NAILING PRACTICE CONDITIONS FOR SKILL ACQUISITION

                                               

These points come from Harjiv Singh who works in performance and development at the Orlando Magic in the NBA but also does a heap of stuff in the motor learning space and is what this focuses on.

• A skill can be practiced continuously (massed) or with rest-pauses/interpolated skill learning (distributed practice)  where distributed practice has a more positive influence on performance
• Practice alone is not sufficient for improvement and without knowledge of results, interest/attention, meaningfulness of the task to the learner, understanding of goals, intent to learn, readiness to learn and to some degree, game representation, this practice can be wasted
• Overlearning, or practicing past the criterion, results in better retention of that which is being learned
• Better learned skills are less prone to be disrupted by manipulated environment conditions and experiences in varying instructional/stressful conditions will contribute to high levels of skill
• Reinforcement increases the probability that the desired act will occur but random reinforcement is a more effective continual form of motivation than constant reinforcement
• Very high motivation impedes progress in complex tasks where highest performance is attained by individuals  with intermediate motivation/drive and as tasks increase in complexity, individuals with moderate motivation do better, showing there is an optimal motivational level for each task
• Reasonably hard, specific and attainable goals produce better performance than easy goals or a general goal to just do one’s best

The major takeaways that you can use at your very next training session include:

• Instead of doing activity #1 x 15mins, rest, activity #2 x 15mins rest, activity #3 x 15mins and finish, try activity #1 x 7mins, rest, activity #2 x 7mins, rest, activity #3 x 7mins, rest x 2 full rounds
• Either before or during each activity, ask/inform your players when/why that activity will be required in a game and if you want to get a little techy, record something on your phone/iPad fro an AFL game that shows exactly what it can look like
• Know how to optimally stretch each activity for your players where you might split your full group up into high/average/low abilities which will make this easier and allows support for ALL players, not just a fraction of them.