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Some coaches rely on de facto drills that seem to be an essential part of their sport as a foundation for their practices; others turn to the latest gadgets and technology to drive their practice plans. Before integrating tradition or tech, coaches should evaluate their drills and innovative tools based on their contribution to skill acquisition. Applying the concept of Representative Learning Design (RLD) can help ensure your practices are contributing to quality learning and greater skill transfer from practice to competition.

What is RLD?

RLD is a framework that assesses how much a practice or drill accurately depicts the demands of competition (Krause et al., 2017; Pinder et al., 2011). In other words, do your practice tasks accurately simulate performance environments? Using the RLD framework, simulated performance environments are assessed based on two key concepts:

  1. Action fidelity – How much an athlete’s movements during a practice task or drill mimic the required movement behaviour during competition.
  2. Functionality – How much a practice task or drill contains the same informational cues that are present during competition.

Prior research has established that perception-action coupling – the pairing of movements with the necessary contextual and perceptual information needed to successfully execute a task – underpins exceptional performance. For example, elite performers make better decisions (e.g., estimating where is a ball going to land) when they are allowed to move as if they are playing, as opposed to when they are seated and viewing video. Research suggests practice tasks that incorporate competition-like movements and information, and thus are higher in action fidelity and functionality, deliver higher quality learning and better performance during competition.  

RLD Research in Sport

Action fidelity

To encourage consistent movement patterns in athletes, coaches often employ a deconstructive approach – an isolated skill that is performed frequently during a match (e.g., tennis serve, softball pitch, basketball free throw) is broken down and segmented in the practice environment. Women serving tennis ball Davids et al. (2000) explored how this method affected novice volleyball players’ serving consistency. In this experiment, novice volleyball players were divided into two groups – one practiced a consistent ball-toss separate from striking the ball (i.e., de-coupled); the other practiced a coupled ball-toss and strike. Results suggested that the de-coupled practice group experienced greater long-term variation in the height and location of their ball-toss. This is important because ball-toss inconsistency is related to more errors, which is detrimental to performance (Davids et al., 2001). Furthermore, routinely performing this de-coupled drill risks harmful long-term learning effects as it disrupts the development of perception-action coupling – research shows expert volleyball players use the vertical zenith (highest point) of the ball as a cue to initiate the rotation of their front hip (Davids, 1999). Thus, drills that are low in action fidelity do not afford the opportunity to synchronize relevant movements with perceptual information.

Functionality

While action fidelity focuses on the movement aspect of the perception-action link, functionality largely focuses on the information part of the link. Within every sport, athletes process and use information to make decisions and move accordingly. Depending on the sport, information may be visual (i.e., an approaching defender or object), haptic (i.e., the feel of a golf club or tennis racquet), auditory (i.e., the sound of impact between ball and object), and probabilistic (i.e., the likelihood of an event occurring in a competition). Consequently, it is crucial to ensure that your practice environment preserves the relationship between movement and information.

The perception-action link is particularly relevant in interceptive sports (e.g., baseball, cricket, softball, and tennis), where athletes rely on the pairing of advanced visual information processing (i.e., an opponent’s bodily positions, and the trajectory, spin, and velocity of the approaching ball) with complex movements to strike the ball. Rear view of player batting while playing cricket on field When ball machines are used to simulate an opponent, functionality is low as the athlete is not able to process informational cues that they use in competition, such as the wind-up or release/contact point of their opponent. To demonstrate the potential harm associated with low functionality drill design, Pinder et al. (2009) assessed the swing timing and coordination of novice cricket batters facing a live bowler (high functionality) and a bowling machine (low functionality). When facing the bowling machine, batters displayed sub-optimal movement kinematics and delayed timing. This suggests batters using a ball machine may be practicing movements not used against a real opponent during competition. The risk is that low functionality drills may disrupt the coupling between information and movement, which could impair learning and performance.

