The Importance of Perception in Athletic Performance

In your experience, does perception need to be verbalized by the athlete or is it more that they can have that sort of internal perception of what's going on without being able to really express it? Some of it's just happening so fast on such a subconscious level that we don't need our players to be able to write a dissertation on why they did skill X. If you then instruct people about how the machine works, how if you press at a particular position, then you get the best out of it. So you're cognitively instructing why they should do X, Y and Z, performance actually drops.