The 4 Stages of Learning Volleyball

The stages of learning are periods which players experience while they advances through skills. As being a coach, if you’re aware about your athletes’ level of preparedness, you could help them progress faster. There isn’t any definitive point of which a player transitions into any the stage, however descriptions help coaches understand about where players are and what level of activities they’re able to achieve.

You’ll find 4 stages of learning which happen whenever players learn about volleyball skills. Just how coaches train players must vary considerably in the opinion depending on the stage of learning the player is at.

Stages of Learning

Stage 1 and 2 – The Cognitive Stage. (An athlete is first presented to an activity or skill). Throughout the first 2 stages, a player is involved in knowing what should be learned. Drills and demos need blocked practice so that players could effectively understand what’s needed of them.

Stage 3 – Association Stage. (The athlete is concentrated on executing and refining the skill). For the duration of stage 3, the main objective is on verbal cues and motor program improvement. This particular stage is all about training while getting lots of feedback. Players needs to be centered on associating particular verbal cues together with the numerous motor patterns they’re executing.

The same as stage 1 and 2, drills and demos require more blocked practice. In my opinion, by restricting randomness, players often learn good form faster. The controlled environment enables for better feedback and much better association of the verbal cues and motor pattern.

“Part” Learning vs. “Whole” Learning

Within the stage 1 – 3, players and coaches must focus more on “part” learning vs. “whole learning as players learn to perform and understand the skill. Whole vs. part refers to how volleyball skills are taught. Do you teach the whole skill or part of the skill?

 

A good number of research would show that transfer takes place best whenever all of the skill are trained. This is sensible, especially when testing for the entire skill. Then again, with new players or in scenarios where you want to correct a particular area of the skill, we often disagree.

The reason why? Newer and younger athletes can’t process all the things right away. Thus “whole learning” has a tendency to end up in bad form in areas of the skill. This bad form could be difficult to correct later on while the player progress due to all of the bad reps.

Good examples I learn being a coach:

Double arm-move forward, back, forward whenever spiking versus neutral, back, forward.
Double move up, up and down on passing versus start up and low only.

Stage 4 – Autonomous Stage. (Players have discovered an automatic kind of performance of the skill).

In this stage, players are concentrated on mastering the skill. This stage focuses on watchful awareness of patterns and movements.

Players and verbal cues must mainly be centered on what athletes see. During stage 4 we often give attention to “Reading the Game,” Slowing the Ball Down,” Slowing the Game Down,” and “Dealing with Pressure,” within a game-like competitive environment which motivates a lot of quick reps such as multi-ball wash drills.

Entire learning, 6 on 6, multi-ball random practice needs to be the usual for the period of stage 4 learning.

Mini games are among the most effective ways to work on the entire skill within a competitive, game-like environment along with a greater number of contacts for each player in comparison to typical games.

In addition, the most crucial step in training any volleyball skill is assisting players develop self-awareness of what they’re doing wrong. A good method like Socratic approach to asking questions and guided discovery is the best for assisting the players achieve this result.

Why You Should Learn How To Play Volleyball

Regardless of whether it’s the dash, adrenaline, spikes, speed, genuine athleticism and challenging dynamics of the game, there isn’t any arguing the power of volleyball and how the people love the pure satisfaction of the sport. You don’t need to be Misty May-Treanor or Kerry Walsh Jennings to be able to experience the game of volleyball. Volleyball is an excellent sport that could be enjoyed by individuals of any age and levels of skill. It could be played all year round since it could be enjoyed both indoors and outdoors.

As mentioned earlier, among the numerous advantages of volleyball is because it could be tried year-round both in an outdoor and indoor environment. Apart from the pure enjoyment of the game, there are lots of reasons why men and women participate in volleyball. It’s an excellent bonding activity for family and friends. It works as a substitute and impressive way of achieving your workout goals in an enjoyable and interesting way. Other people just love the game and perform volleyball for pure enjoyment. Whatever the reason might be, the physical, mental and emotional advantages of playing volleyball are unequaled.

