About a month ago I posted a very short excerpt from a book I had just completed titled "How We Learn to Move" by skill acquisition specialist Rob Gray and now with some AFLW winding down I can finally start posting the numerous noted I took from it.
I'm sure you'll get plenty our of the notes on their own but if you don't have a decent background in this theory of movement, then I strongly suggest you get your hands on the actual book.
Here's part 3 of 97 book notes and over 4300 words in this series.
CHAPTER 6 – LEARNING AS SEARCH, THE LAWS OF ATTRACTION AND THE TIM TEBOW PROBLEM
Despite the increased focus on the role of variability in skillful movement that is not to deny there is not also considerable in-variance – things that are the same across executions made by the same performer and are similar between different performers.
Even though, in theory, there are endless number of movement solutions we could use, we all have certain coordination tendencies as we are attracted to certain solutions that are highly stable and struggle to execute others that are very unstable.
Tim Tebow was a great college player but he held the ball too low when dropping back to pass which took him .2sec longer to get his throw off which he could get away with slower college defenses, but not in the pro’s.
The movement solution we come up with, and the attractor landscape we create, is shaped by the constraints we face when practicing a skill.
Bifurcation refers to learning in which we switch to using a completely different coordination pattern that we’ve never done before by creating a new attractor.
Shift learning refers to a gradual shift towards a desired pattern, reflecting the fact that we are not completely restructuring our perceptual-motor landscape and making new attractors but instead just shifting and reorganising the ones we already have.
Coaches need to accept that in a complex system they cannot possibly know what the optimal movement solution for an individual athlete will be – they can only help them find it for themselves.
CHAPTER 7 – NEW WAYS OF COACHING 1: THE CONSTRAINTS-LED APPROACH (CLA)
Trying to give the pitcher the “correct” mechanics does not fit well with the business model of self organisation.
Research has shown that even highly skilled athletes are very poor at following detailed instructions about how to change or correct their technique.
How can an athlete possibly be expected to implement a 2.5% change in angle or a 5cm change in position when these aspects of my movement are varying by more than that already?
Another issue with trying to correct technique flaws via explicit instruction is that, even when you get the athlete to implement the change, it tends not to be very sticky.
Athletes change their movement solutions to a less effective one under pressure because of how they were taught in the first place, and by following those explicit instructions you did when you were young, it only adds more pressure to nail every single cue in an already high-pressure situation.
In baseball pitching, a common technical flaw is forearm fly-out and a great way to help this is to practice with a connection ball, which is a large rubber ball between held between the arm and the body, and when you pitch, the ball goes towards the plate when it flies out which means you’ve kept your arm in while rotating and released it at the right time.
There are 4 key principles to CLA and 1 or more of them are manipulated in practice in order to de-stabilise the existing movement solution/attractor, encourage exploration and self organisation, to amplify information and invite affordances and to provide transition feedback about the effectiveness of the search, and are present in small sided games.
Conditioned games, in conjunction with small sided games, manipulate task constraints by changing the rules.
A verbal instruction to a player is a type of task constraint (an informational one) that can and should be used.
A study on using analogies as coaching cues showed that using analogies to convey a motor skill’s key features does not require the performer to implement highly specific technical changes (which we are not very good at), avoids specific references to bodyparts which can lead to choking and allows for variability and individuality.
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