Teaching Tacit Skills

The best grappler at your gym may be the worst teacher. The disconnect isn’t personality — it’s the nature of expertise. As skills become automatic, conscious access to the mechanics fades. The expert knows what to do without knowing what they know. When asked to explain, they confabulate — inventing explanations that don’t match their actual movements.

This is the coaching paradox: verbalization often harms the very skills it tries to transmit. Rich Nichol’s research on motor learning shows that explicit instruction can increase conscious monitoring, which fragments implicit skill execution. Tell someone exactly how to move and they become worse at moving.

Traditional coaching assumes more explanation helps. Break down the technique, name every component, correct every deviation. The result is learners saturated with declarative knowledge that crumbles under pressure. They can describe the technique but can’t perform it when it matters.

The constraints-led approach inverts this. Instead of telling learners what to do, you change the environment so the desired movement becomes the natural solution. Want to teach hip escapes? Put the learner under side control with specific grips that make other escapes fail. The body discovers the hip escape because the constraints leave no alternative.

Nonlinear pedagogy builds on this. Learning isn’t linear accumulation of discrete techniques. It’s exploration of a movement landscape. The coach’s job is to create conditions for exploration, not to specify the destination.

Analogy learning bridges explicit instruction and implicit acquisition. Instead of describing mechanics (“extend your hips, rotate your torso, drive through the heels”), you offer a metaphor that guides movement without fragmenting it. “Push the floor away.” “Explode like a spring.” “Make yourself heavy like a bag of sand.”

The metaphor engages the body directly. It doesn’t create explicit rules that require conscious monitoring. Research shows analogy-trained performers maintain skill under pressure better than explicitly-trained performers. Less conscious knowledge means less to reinvest when stress hits.

The Japanese approach to craft transmission offers another model. The shokunin tradition emphasizes watching before doing, sometimes for years. The apprentice observes the master, absorbs rhythm and feel, internalizes standards through proximity rather than explanation. When they finally attempt the work, the template exists in their body.

This seems inefficient by Western standards. But it avoids the fragmentation problem. Knowledge enters implicitly, through observation and guided practice, rather than explicitly through instruction. The apprentice can’t articulate what they learned because they never encoded it verbally.

Practical applications for coaches and teachers:

Design constraints, not instructions. What environment makes the desired skill the natural solution? Modify equipment, space, rules, or partner behavior to guide discovery.

Use analogies over mechanics. When verbal guidance is needed, prefer metaphors that evoke the whole movement rather than descriptions that fragment it.

Let failure teach. Resist the urge to correct immediately. Struggle produces learning that correction short-circuits.

Demonstrate more, explain less. The visual system is older and better adapted for movement learning than the linguistic system.

Create variability. Slightly different conditions each repetition produces more robust skill than blocked practice of identical movements.

The deeper principle: knowing is not the same as telling. Some knowledge exists only in action. The attempt to make it explicit can destroy it. The master coach creates conditions for learning rather than delivering content.

Teaching tacit skills requires humility about the limits of language.

Go Deeper

Books

The Constraints-Led Approach by Ian Renshaw et al. — The theoretical framework and practical applications for skill acquisition.
Motor Learning and Performance by Richard Schmidt — Academic foundation for understanding implicit and explicit learning.
The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey — The classic practical treatment of quieting the analytical mind.

Films

Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011) — Ten years of watching before the apprentice cooks rice.