The double translation problem

My path from learner to coach ran through three stages, and the third is the one nobody talks about.

Stage one was extraction: getting pattern-bearing knowledge out of the heads of master coaches. Rare and hard — but the tractable part, relative to what followed.

Stage two: as I absorbed what I'd extracted, the patterns became mine — and became tacit. Partly because that's what mature skill does, and partly because there was simply no language for some of them. The words may not exist.

Stage three is what I call the double translation problem, because it's two distinct problems wearing one coat. The first is encoding: the knowledge is yours but still unsayable, and you have to turn it into language anyway — analogies, metaphor, external focus cues. My worked example: "hide the logo, show the logo", a six-word cue built on a tennis coach's phrase, which cut a movement pattern I'd been failing to teach for nine to twelve months at a 60% success rate down to 90–180 minutes at close to 100%.

The second problem is recognition, and it's stranger: even with a perfect cue, a rower cannot watch their own stroke. There's no mirror, no replay, no moment to check. So teaching the correct pattern isn't enough — you also have to teach the performer to recognise, from felt sense alone, that they've just produced it. My solution was a conditioned marker: a whistle fired at the exact instant of correct execution, giving the athlete a felt reference point they could search for and reproduce. The marker isn't compensating for my late feedback; it's closing the performer's own self-observation gap.

Encoding is a translation problem — tacit pattern into public language. Recognition is a calibration problem — tuning proprioception to find a target state with no external reference. Most teaching fails because it attempts neither.

This account is drawn from my own practice and I hold it as a claim, not a proof. The test I'd want: whether the cue-construction method repeats across domains, and whether marker-conditioning protocols transfer outside sport.