Comparing forward and backward chaining in teaching Olympic weightlifting
Forward chaining beats backward chaining when teaching Olympic lifts to novices.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Moore and team ran an alternating-treatments experiment.
They compared forward chaining with backward chaining for Olympic lifts.
All lifters were adults new to the clean and snatch.
Each athlete tried both teaching orders in mixed sessions.
What they found
Forward chaining won.
Lifters hit the correct form more often when skills were built from the first step to the last.
Backward chaining, starting with the final position, produced sloppier lifts.
How this fits with other research
The result lines up with Bentham et al. (2019).
They also used an alternating-treatments design and found that blocked, step-by-step trials beat mixed trials for adults learning new skills.
Both studies say the same thing: teach one chunk at a time and move forward.
BURNSTEIN et al. (1964) opened the door.
They showed chaining could measure reinforcement strength in lab animals.
Channell et al. (2019) now extend that idea to human athletic coaching.
Why it matters
If you coach sports, dance, or any motor skill, start at the beginning.
Teach the first move until it is clean, then add the next link.
Skip the old advice to "work backward from the finish."
Your athletes will learn faster and perform better.
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Break the next complex skill into steps and teach step 1 first.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
The popularity of Olympic-style weightlifting in fitness routines is growing, but participating in these exercises with improper technique places lifters at increased risk for injury. Fitness training professionals have developed multiple teaching strategies, but have not subjected these strategies to systematic evaluation, particularly with novice lifters. Two strategies recommended by professional training organizations are akin to forward and backward chaining, which have been shown effective at teaching other novel, complex behaviors. The present study compared these forward- and backward-chaining-like strategies to teach novice lifters "the clean" and "the snatch," two Olympic weightlifting movements frequently incorporated into high-intensity training programs. Participants performed lifts taught with forward chaining more accurately than lifts taught with backward chaining.
Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 2019 · doi:10.1002/jaba.517