Volleyball has these main benefits:

Physical Activity

Actively playing volleyball is really a healthy method of getting some workout. Physical exercise is vital for your health as it helps maintain your heart in great working order, and also helping to avoid diseases and illnesses such as cardiovascular disease, cancer and diabetes type 2. Actively playing volleyball regularly is an excellent method to boost your exercise level, that will help you become fit and well toned, and also healthy and lively. Physical exercise may also help prevent depression and boost feelings of happiness well-being.

Develop Agility, Speed, Coordination, Stamina and Flexibility

Volleyball is definitely an extreme and physically demanding sport which could deliver amazing results. Particularly if they’re wanting to play in a highly competitive level.

If not, volleyball will definitely place you through your paces. Volleyball players should have a particular degree of speed, coordination, agility, endurance, rapid reflexes, flexibility, power as well as stamina just to be successful in the game. These skills and physical abilities are trained, nurtured and improved through the entire program of practice and play both in indoor and beach volleyball. Volleyball is a sport which trains all of your senses, challenges and builds up your abilities and skills, trains all your muscles and oftentimes pushes you into your physical limits.

Social Interaction

Taking part in volleyball mandates that you work along with a team to get points and prevent the other team from winning. This implies that you need to work well with your team and provides you precious chances to interact socially with acquaintances and friends. Regular social interaction improves your emotions of happiness helping you feel as though you’re a part of a group going after a common goal. Spending some time with friends also causes you to feel loved and valued, that means happiness.

Sportsmanship

Performing as part of the team needs that you learn about good sportsmanship and just how to deal with others. Playing volleyball provides you with such benefits by needing you to focus on what your team mates are performing so you could work together to predict the movements of the other team. Taking part in a team likewise shows you the worth of working hard and fairness. Volleyball is really a competitive and intense sport that will depend on how well you acknowledge defeat, and also just how graciously you win.

In summary, the advantages of playing volleyball are a lot more amazing and significant than many may know. The mental and emotional advantages of playing volleyball are just as incredible. From enhanced self-confidence, self-esteem, teamwork, interpersonal skills as well as a better sense of happiness and belonging in order to decreased stress levels, anxiety and also improved social interaction, emotional relationship, sense of achievement and a whole lot more. The advantages of playing volleyball are really unequaled.

Four Tips to Help Reduce the Stress of Volleyball Tryout Season

Volleyball tryout season is a stressful time. If you really want to make the team, but you’re nervous or suffering from performance anxiety, try these tips.

1 – Get Plenty of Sleep

You can’t perform well if you’re mentally running on empty. It’s easy to fall into a vicious circle of not sleeping because you’re stressed out, then being even more stressed out because you can’t sleep. Make an effort to break that cycle.

 

Cut down on those energy drinks for a few days, and make a point of turning your phone off and going to bed early. Get up early and go for a light jog to clear your head. Repeat every day and you should find that you start feeling a lot better, and that will show when you turn up for a game.

2 – Treat it Like A Day With Your Old Team

Yes, it’s a tryout, but don’t let your nerves get to you. You’re polite, coachable, friendly and hardworking with your team aren’t you? If so, be yourself. You don’t want to get onto a team that doesn’t like you, so be ‘you’, and do your best. If the team takes you, great! If they don’t take you, then you weren’t a good fit, and that’s a blessing.

 

Once you shift your thinking to that way of looking at things it gets a lot easier to relax and just do your thing. A sense of competitiveness and urgency is good, but remember that your worth isn’t tied into whether you make that team or not. There are other teams and there will be other years. You’ll always be able to play.

3 – Listen to the Coach

Being coachable is important for any athlete. Each team has different ways of doing things. Listen to the coach and take feedback in your stride. Don’t get upset or stressed if the coach talks to you. Remember that means you have attracted their attention. They wouldn’t give you feedback if you were on their “not worth it”list. So, treat feedback as a good thing!

 

If the coach tells you to do something, then do it. Thank them for the feedback and show that you’re open to trying new things and doing things their way. Volunteer for any extra jobs, and try to show maturity in everything you do. It can be tiring and stressful, and adapting to a new way of doing things isn’t always easy, but it will be worth the mental (and physical) effort!