Technology and RLD

Practice plans that incorporate modern technology are becoming increasingly popular in high performance sport. Hockey and soccer players can watch shooting technique filmed on high speed cameras, basketball players can track how many shots are made in practice with wrist and net sensors, and football/rugby players can be seen tackling robotic pads at their respective training sites. However, some of these technologies are unrepresentative to the point that they contain no recognizable aspects of a sport (e.g., multiple object tracking). Although some evidence that brain-training technologies improve working memory exists (Vartanian et al., 2016), multiple studies have suggested that training with such technology does not lead to sport-specific performance improvements (Farrow et al., 2018; Harris et al., 2020; Melby-Lervåg et al., 2016), as it is low in functionality and action fidelity. For a sizeable cost, coaches can integrate a high-fidelity virtual environment or augmented reality into their practice plans. While promising, the majority of virtual reality (VR) applications to sport research have focused on endurance sports, where less factors need to be considered to create an immersive environment (Neumann et al., 2018). As VR environments become more representative of competition in skill-based sports, the potential benefit and harm to skill acquisition will likely depend on how much they preserve action fidelity and functionality, and how much their use is balanced with other representative tasks.

New technology is also contributing to a prompt feedback climate. Although wearable and software-based measurement instruments contribute to a better understanding of how specific inputs affect outputs (e.g., high-speed cameras that capture how a specific grip affects a baseball’s movement during a pitch), they can also lead to a compartmentalized visualization of movements. Additionally, the instantaneousness of technological feedback (i.e., immediately after a mistake is made) is typically unrepresentative of competition, and can have harmful outcomes on learning if not packaged and delivered appropriately (learn more in the SIRC blog on Coaching Strategies to Maximize Long-Term Learning and Performance for Athletes).

Key Takeaways

Contemporary practice environments include drills that have been unchanged for decades and impressive emergent technologies, regardless of what empirical research suggests about their efficacy. When evaluating traditional drills, or deciding to introduce technologies into the practice environment, coaches and athletes can use an RLD lens to assess their value by considering the following questions:

If skill acquisition and progression are the goals for athletes, drill design should be viewed through a Representative Learning Design lens.

Hot summer temperatures combined with long training or competition sessions can raise athletes’ body temperature, with devastating effects on performance. Strategies to maintain optimal body temperature for performance including cooling before exercise (e.g. with cold water immersion or ice vests) or during exercise (e.g. by drinking cold water or using cold water spray); or through heat acclimation or acclimatization (e.g. use of heat chambers, or training camps in warm climates).

Returning to sport after months of isolation can take a mental toll on athletes. Athletes can expect to move through three phases of emotional challenges: managing the emotions associated with losing their bearings; making sense of the situation and giving meaning to the necessary change; and mobilizing energy and efforts to adapt to the new reality.

Whether you’re racing for the finish line at the UCI World Tour event or your Sunday café ride, sprinting velocity is key to success. Research shows adopting a forward standing position during a sprint could give riders a speed boost of up to 5kph.

Whether you are a high performance athlete training for the Olympic and Paralympic Summer Games in Tokyo, or a weekend warrior working on a personal best, learning to manage heat stress should be a priority. Heat stress and fatigue can lead to decreases in performance, influencing a podium finish, or can be the precursor to heat-related illness, which could end your competition all together. Therefore, it is important that athletes, sport scientists and practitioners have management strategy in place, especially when traveling abroad or competing in a hot environment.

At rest, safe and efficient functioning of the human body is around ~37°C. Temperature is regulated by the hypothalamus through processes such as sweating (cooling down), shivering (warming up), and metabolism. In fact, ~70-80% of the energy derived from food and drink is used to maintain your internal body temperature (Ament & Verkerke, 2009).

During training and competition, the “ideal” internal temperature shifts to ~38.5°C. At this temperature athletes may experience an increase in muscle power and improvement in performance (Asmussen & Boje, 1945). For example, temperature work by Amussen and Boje (1945) demonstrated that after a passive warm-up, performance during a singular sprint improved by 5%. Warm-ups are designed to increase body temperature – the body uses adenosine triphosphate (ATP) as energy to fuel repeated muscle contractions, creating heat as a byproduct. However, the longer you exercise, the more heat you will generate. It is when this internal heat generation is combined with increased temperature through prolonged external heat exposure that problems can occur.

