How We Learn to Move
A Revolution in the Way We Coach & Practice Sports Skills
Rob Gray, Ph.D.
Perception Action Consulting & Education LLC
Copyright 2021 by Rob Gray, Ph.D./Perception Action Consulting & Education LLC
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
All figures reproduced with permission from rights holders.
To Sara, for the love, support and strong attraction.
To Angus, Molly, and Jonah for filling my life with essential noise.
To the listeners and supporters of the Perception & Action Podcast for the encouragement, feedback, and emergent discussions.
Contents
Preface: How We Learn to Move
It was about five years ago, walking around my local park on a beautiful Saturday morning, when I suddenly realized something was dreadfully wrong. On the soccer fields, kids from a local club were waiting in lines to dribble a ball around a set of cones . On another field, players from a nearby high school football team were waiting in a line to run through a set of tires . On the baseball diamond, batters were hitting balls off tees . On the tennis court, the instructor was tossing the ball underhand to a player attempting to repeat the same forehand stroke over and over into an empty court . Soccer, football, baseball and tennis are incredibly exciting, dynamic activities defined by their interpersonal actions: attacker vs defender, pitcher vs hitter, server vs receiver. It seems like almost every week we see a highlight of an athlete from one of these sports doing something new and unexpected. So, why then do we practice them in such a static, isolated, and choreographed manner? If an alien from another planet came and watched, would they think the goal of sports here on earth was to defeat inanimate pieces of rubber?
Why do we insist on teaching movement skills this way? From golf lessons to soccer practice, to learning to do pottery, the dominant view has been that we become skillful by trying to repeat the one, correct technique given to us by a coach or an instructor, over and over until we get it right. In baseball, tennis and golf we learn THE way to swing. In soccer and basketball, we learn THE correct way to dribble a ball. In pottery we learn THE way to position our hands. We reduce these creative, interactive, dynamic activities down to dull, isolated fundamentals so that they can be drilled and mastered. For a long time, we have assumed that decomposition and repetition rule the day if you want to be an elite performer.
In this book, I want to introduce you to a revolution in the way we think about learning to move and act in the world. A radical change in sports skills training that has inspired Chelsea coach Thomas Tuchel to have his players hold tennis balls in their hands during soccer practice. A way in which there is no one correct technique. Exploration, creativity and individuality are encouraged. Repetition is not only not the key to becoming skillful it is impossible. And you, yourself (not a coach or instructor) are the one with the answers.
This exciting new view of skill completely changes the way we think about learning. When we acquire a new skill, we want to harness the natural inconsistency and variability in our bodies rather than treating it as noise and attempting to tame it through repetition. Being skillful and creative comes through establishing a direct connection with the environment around us, not pulling away from it by becoming automatic and reflexive in our movements. Being an expert is not defined by what you have in your head but rather how effectively you relate to the world around you. As performers we want to be adaptive problem solvers and creative decision makers, not robots just executing stored programs drilled into us in practice.
There is a new role for the coach too. Rather than just running athletes through the same old drills and giving the same old instructions, in this new way of thinking about skill, coaches need to be innovative practice designers and guides through the learning process. Instead of using boring old repetition of an isolated technique, coaches adopt approaches like the Constraints Led Approach that encourage athletes to try different things and explore (sometimes wildly) different types of movements. As we will see when we learn about these approaches, they have endless possibilities so there is lots of room for the coach to be creative and try new things too.
The revolution is also inspiring changes in other related fields. Instead of focusing on the failed endeavor of brain training, which attempts to improve things like perception, attention and decision making out of context on a small screen, innovative sports training technologies like vision occlusion glasses and movement sonification are being developed which can be used on the field while the athlete is performing their skill. Rather than just trying to recreate the real world, virtual reality (VR) technologies are being developed which give value added by allowing the athlete to practice things that are impractical or even impossible to do on a real field or court. This new way of thinking also presents new hope for improving an athletes ability to avoid and recover from injuries. There is a growing body of evidence showing that encouraging a performer to execute a movement in multiple different ways (instead of repeating the one, correct technique) can reduce the risk of knee and elbow injuries and even concussions. Injury rehabilitation and physiotherapy are cast in the completely new light of movement exploration and increasing body awareness, rather than trying to cautiously return to where you were before with the same old set of exercises.
Finally, and returning to what I saw in the park five years ago, this revolution is changing the way we coach young athletes. Thankfully! Our traditional, fundamentals, repetition-dominated view of learning is ruining youth sports. Isolated, reductionist practice activities like running around cones or through a set of tires are boring. They remove all individuality, exploration, decision making and creativity. When kids struggle to master the fundamentals in sports training or physical education class they typically drop out of sports. They never get the chance to further develop the joy of movement, express their own perceptual-motor skill and movement creativity, and grow a love of actively interacting with their environment. Instead, they learn that they are uncoordinated and not sporty and move on to something else. There must be a better way. Viva la revolution!
My goals with this book
As we will see, this revolution has been going on, out of sight to most, for quite a long time. It has been led by key figures from across the globe: from Moscow, Russia to Ithaca, New York. It also involves a lot of complicated terminology and includes concepts that are not easy to grasp right away. If you dig deeper into this area, which I hope you will be inspired to do by the end of this book, you will hear intimidating-sounding terms like Ecological Dynamics, Dynamical Systems Theory and Adaptive Complex Systems to name a few. My goal in writing this book is not to try to explain all these complex ideas to you. Nor is it to provide a comprehensive review of this new approach to skill learning. Instead, I like to equate this book to a movie trailer. Its purpose is to introduce you to some of the main characters and ideas. To provide some evidence for this new approach by looking at a few key research studies. And along the way hopefully build some intrigue and get you excited about going to see the full movie. So, grab your popcorn!