4 – Be Prepared

A lot of ‘stress’ comes from the unknown, from rushing around or from being poorly prepared. You’ll feel more confident and less stressed if you do a little forward planning.

Learn the names of the coaches and the address of the venue. Find appropriate kit (now is not the time to be wearing a vest from a rival team!), and pack it the night before. Pack a water bottle and other accessories too.

How To Get Over Nerves Before & During A Game Competition

Leave early so that you get there on time. Turn your phone off when you get to the venue and resist the urge to check it. Make sure that you have a packed lunch or options for eating sensible food nearby. If you have injuries, pack a strap, tape, etc, so that you don’t have to ask to borrow someone else’s.

A little preparation the night before will go a long way towards making you look organized and prepared, and will make a huge difference to how you feel too. Plan ahead and you could well be that cool, calm and collected girl who aces the tryout.

7 Fun Tips to Improve Your Volleyball Beach Game

Beach volleyball is a lot of fun to play casually, but the sport is actually incredibly hard work to play competitively. It’s explosive, requires technique and communication, and good cardio too.

Here are seven tips to help you improve your beach volleyball game.

1 – Try the 4 Touch Drill

The 4-touch drill is a drill for ball control and helps you to learn how to set and control the ball. The coach starts the drill, hitting a ball to the digger. The digger will then dig to the middle of the court, and run to bump-set back to the coach. The coach will then hit another ball and the play will dig again, and hand-set to an attacker. It’s a hard, fast-paced drill!

2 – Play Without Jumps

Take the athleticism out of the equation and force yourself to play creatively by playing ‘no jumping allowed’ volleyball.

3 – Volleyball ‘keep-em-up’

Try to bump and set the ball to yourself as many times as you can. Aim to hit 50. It’s hard to hit 50 touches at first but you will find that you get better fast by doing this!

4 – Pass Against the Wall

If you can’t get to the beach often but you want to get better fast, then try putting a piece of tape against the wall, at around 8 feet high, and pass against it. Aim to do 15 minutes of passing against the wall every day. You’ll quickly get a feel for how the ball moves. It’s a stress-free way of getting a lot of reps in and it really does work!

5 – Don’t Neglect Your Footwork

Time in the sand is vital if you really want to get good at beach volleyball. The hardest part of beach volleyball is coping with the beach itself. Playing in sand is vastly different to playing on a court. So, spend as much time as you can on the sand. Do movement drills, run, sprint and jump until you learn how the sand affects your movement.

Yes, this is an excuse to go to the beach and just ‘play around’. Exposure to the sand can make a huge difference, especially if you’re a decent volleyball player and are moving from indoor courts onto the beach for the first time.

6 – Resistance Work is Fun

For a bit of variety, head to an indoor gym and do some footwork and resistance work. Resisted sprints at a CrossFit gym are a good way of improving your explosive power, and if you’re a bit burned out on volleyball itself then you will enjoy playing with a new toy and getting a good workout. You can try ladders and Theraband workouts too just to improve your agility and get a bit of exposure to new skills.

7 – Learn to Slow Down

This one tip could well be the most important. Learn to slow down and to leave space between you and the ball. Getting too far under the ball too soon will kill your power. Don’t move forward until after your partner has set.

Beach Volleyball Attacking Tip – The Batter’s Box

Playing slow-paced, casual games is a good way to get used to doing this, and will help you to calm down and get better angles. It’s tough to break the habit of racing to the ball, but your attacks will get a lot better once you learn to do it.

Remember, volleyball should be fun. Break up your training, play with new skills and new techniques, and above all, remember to have fun. Even if you’re aiming to play for a big team, you still need to enjoy practice!

5 Yoga Poses That Benefit Volleyball Players

Volleyball is a sport that requires you to dive low and jump high, while fully involving your shoulders. Since it is a full-body sport, you need the strength and flexibility of both the upper and lower body with quick as well as balanced reflexes. With a strong core and coordination, you will be able to move around the court more effectively and efficiently, while less prone to injuries. Volleyball involves repetitive motions, which cause imbalances to the body, pains, and can lead to injury. To counterbalance this, you need some kind of practice, and this is where yoga comes into the picture.