Beyond an internal temperature of ~38.5°C, athletes may experience a decrease in performance. The central governor theory suggests the subconscious brain regulates muscle recruitment to prevent the body from overheating and having to shut down (Noakes et al., 2004). According to Noakes et al. (2004) the brain constantly performs subconscious calculations of the metabolic cost required to complete an exercise task, considering both the current physical state and the environmental conditions. The brain then selects an optimum pacing strategy to allow the completion of the task while maintain internal homeostasis and a metabolic and physiological reserve. For example, research by Tucker et al. (2004) comparing performance in cycling time trials in environmental temperatures of 10°C and 35°C reported an “anticipatory response” during exercise in the heat that adjusted muscle recruitment and power output before any abnormal increase in internal temperature, heart rate or perception of effort.

During exercise in the heat, the ability to cope is imperative. Temperatures at the Tokyo Games are expected to exceed 30°C  with 80% relative humidity (Gerrett et al., 2019). The combination of exercise and environmental conditions can easily result in physiological strain caused by heat accumulation. To help mitigate heat-related stress to maintain or improve performance, athletes can rely on three thermoregulation strategies (Bongers et al., 2017):

  1. Cooling before exercise is designed to reduce internal body temperature so athletes begin training or competition in a cooled state. Techniques include ice baths, cold water immersion, and the use of ice vests.
  2. Cooling during exercise is typically used to lower skin temperature and alter thermal perception during training or competition. This can be achieved through cold water spray, cold water ingestion, fans, etc.
  3. Heat acclimation or acclimatization refer to physiological adaptation that enhance the body’s ability to cope with heat exposure. This includes positive adaptations to heart rate, internal body temperature response, and sweat onset and rate. Acclimation is stimulated in controlled environments such as heat chambers or through passive heating; acclimatization is achieved through natural environments – during warmer temperatures in the summer, or by spending time in a warmer climate.

Athletes may need to experiment with different cooling strategies to determine what is most effective. While all strategies are practical when trying to improve performance, feasibility may be the most significant differentiator, especially when traveling abroad, depending on human resources, or in the occurrence of logistical limitations. Prior to competition, athletes and their support teams should practice implementation to maximize the benefits (and avoid mishaps). Although sport has a lot of uncontrollables, a cooling plan is something for which both athletes and practitioners can take ownership.

“Skills learned slowly are forgotten slowly” is an aphorism that should be used to coaches to inform practice structure. While a blocked practice structure may improve short-term practice performance, a randomized practice structure poses a greater challenge to learners resulting in enhanced motor learning and thus better long-term performance.

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Only 16% of Canadian adults meet Canada’s physical activity guidelines. In preparation for National Health and Fitness Day tomorrow, check out our new fact sheet on evidence-based tips for getting active. (Spoiler: Set a goal, create an action plan, track your activity, get feedback, review and reset!)

At a time when athletes and coaches have been inundated with pseudoscientific ideas about the importance of accumulating 10,000 hours of practice, the importance of practice quality often does not receive the attention it should. Contrary to popular belief, there is significant evidence that improvements in sport-specific skills during practice do not always yield the long-term change in performance that signifies learning (Soderstrom & Bjork, 2015). While many traditional coaching strategies, such as repetitive practice drills, coach-prescribed motor patterns, blocked training, and frequent corrective feedback have been shown to yield short-term motor performance improvements during practice, these strategies do not contribute to robust motor learning that can be transferred to competition. Motor learning is characterized by relatively permanent improvements in movement ability and is measured over time and outside of practice (i.e. during games and competition). An understanding of the learning-performance distinction is necessary for coaches designing learning environments for athletes. Using principles from Nonlinear Pedagogy (Chow, Davids, Button, & Renshaw, 2016) and the OPTIMAL theory of motor learning (Wulf & Lewthwaite, 2016), this blog will highlight some of the factors that influence learning outcomes for athletes, and provide recommendations for coaches to improve their current training strategies.

Learner Autonomy

People experience a natural motivation boost when provided with opportunities to exercise control via choice. When given the opportunity to choose, our intrinsic motivation becomes elevated and our performance tends to increase. Giving athletes control over certain practice elements is one way that coaches can increase motor learning. For example, letting athletes decide:

Interestingly, research suggests that learner autonomy benefits motor learning even when the choice provided is unrelated to the motor task. For example, when participants were allowed to choose which colour golf ball (white, orange, or yellow) they preferred to use during putting practice, they outperformed participants who were not given a colour choice during a retention test 1 day later (Lewthwaite, Chiviacowsky, Drews, & Wulf, 2015). The findings of this study, and several others, showcase the positive influence that autonomy can have on motor learning.

