STUDY NIGHT - HIGH PERFORMERS

                                           

These notes are taken from a study on high performers in sport, what they look like, what they think about and what sets them apart from us normal's.

There's a saying that says "success leaves clues" so if you're goal as a player to improve, or a coach wanting to improve your players, then the answer could very well be in among these 700 or so words.

• High performers excel at learning in performance to quickly exploit opportunities to coordinate their actions to adapt to what the competitive context offers them, to function more effectively/efficiently
• The fastest sailors in regatta’s continually reorganise their actions and are highly attuned to immediate changes in prevailing currents/winds to any moment
• The skillful footballer adapts to the weight of their pass to match it to the demands of a wet surface where the ball skids or a dry surface with greater friction
• The spin bowler that quickly finds the most optimal pace when bowling on a new pitch
• The ice climber who explores/perceives properties of a frozen waterfall when traversing a route on a rocky surface
• Learning and performing are inter-dependent processes as learning cannot emerge without performance and performance needs to be assessed over time to evaluate learning
• Learning can lead to behavioral changes but refers to the set of processes that supports these changes
• Anxiety levels change the intentions of performers, what they perceive and consequently how they move
• Learning is the process of continual improvement of the relationship between an individual/environment by using surrounding perceptual information to continuously regulate actions but is a continuous work in progress as dynamic relationships can regress, stabilise or progress depending on their experience
• Individual performance solutions can vary over time scales via a change in capacity/skills, growth/maturation etc
• Learning does not occur in structured coaching sessions but rather in contextualised experiences of engaging with constraints of competitive environments
• Over all time frames, the skills/abilities that each ind develops are shaped by all the environments/landscapes of affordances/opportunities to action to which they are exposed to such as tennis players great on clay courts being a strong baseline player v a player with a serve and volley game on grass
• The perception/learning of affordances is not automatic but requires periods of individualised exploration over time to fine tune their attention as they detect meaningful properties of the environment to support/exploit their action capabilities so practice tasks need to provide athletes the opportunity to educate their intentions, attention and to calibrate their actions to achieve performance solutions
• Design learning for each stage by providing an initial period of search/exploration followed by a discovery/stability phase and for advanced athletes, activities should enhance their ability to exploit the available affordances
• Fine tuning performance involves specifying the information for skillful performance where you need to determine what variables you need to ignore or attend to but if you remove too many variables in the environment and make the practice task too easy, then the opportunity to learn to exploit relevant information to regulate their actions can be limited, as the opportunities to differentiate between unhelpful and helpful information, is denied
• An individual's degree of action fidelity is determined by the degree to which specifying affordances and the actions they support, are made available in training tasks
• Exposing learners to rich/varied practice environments can promote opportunities for individuals to develop knowledge of the performance environment by learning to self regulate and adapt (relatively) stable perception-action couplings to emergent problems
• Variability of practice refers to altering task, environment and individual constraints, not just 1 of them, such as the aim of achieving the same result under different conditions, which helps to self regulate to achieve consistent performance, and by adding perturbations you can support exploration/adaptation and not have that be viewed as a source of error in the system
• Skilled athletes are able to use task specific experiences to perceive action possibilities and exploit opportunities offered by factors such as opposition weaknesses or changes in environmental constraints such as wind, temperature and surface
• During performance this improved fit emerges through a continuous cycle of perceiving/acting to readjust intentions with respect to the (updated) knowledge of the environment
• When preparing athletes to compete, learning in action needs to be as fast as possible as task demands dynamically change as a result of interaction between task, environment and individual constraints as opportunities for action are usually brief and athletes need to pick up on them fast before they disappear
• Practice tasks should be based on matching learner intentions in practice with those observed in performance, ensuring learning tasks are highly representative of performance environments and contain key specifying information/affordances promoting maximum positive transfer with perception-action couplings demonstrating a high degree of fidelity to those seen in performance
• Practice adopting the concept of repetition without repetition to promote exploratory/performatory actions to support the emergence of stable/adaptable movement solutions and the design of constraints that invite learners to pick up/utilise affordances as and when they become available in a performance context