’s answer shows you whether they noticed what you noticed. If they describe exactly the thing you wanted to correct, you might not need to add anything, and they’ve just practiced the most important skill of all.
4. Add one thing, only if it’s needed. If something important is still missing, give one short cue, preferably an external one. One cue is easy to remember, and several cues at once usually get lost.
5. Give the athlete permission to ask you. Tell your athletes they can ask for your view whenever they want it. This makes them active partners in their own learning, and over time their questions will show you how well they understand their own movement.
6. Reduce your input over weeks. New skills, younger athletes, and beginners need more input at the start. As the athlete’s self-assessment becomes more accurate, you can step back further, session by session.

A simple way to check progress is to ask your athlete to describe a play or a save before you describe it. When their version matches yours more and more often, you know the athlete’s ability to coach themselves is growing.

More Ways to Give Better Coaching Feedback

The ask-first routine is my favorite tool, and there are several others that coaches and researchers use. Summary feedback means you watch a whole block of repetitions and then give one short comment about the pattern you saw, which lets the athlete work through several attempts on their own first. With a goalkeeper, you might watch ten shots and then say something like: “Most of your low saves were late on the left side,” which gives them one clear direction to work on.

Bandwidth feedback means you agree with yourself on an acceptable range, and you only comment when a movement falls outside that range. For example, if a goalkeeper’s arm is slightly lower than ideal but still safe and efficient, you let it go, and you only speak up when the arm drops behind the line of the body. This approach teaches the athlete that small variations are normal, and it saves your coaching feedback for the moments that truly matter.

Video review can also work well, especially when the athlete comments first. Show the clip, ask the athlete what they see, and only then share your view. Many athletes are surprised by how much they can spot on their own once someone asks them to look.

Athlete-requested feedback, where the athlete decides when they want input, is popular in coaching literature, and I like it for the sense of ownership it gives athletes. The research here is also more mixed than many articles suggest: a 2025 meta-analysis by McKay and colleagues argued that reporting bias and underpowered study designs have greatly exaggerated the learning benefits of self-controlled practice. I still use it with athletes who want it, because an athlete who asks a question is paying attention to their own performance, and that attention is exactly what we want to build.

Coaching Feedback During Matches

Everything we talked about becomes even more visible during competition. While play is running, an athlete has almost no capacity to process instructions shouted from the bench, because all their attention is (and should be) on the game. A goalkeeper who hears: “hands up!” while a shooter is already jumping gets one more thing to think about at the worst possible moment. During play, short words of encouragement or simple tactical information about the opponent are usually far more useful than technical corrections.

The way we deliver feedback matters as much as the words we choose. The same correction can land as support or as a threat, depending on our tone, our face, our body language, and the feeling behind it. A calm voice and a steady presence tell the athlete that we are with them, and that one message opens their ears far more than any instruction. When feedback comes wrapped in frustration, the athlete hears the frustration first, and the useful part gets lost underneath it.

A coach’s body language during matches has its own loud message, and our athletes read it constantly. Hitting the bench, throwing a water bottle or a notebook on the floor, yelling, or swinging our arms in frustration all signal that the environment is unsafe, and a goalkeeper who feels that tenses up and plays even smaller. The calm we show on the sideline becomes the calm the athlete can literally borrow in a hard moment. So in the middle of a match, our calmness is one of the most useful things we can give them, because they are watching us to know whether it is safe to keep taking risks.

Timeouts and halftime are the moments where coaching feedback in matches has the best chance to help. In handball, a timeout lasts one minute, which is enough time for one or two clear points and very little of anything else. I like to give goalkeepers information that points outward, for example which side a certain shooter prefers or where the defense is leaving space, because this is information they can use immediately without thinking about their own body.

After a conceded goal, what the athlete needs most is a way to reset and move on to the next shot. A calm look, a short word, or a simple gesture from the coach can help much more than a technical explanation in that moment. The technical conversation can wait until the next training session, when the athlete has the time and energy to learn from it.

When Your Voice Is Needed Most

Being silent has limits, and a good coach knows exactly where those limits are. The first limit is safety. Some elements of technique protect the body from injury, and those elements should always be taught directly and corrected right away. In my blog post How to Coach Handball Goalkeeper Technique, I explain how I sort technique elements into a few groups, and the safety group is the one I never leave to the athlete’s own exploration or their feeling, for example the position of the reacting arm in saves of high shots.

The second limit is beginners. An athlete who has never done a movement before doesn’t yet have a picture of what “right” feels like, so they need clear demonstrations and explanations to build that picture.

The third limit is a pattern that stays stuck for weeks. If an athlete can’t find the solution on their own after many attempts, a clear piece of coaching feedback is exactly what they need.

The fourth limit is emotions. An athlete who is scared, frustrated, or overwhelmed needs a human voice and a calm presence far more than a lesson in self-discovery. Stepping back from technical comments never means stepping back as a person. Your athletes should always feel that you’re there with them: in your eye contact, in your smile after a great save, and in your calm voice after a hard goal. Warmth and technical silence work very well together.

Bringing It All Together

Coaching feedback is one of the strongest tools we have, and like every strong tool, it works best when we use it with intention. Research shows that correcting every repetition has no clear learning advantage, that what we see in training is often performance more than lasting learning, and that the way we direct an athlete’s attention deserves as much thought as how often we speak. On top of the research, there’s a simple truth from the game itself: in competition, our athletes are on their own, and the ability to notice and fix their own movement is something they need to practice long before match day.

Here’s my challenge for you: at your very next training session, choose one exercise and let the first set run without any technical comments. After the set, ask your athlete one question and listen to the whole answer before you say anything else. Pay attention to what they notice, how they describe it, and how they react to being asked. That one small change can change the way you give coaching feedback, and it can change how your athletes feel about learning with you.

The moment I hope for as a coach looks like this: a goalkeeper comes off the court after conceding a goal, sits down, and tells me exactly what happened and what they’ll do differently next time, before I say a single word. In that moment, the athlete doesn’t need me for that problem anymore, and that’s the whole purpose of the work we do. In the goal, or on the court, our athletes are alone, so let’s prepare them for it, and sometimes, let’s give them the chance to hear their own voice first.

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