Yoga has all sorts of benefits to beach volleyball players, and that’s the primary reason so many athletes have reached their highest level have incorporated it into their regimen.

Yoga Benefits to Athletes

Improved Balance

As mentioned earlier, beach volleyball has a lot of challenges in both single-arm and single-leg movements.

As such, it’s imperative to have great balance and overall body awareness, both of which yoga practice focuses on.

Increased Strength

Volleyball players are always trying to find their body alignment, which results in a robust foundation, allowing the muscles to work optimally. Yoga can ideally help with this.

Other benefits include increased flexibility, complement mental training, and injury prevention.

Top Yoga Poses For Volleyball Players:

Threading The Needle Twist

This is a pose that’s excellent for shoulder flexibility and torso mobility. In beach volleyball, you rotate one way a lot and the rotation of your torso can be limited in the other direction, which can result in injury.

This yoga pose opens your shoulders, upper back and chest, minimizes tension, and increases the flexibility of your hip.

Dancer

This is a pose that helps with single leg balance, stability, and hip mobility. Beach volleyball players usually struggle with round shoulders and tight hip flexors. It’s imperative not to hyperextend the knee or arch your lower back when doing this pose. This will affect how well you can stretch the targeted regions.

Plank

This yoga pose strengthens your abdominals, thus increasing explosiveness and control on the court. It ideally builds strong arms, breeding nice open forearms and wrists for a more relaxed set or serve.

Reverse Plank

This is a pose for anyone, particularly beach volleyball players who wish to add strength to their core.

It ideally helps strengthen the lower chain, hamstrings, lower back, and glutes. All these regions are vital for volleyball players, and it is essential to keep them strong and well-stretched.

Wide-legged Squatter

When playing beach volleyball, it’s imperative to stay in a low, squatted position numerous times during a match. This pose boosts the flexibility and balance that you need. It works targeted regions like the calves, hamstrings, calves and the back.

Pigeon Forward Fold

This is an excellent way to stretch as well as calm down during pre-practice and post-game. It helps you stretch and add flexibility to the lower back, hip and lats. Your lower back can be quite vulnerable if it’s not stretched correctly. With the pigeon forward fold, you can help prevent injury to the region.

Deep Stretch for Athletes Yoga Class 

Yoga is an excellent combination of strengthening and stretching that helps keep your body in shape regardless of age. Beach volleyball players can benefit from doing these yoga poses as they help enhance the ability to perform during the match. Coaches are realizing that their players’ overall physical, mental and inspirational well-being improves as a result of adding yoga to the workout regime. So, consider doing so, and you will undoubtedly notice an improvement in your beach volleyball game. All the best!

4 Critical Questions You Should Ask Your Volleyball Uniform Provider

Selecting uniforms for a volleyball team can be fun. You get to choose from a wide variety of designs and patterns, and it gives you the opportunity to present the players with a stylish uniform that they would love to wear every time they enter the pitch.

With the logo of the team on the uniform, it gives a different level of motivation to the players to go out there and play their best game every time.

Questions to ask a volleyball uniform provider

The entire process of selecting a volleyball uniform provider is not as easy as you think. There are several obstacles that you need to bypass and navigate to the best uniform seller in the business. So, before starting your screening process, here are a few questions that you should ask that will help to find a reliable uniform provider:

1. How will the provider forecast your uniforms?

What does the uniform provider have to say about forecasting your team’s uniforms? There are several stages to finalizing a uniform for your team. You start by selecting the design that you think suits best for your players, you decide the position of the team logo and customize the badge size and design. So, once your team finishes trying out the uniform, its time you place the order.

This part involves placing the order to the uniform manufacturer. The uniform provider has to communicate with the manufacturer and provide a specific date within which everything will be ready. This is forecasting. It helps the customer know for sure that his/her team will wear the uniform on the said tournament. Reliable uniform providers will be ready to meet your deadline because they value their customers.

