“We don’t practice until we get it
right. We practice until we can’t get it wrong,” is a phrase that I had drilled
into my head as a high school athlete. My basketball coach shouted it to us at
least once per week. It seems that after reading the article from Lee, Swanson,
and Hall (1991) that a more appropriate phrase would have been “We don’t
practice until we get it right, but we practice until we think you have all of
the skills at your disposal to critically think your way through challenging
situations and respond accordingly,” but that just doesn’t quite have the same
ring to it.
According to Magill and Anderson
(2017) the discussion about the retention of skill is essentially a debate
between the application of constant practice and practice variability. Constant
practice can be defined as the practice of only one variation of a specific
skill while practice variability is defined as the practicing several
variations of a skill (Magill & Anderson, 2017). There is a significant
amount of evidence to support the efficacy of implementing a more variable
approach to teaching motor skills as opposed to the blocked practice plans that
most of us experienced as young athletes. Gentile’s learning stages model
emphasizes a learner’s need to experience variations of regulatory and
nonregulatory context characteristics, Schmidt’s schema theory has shown that
the amount of movement variability a learner experiences during practice is key
to predicting success in future performance, and the dynamic systems theory stresses
the learner’s need to explore the perceptual motor workspace to discover the
optimal solution to a motor skill problem (Magill & Anderson, 2017).
A variable that I found most
interesting is how important performance error, especially when it occurs in a
variable practice setting, is to skill learning (Magill & Anderson, 2017).
There is evidence to support that more performance error during practice,
especially during the learning stage, can be better than less error if we are
trying to improve a specific motor skill (Magill & Anderson, 2017). This
evidence has great implications for practitioners because it allows them to be
more aggressive when trying to teach athletes or clients new skills so long as
it doesn’t put the athlete or client in harm’s way.
Williams and Hodges (2005) have
expressed the importance of performance error during practice as well. They
suggest that this can be best facilitated by implementing random practice
schedules and subsequently higher levels of contextual interference (Williams
& Hodges, 2005). It is assumed that random practice, accompanied by higher
contextual interference, and littered with performance errors is most
beneficial to long-term skill retention because it either encourages the
performer to undertake more elaborate and distinctive processing from one trial
to the next or allows them to forget and reconstruct an action plan each time a
skill is performed (Williams & Hodges, 2005) These hypotheses are known as
the elaboration hypothesis and the action plan reconstruction hypothesis,
respectively (Williams & Hodges, 2005).
I was coached by a generation that
emphasized repetitious practice of the fundamentals in the hopes that it would
make us better performers. It’s agonizing to see that there was research available
long before I was competing in high school sports that refutes the hypothesis
that practice has to be repetitive and must directly mimic skills that will be
used in the context of competition. Though repetition is certainly a variable
that is necessary to motor improvement, there is so much more to motor skill
acquisition and retention. One must consider the cognitive processes involved
if motor skills are to cross over to the competitive landscape (Lee, Swanson,
& Hall, 1991). No two experiences in competition are ever the same so it’s
important that athletes are equipped with the skills they need to develop their
own strategies and make their own decisions and evaluations related to action.
The evidence is clear that the most efficacious way to do this is through
randomly organized practice. I love the Jacoby analogy in the Lee, Swanson, and
Hall (1991) article because it suggests that we should be training for the
ability to solve complex problems not simply retrieve answers from our memory.
This analogy should also allow all coaches to audit their methods effectively.
Our goal shouldn’t be to teach athletes specific actions that they can reenact
whenever they encounter a recognizable scenario, but provide them with a large
variety of diverse information and force them to organize it and use it
effectively in their own unique manner to achieve performance success.
References
Lee,
T.D., Swanson, L.R., Hall, A.L. (2014) What is repeated in repetition? Effects
of practice conditions on motor skill acquisition. Journal of the American Physical Therapy Association, 71, 150-156.
Magill,
R. A., & Anderson, D. I. (2017). Motor
learning and control: Concepts and applications
(11th
ed.). New York, NY: McGraw Hill.
Williams, M., & Hodges, N. J.
(2005) Practice, Instruction and Skill Acquisition in Soccer:
Challenging Tradition. Journal of Sports Sciences, 23(6),
637-650.
