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 5 of 97 book notes and over 4300 words in the last post of this series.
CHAPTER 11 – YOUTH COACHING: THE PROBLEM WITH CONES AND MAKING PRACTICE FUN AGAIN
Skills like agility and ball handling, are functional and driven by information from the environment, but they often aren’t practiced that way.
It has long been assumed that in traditional coaching that teaching skills to novices must start with task decomposition which is breaking a skill down into components, isolating them and then having athletes repeat them over and over in the hope they just magically reconnect when attempting the full skill again.
An alternative way of reducing complexity to make it easier for kids to acquire the necessary perceptual-motor skills is through tag which is functional and purposeful with the participants trying to realise clear affordances (tag someone or avoid being tagged) and it is coupled and information-driven and the only way you get/avoid being tagged is by regulating your movement based on the perceptual information from the other person’s movement, plus it involves heaps of decision making.
Task decomposition also often involves decoupling perception from action but there is plenty of evidence suggesting we perceive the world differently when we are required to act on it as opposed to when we’re not. For example a goal keeper study had them view penalty clips and simply say what direction they thought the kick was going to go vs if they also then had to try and stop it and their gaze behavior was way different between each of the 2 options.
After light hits your eyes it is converted into an electrical signal that travels to the back of your head, arriving at the visual cortex where it splits off into 2 parts – the dorsal stream that goes to the top of your brain and the ventral stream that goes to the bottom - with each brain area doing vision for action and vision for perception respectively. What this means is that one is using visual information to help guide actions while the other is using it to allow for passive perception and verbal responses.
When you ask an athlete to perform a decoupled task where they are perceiving without action, they will be using a different parts of the brain (the vision for perception/ventral stream) then they will be when they play their actual sport (the vision for action/dorsal stream).
A similar problem comes when you ask a performer to act but you do not include the information they normally use such as cricket batters taking balls from a bowling machine that lacks the information the bowler themselves give out to batsman during their action.
Being skillful relies on a performer developing highly specific relationships between the information in their environment and their movement but when these are separated, then the task they are becoming skillful at is different to the actual game task and transfer is less likely to occur.
Instead of fundamentally changing the task the young athlete is trying to perform by decoupling it, the task can be simplified through scaling of the equipment such as lower compression balls, smaller racquets and lower net heights in tennis.
As far as learning fundamentals are concerned, a study had 10 and 11 year old soccer players complete 22 weeks of practice involving small sided games but they were not given any traditional, technical instruction but instead, the goal was for them to learn skills like dribbling and passing in the game, which were tested pre-study. While there were no improvements at 11 weeks, there were significant improvements in decision making and skill execution by week 22 so while it might take longer for basic skills to emerge, in the long run athletes develop the same fundamentals we see in traditional training but with the decision making improvements on top of it.
Young athlete should diversify the sports they partake in is that it can lead to a change in their individual constraints (strength, flexibility, speed etc) resulting in improved performance when they go back to their main sport.
CHAPTER 12 – WHAT ARE WE “ACQUIRING” ANYWAYS? THE NATURE OF EXPERTISE, AUTOMACITY AND DIRECT LEARNING
Direct learning consists of information/education of attention (involves a switch to using information that is more effective for the control of action, coined specifying information, where we need to vary constraints to encourage performers to educate their attention to more effective information), movement/education of intention (when a performer changes their goal for their action such as a long jumper being able to regulate and self organise their steps so they get as close to the board on take off as possible, even though they step out their run ups prior – degrees of freedom!) and calibration (learning a skill then altering it when needed to execute in slightly differing conditions like a new car where the brakes don’t quite work the same and acceleration is a little different).
In sum, the control of actions can be explained much more simply as the establishment and adaptation of information-movement control laws in which the performer directly picks up some action-relevant information from the environment and uses it to regulate their actions with no need for prediction, information processing or assessing memories of previous actions.
Skill involves innovation, whereas habits involve sheer repetition. Habits are pre-formed motor programs while skills are more adaptive and flexible.
CHAPTER 13 – THE EVOLVING ROLE OF TECHNOLOGY AND DATA IN SUPPORTING SKILL DEVELOPMENT
Using tech data in skill training can induced an internal focus of attention in an athlete, which is the telling the athlete to focus on specific body parts and moving them through specific ranges of motion, but this has been shown to result in inferior performance and learning of skills compared to conditions where attention is directed outwards towards the effect of their movement, such as following through towards your target when kicking. Internal focus of attention disrupts the self-organisation of degrees of freedom occurring in the athletes body parts.
CHAPTER 14 – INJURY PREVENTION AND ADAPTATION (NOT REHABILITATION!)
Being able to move in different ways to achieve the same goal not only gives the athlete the advantage of being able effectively adapt to the ever-changing constraints they face, but it also has the potential to reduce the impact and wear and tear on the body associated with repetitive movements.
An overemphasis on planned movements creates patterns (greater angles, rotations and energy absorbtion) that are likely to cause overuse injuries and it is likely these patterns appear because the movement is overly constrained so add more unplanned/unpredictability into the mix.
In a study on a group of pilots, from novices to experts, they found that variability was more then 1.5 times greater in experts which they put down to the very impoverished visual conditions which encouraged the experts to search for a movement solution to land the plane, acting with high variability to get some more information where novices simply tried to land the plane in the only way they knew how, how they’d been taught, regardless of the conditions.
A cracker of a book with plenty of takeaways for coaching in 2024, not 1984!
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