2. What does the uniform provider think about customer service?

Whether it is a uniform provider or a company selling smartphones, unless they have a satisfying customer support team, they will not win too many customers. Usually, uniform providers assign a club with one of their dedicated representatives so that they understand your team’s values, especially from the point of view of your equipment and uniform needs. But is that representative patient enough to listen to what you want? That’s where a strong customer service team kicks in.

Sometimes you may come across volleyball uniform providers that do not speak your language. Do they have a translator or cater to bilingual requests? Clarify everything before hiring the uniform provider.

3. Will the uniform provider cater to your team’s fans?

Every volleyball team will want their fans to wear similar uniforms. So, your order doesn’t limit to the players only. And you should make that clear to the uniform provider.

Ask them if they are ready to deliver uniforms to the fans also. Many parents and siblings of the players turn up for the game with the name of their son or daughter on the back to support him/her. Will the uniform provider offer such modifications on every order?

Related: Stay protected with Nike Essential Volleyball Knee Pads.

4. Will the uniform provider design the team’s badge?

The team’s logo is very crucial for players. It’s a badge that unites several individuals into a team. They should love not only the badge but also respect it. So, ask the volleyball uniform provider if they have a designer who can understand your logo’s concept and design a prototype. Many team managers may not have an artistic mind to design a logo. That is why it is better to clarify if the uniform provider can design the badge or not.

If the volleyball uniform provider ticks all the boxes to these questions above, hire the company immediately.

Why Power Posing Is Important In Volleyball

Power Poses are very important transformative expressions among primates and human beings. Animals make such poses whenever displaying their dominance and power on the wild kingdom. Players do these poses whenever they feel brimming with power, on the intense moment of winning as well as the incredible rush of victory happens over them.

Even simply seeing this body gesture is infectious. Instantly the raw emotion is transmitted while we share with the glory of the win. And I guess you’ve even power posed by yourself too. What’s really fascinating is the victory pose is natural inside us. As a matter of fact, we’re hard-wired to act it out – congenitally blind individuals do this whenever they’re successful in events, even if they’ve never witnessed it or been taught to do this!

A professor and researcher coming from Harvard Business School, Amy Cuddy, provides strong experience into her many years of research on the subject in her “TED talk”, known as “Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are.”

On her talk, she explains exactly how “power posing” – standing at a posture of confidence, even if you don’t really feel confident – could affect the measures of cortisol and testosterone levels inside your brain. According to her research, it reveals that you actually alter your body chemistry by simply altering your body position.

As being a coach how many times would you begin your very first practice and also your middle school or high school athletes are slouched over, arms crossed looking down in the floor. You could pretty much observe who is actually insecure and is lacking in self-confidence from the instant you head into the first huddle.

Aside from that, if left uncontrolled, these players could go onto to turn into what we refer to as your “Energy Vampires”. That means, unknowingly to them or their team members, they create a negative mood for practice that basically sucks all of the positive energy away from the gym, your practice, as well as your team. Developing a team culture of excellence starts effectively by simply dealing with “Energy Vampires” via the powerful tool and training of the players using “Power Posing”.

According to a coach, he instantly begin by correcting them. He actually evaluate and go over Amy Cuddy research. Policies for his practice include things like: no arms crossed, look into each other on the eye, hands in the hips and occupy space for a “Power Pose”. This is to try and look the way the players want to feel!

For instance, he ask players to think of two “Power Poses” for huddle and the other is ridiculous power pose. The very last is similar to a body builder in stage and they use to do “light” intense moments. Think about Usain Bolt or Arnold Schwarzenegger – Mr. Olympia.

The Wonder Woman pose stands out as the greatest power pose, in which you place your hands in your hips. Standing up having your feet apart and your hands in your hips might feel weird in the beginning, however it is a power pose on its essence.

The fastest approach to alter your emotional state would be to alter your body language. In case you imitate successful body language you are likely to feel and become energized. In case you imitate dis-empowered body language you’ll immediately feel dis-empowered (frustrated, upset, guilty, terrified and more).

“Power Posing” is likewise essential for competitions and coaching your players to flourish in matches. We recommend you to review “Power Posing” along with your players parents as well. Teams we talk with usually send out an e-mail to their players parents to teach them about this powerful tool and they’re mostly very thankful.