For those coaches amongst us, we all love sharing our enthusiasm for the sport and seeing our students pick up the skills we teach them. But when was the last time you thought about the evidence that backs up the way we coach? 

As a full-time secondary school teacher, I’m always being pestered about the importance of ‘evidence-based practice’ and cognitive science. That is, making sure that the way we teach is backed up by plenty of proof that it works. But if we want to help train solid paddlers (in addition to ensuring people enjoy the sport of course), surely this is something we should be thinking about as coaches? To save you the trouble of trawling through endless pages of research, I’m going to walk you through some of the main evidence-based ideas in teaching and how I take them from the classroom to the river.^[1] In this article, I’ll be looking at how we can help paddlers to build schemas.