Internal vs. External Cues

Hello everybody!

I’ve previously mentioned Gray Cook and some of his thoughts on how the body moves. Today I am going to discuss how his thoughts mixed with those of Douglas Heel relate to cueing a movement. One thing Gray Cook includes in his FMS program is a pyramid that looks like this:

His ideas are that we need to install quality movement before reinforcing that movement by increasing performance. Finally once we have a solid base we can properly teach (sport) skill. After I saw this pyramid, I instantly thought about Douglas Heel’s three body zones presented in his Be Activated series. I created a similar pyramid with Heel’s zones, which looked like this:

Notice any similarities? These two pyramids are almost talking about the same thing but from two different approaches. Quality movement begins with zone 1. Power (performance) is produced in zone 2, and skill exists in zone 3. This progression also mimics the relationship between a sport coach, strength coach, and the athletic trainer/PT. The athletic trainer/PT focus on quality of movement and strength coaches improve athlete power production and endurance to maintain that production. Sport coaches dial in on specific skills required for success in their sport, something like elbow angle and wrist follow through during a jump shot.

In addition to drawing attention to the similarities between these philosophies, I wanted to set the tone with these graphics to talk about cueing athletes. In a previous article of mine I talked about athletes as "Great Compensators", they are given a task and they can complete that task even with less than optimal firing patterns. Now let’s talk about how we get athletes to complete tasks with internal and external cues. Internal cues are focused on the athlete moving his/her body a specific way. An internal cue might be, “drop your hips down,” or “point your toes out”. In contrast, external cues target the movement outcome. External cues might sound like, “push through the floor,” or “land quietly”. Research has shown that external cues often result in an increase in performance when compared to internal cues. Let's dive deeper into this.

My theory is that internal cues require a very high level of motor coordination in order for the athlete to respond well. Motor coordination is easily disrupted (not absent, but disrupted) when you consider neuromuscular compensation patterns. Internal cues must get processed through several layers of interpretation by the athlete before it can materialize into changing the movement. Without proper motor coordination to produce the intended movement, the athlete will likely compensate to accomplish the outcome, something they are quite good at. External cues create a common understanding between the coach and the athlete. So for a comparison example, if I cue an athlete by saying “push the ground away” when running, I know that the athlete understands what the ground is and how to push it behind them with their legs. If I cue an athlete with “extend your hips” then they might just go into an increased lordotic curve to accomplish more hip extension instead of actually creating more glute force into the ground. There is no guarantee the athlete will use the correct patterns following an external cue, but if the quality of movement is maintained then we can assume the athlete will recruit the correct firing patterns to achieve the desired outcome.

How do cues relate to the two pyramids I displayed before? Well I find that far too often our cues (internal or external) are aimed for zone 3 or skill based movements. The problem with that relates to the “cracking the whip” example I mentioned in my previous article, “Compensation Patterns”. Focusing cues on zone 3 leads the athlete to prioritize zone 3 over 2 and 1 (moving from the top down in the pyramids). In this pattern the athlete is trying to crack a whip while holding the end of the rope instead of the handle. I think because of this tendency, we are prone to two things. First, we are vulnerable to reinforcing athlete compensation patterns, and second, we are deprioritizing movement quality.

I believe a great coach can use both internal and external cues to guide the athlete to the ideal outcome. Not all athletes are the same however, some will respond better to internal cues over external cues. What are your thoughts on cueing athletes? What do you find works best for getting optimal results? Are we susceptible to guiding our athletes to work “top down” (zone 3 to 1)?

More next time,

Mark D.

@MarkDomATC