Recommendation: Regularly incorporate choice – relevant or not – into practice sessions.

Verbal Feedback and Attentional Focus

Verbal feedback is arguably the most abundantly used coaching “tool” in sport. Knowing when and how to structure feedback to optimize learning outcomes is therefore valuable for coaches and players alike. In terms of timing, giving athletes the power to decide when they receive feedback has been shown to enhance learning. In terms of verbal feedback type, a more positive filter seems to benefit learners. For example, research participants who were told their average putting performance was improving after each set of 10 putts (regardless of whether or not this was true), showed increased putting accuracy during a retention test 1 day later; indicating that learning was increased in those who received comparative feedback (Chiviacowsky, Harter, Gonçalves, & Cardozo, 2019). Similarly, research has shown enhanced learning when participants were told their performance was superior to others, and when feedback was given following “good” trials instead of following “poor” trials. To help athletes improve, coaches should consider the timing and type of feedback they provide when pointing out errors and suggesting potential solutions.

Recommendation: Place greater value on positive comparisons (either in relation to previous performance or in comparison to others – without naming names), and provide feedback following strong trials more often than weak trials.

Verbal feedback from coaches can also be used to direct an athlete’s focus internally (on the body movements) or externally (on the intended movement effect). There is substantial evidence that an external focus of attention is superior to an internal focus of attention for motor learning. For example, Becker and Fairbrother (2019) found that participants who were instructed to focus externally (“accelerate the dart”, “straight dart path”, and “hit the target”) outperformed their peers who were instructed to focus internally (“accelerate the forearm”, “straight arm path”, and “hand to target”) during a dart throwing task; both during the intervention and the retention test 1 day later.

Recommendation: When providing feedback on technical skills, frame the message to focus the learner’s attention externally on the intended effect of the movement, rather than the body movement itself.

Practice Structure

Blocked practice schedules involve chunking, where sport-specific skills (skating forwards, skating backwards, passing, shooting, etc.) are practiced separately for a period of time (i.e. low contextual interference). On the other hand, random practice schedules require skills to be utilized in a somewhat indiscriminate order (i.e. high contextual interference). Blocked practice has been shown to improve motor performance, especially for beginners, whereas random practice has been shown to enhance motor learning. The variation that exists during random practice forces the athlete to adapt to the changing context and develop the underlying mechanism of the movements rather than simply repeating the same motion continuously. A study involving high school basketball players found that those assigned to the blocked practice group (27 chest passes, 27 overhead passes, and 27 sidearm passes) outperformed their peers in the random practice group (total repetitions were equal – 81 – but participants were not allowed to perform the same pass more than two times consecutively) during the intervention; indicating superior motor performance. However, the random practice group outperformed the blocked practice group during both the retention test (1 day later) and the transfer test (participants were required to perform the passes from a greater distance); indicating superior motor learning (Medina, Baba, & Thomas, 2019). Indeed, skills that are learned slowly, are forgotten slowly. It should be noted that random practice schedules pose a greater challenge to learners than blocked practice, and athletes may feel as though they are not improving quickly – which can be frustrating. The incorporation of learner autonomy and positive verbal feedback can help reduce frustration.

Recommendation: Incorporate more random practice as athletes become more skilled, but find the proverbial “sweet spot” to balance the amount of challenge and frustration that is imposed.

Conclusion

The learning-performance distinction has tremendous implications for coaches attempting to facilitate motor skill acquisition amongst athletes. Coaches should strive to promote motor learning, as opposed to short-term improvements in motor performance, to help athletes reach their full potential. This article outlines just some of the parameters that can be manipulated by coaches in order to enhance motor learning amongst athletes. As a final suggestion, it is recommended that coaches inform athletes of their intention to alter their coaching techniques and explain the rationale behind the shift, prior to actually implementing the change. Buy-in from athletes ahead of time can reduce frustration, resistance to change, and further benefit learning!

Recommendation: Inform athletes of your intention to alter coaching techniques and explain the rationale behind the shift, prior to implementing the change.

Wonder why you’re not hungry after HIIT workouts? New research from Wilfred Laurier University reports that lactate produced during hard interval workouts influences appetite-associated hormones, causing post-exercise appetite suppression.