Knowledge of Result vs Knowledge of Performance: which feedback actually changes movement?

When you coach someone through a movement, you give feedback. But there are two fundamentally different kinds of feedback, and most trainers default to the weaker one without realising it.

If you have used the Coach Function worksheet, you have already met both. Every movement on it asks you to state the knowledge of the result and the knowledge of the performance, and then to give the client feedback on each. This article explains why the worksheet keeps asking for both, and which one to lead with.

The two types

Knowledge of Result (KR) is feedback about the outcome. Did the task succeed or not? "You stood up without using your hands." "You kept the thorax flat on the floor while your legs rotated." "You held your balance the whole way across." It says nothing about how the movement happened — only whether the goal was met.

Knowledge of Performance (KP) is feedback about the movement itself — the form, the mechanics, the pattern. "Your left knee caved inward as you stood." "Your shoulder lifted off the floor." "You held your breath." It describes the how, regardless of whether the outcome was achieved.

The worksheet frames KP precisely: it is about the errors that make a rep not successful, not efficient, or not safe. That is the job of performance feedback — to name the specific thing that went wrong so you know what to correct.

Most coaching instinctively reaches for KP. It feels more expert, more precise, more useful. But the motor learning science points the other way.

Why result usually beats performance

The reason sits in a problem called degrees of freedom. Any everyday movement — standing from a chair, carrying shopping, stepping off a kerb — involves dozens of joints, hundreds of muscles, and a near-infinite number of ways to combine them. Nobody, coach or client, can consciously control all of those variables at once. The moment you fix your attention on one part ("squeeze your glutes"), you lose track of fifteen others.

The nervous system is extraordinarily good at solving this problem on its own — but only when it knows what success looks like. Give it a clear target and honest feedback about whether it hit that target, and it will self-organise the messy details underneath. It will quietly find a workable combination of timing, sequencing and force, and refine it rep after rep. This is why a child learns to walk without a single cue about hip mechanics. They get relentless KR: fell over, or stayed up.

When you flood a client with KP instead, you do two unhelpful things. You hand them more variables to consciously manage than anyone can handle, and you pull their attention inward — onto body parts — when efficient movement is organised outward, around the task. The research on attentional focus is consistent here: an external, task-focused cue ("drive the floor away") tends to produce more efficient movement and higher force output than an internal, part-focused cue ("contract your quad"), even though the internal cue feels like it should be more precise.

Where Knowledge of Performance still earns its place

KP is not useless — it is situational. It matters most when a specific part has gone offline: after an injury, after long disuse, or when one muscle genuinely is not participating and needs to be consciously "found" before it can rejoin the pattern. Directing attention to a part can help re-establish it in the brain's map. But that is a targeted, temporary tool — not the default setting for everyday coaching.

This is exactly why the worksheet asks you to look for performance errors after stating the result, not before. You watch for the one error that broke the task — the breath-hold, the scapula lifting, the lumbar spine drifting into extension — and you address that. You do not narrate every joint.

The most powerful move: pair feel with result

Here is the part most trainers miss. The body's movement patterns do not run on words or angles — they run on feel. So the strongest feedback strategy is not KR alone. It is combining knowledge of the result with the client's own feltexperience of the movement.

Better still: have them feel the difference between a successful rep and an unsuccessful one. This is why the worksheet asks the client questions like "What do you feel? Where do you feel something working? What words would you use to describe it?" Those questions are not filler — they are building the client's felt vocabulary for success, so they can reproduce it without you.

A worked example: the sit-to-stand

Take a common general-population task — standing up from a chair without using the hands.

Knowledge of result: "You stood all the way up without pushing off your thighs." That is the outcome. Success or not.

Knowledge of performance: "As you came up, your knees rolled inward and your heels lifted." That is the how — and it names the error that made the rep inefficient or potentially unsafe.

Pairing feel with result: "You got up cleanly that time — what did that feel like through your feet? Now feel the difference on this next one where you had to rock forward to make it." The client learns the feel of the success and the feel of the miss, anchored to a clear result.

Notice the order. Result first. Feel attached to the result. Performance error named only to direct the correction. That is the whole logic of the worksheet in a single rep.

The practical upshot

For the general-population client — the office worker, the older adult, the recreational gym-goer — lead with the result and let them feel it. "Did you manage it? Good — what did that feel like? Now feel the difference when it goes wrong." Save the part-by-part correction for the rare cases where a part has genuinely dropped out and needs re-recruiting.

Knowing how you did something is far less reproducible than knowing that it worked and what success felt like. Coach the result. Coach the feel. Let the nervous system handle the rest.