In part 2 we considered a situation where many parents’ desire to see their players working hard, hustling, and pushing themselves for their team can, in some situations, be counterproductive to that player’s technique development. In this part we will learn more about why it is helpful to learn new techniques using slow-speed exercises.
Learning new movement skill techniques falls under the scientific heading of “Motor Skill Acquisition”. Research consistently reveals that one of the most (if not the most) important variables affecting the rate of improvement in a new skill is the quality of feedback that the learner receives.
I think most people would find that to be relatively obvious and expected. And many parents seek this very feedback for their kids in many disciplines including school tutors, athletic trainers, and sport specific skill instructors. This reveals the most obvious way to get really good feedback on one’s performance, namely having an expert work with you and give, instruction on how to do something, cues on when to do it, and feedback on how you did and how to get better.
There are other ways to get the feedback required for improvement that one can do on one’s own. One of these is simply to know the result you are looking for and try to achieve that result. Lets look at a snap shot as an example of this because it shows that even the result, or outcome, that we are shooting for can be somewhat complex. In the snap shot, we are looking for three and maybe four aspects in our result.
- Accuracy
- Velocity
- Quick Release
- (maybe) Deception
We would like the first three for sure and often the fourth as well to be outcomes of our technique. One can see that at some point we may need to sacrifice one to improve another, so this shows how complex it can be to even decide if we had a successful attempt at a technique by analyzing our output.
And often times, early on in a learning process, one can get what they think is a better result by taking a technique shortcut. This is the challenge of only looking at results when learning. Analyzing the result doesn’t ask, “how did we do with our technique?”. It only looks to see if we are making progress on the aspects of the output that we care about. A shortcut can lead to gains right now at the expense of having a more “perfect” output later.
So, we need feedback not only on achieving the result we want, but also on the nature of the technique we are attempting. This is harder to do on one’s own, but there are a few ways to do it.
The first is to watch ourselves. It is hard to do this well with many techniques (especially lower body techniques, whole body techniques, or techniques where we need to use our eyes to aim at a target). Our first-person viewpoint makes it hard to get the sort of information we need to get great feedback.
We can get around this using a mirror or a video camera, but these still have limitations. This isn’t to say that it isn’t useful to watch oneself. Instead, it is just hard to get needed information on all aspects of a technique using these methods.
This all leads to the idea of “Proprioception”. This is the system your body has for knowing where all of its parts are in the space around your body. Imagine closing your eyes and trying to touch your right big toe with your right index finger. It doesn’t sound that hard, does it? In truth it isn’t that hard. You can likely get quite close if you try. And this is thanks to your proprioception.
The thing is though that if you try to use proprioception to attempt a technique get feedback about it, it is very hard to get super accurate results at full speed. Contrast this with holding a pose. If you hold a pose, you can direct your mind’s attention to each part of your body and consider if it is in the right place. During high speed movement we simply don’t have time to do that and we get lower quality feedback from our proprioception system.
If we can find a middle ground between posing exercises and normal technique execution, we should be able to get really great feedback on our own using the proprioception system. The answer is slow-motion execution.
The beauty of internal feedback is that it is instant. If you have good proprioception awareness and use it to learn a new movement in slow motion, you will understand how you are doing with this new motion instantly during the repetitions. You can even adjust on the fly, mid-repetition. That is very powerful for rapid learning. We should still seek to supplement with other forms of feedback including expert review and by watching ourselves, but using slow motion execution to get the most quality feedback out of repetitions for fastest improvement. And this is on of the most powerful aspects of the “slow down to go fast” idea.
In part 4 we will consider how manipulating resistance can affect the speed of acquiring a new skill.
