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Fast Reactions: Part II

By Andy Blayock, 06/06/18, 11:00AM CDT

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Trainer Andy Blaylock elaborates on the importance of repetition in relation to sharpening movement efficiency.

Part I Refresher

In part one, I made the case that the biggest differentiator of hockey players at the highest levels is reaction time to important changes in the flow of the play. This is a surprising idea since it is clear that NHL players are enormously skilled and there has yet to be a professional drag racing / professional hockey crossover player - the “Bo Jackson of hockey and drag racing” (in drag racing, you are only good if you are fast on the gas when the light turns green).

So, I argued that my claim about fast reactions remains true, but it is hard to tell because of a deeper connection between fast reactions and skill.


A clockwork mechanism, one of the oldest references from precision movement.

The Deeper Connection

There are sports where you are given a lot of time to plan the technique you need and decide when to start executing that technique at your leisure. Golf (aside from the rumored variant, “speed golf”) is always like that. Baseball is a mix. The pitcher controls the timing and, given that, takes as much time as is needed to develop their plan before throwing the ball. The batter (and everybody else involved in the play) responds to the pitcher’s choice and the subsequent consequences. The batter chooses not to swing or adjusts technique on the fly while trying to be fast enough to not get left behind. Hockey is almost entirely like the batter’s task.

When the time pressure is ratcheted up in “flow” sports, plans for technique details are either harmful or worthless. If the player remembers their detailed plans about how to move their body in such a situation, those plans will actually be harmful because this process would require their attention thus taking it away from processing the flow of the game. More realistically, however, plans are merely worthless if players just forget detailed technique plans and execute based on habit. Often, a habit-controlled motion is a less efficient version of the motion that the player could have executed if they could have focused on the motion.

Fortunately, this situation doesn’t often play out for advanced players. Instead, the game is simply played with habits. Another way of describing a habit is to say something that is done with automatic control.

But, how do we get automatic control?

Automatic control is achieved through repetition with reinforcement. Repetitions are a given. Everyone understands repetitions are a part of learning how to properly execute a technique that is known to work for specific situations in sports and elsewhere.

What, then, is reinforcement?

“Reinforcement” is a term used in many areas. It is used in parenting to describe the deliberate attempt to communicate to a child that a certain behavior is the right one for a situation. It is applied similarly in school and in coaching. These are good uses and apply to the process of mastering a movement or task.

However, it is important to note that it is used slightly differently here. Reinforcement, when it comes to the nervous system, is a result of a successful attempt to achieve a goal with a movement. Reinforcement has the effect of making the characteristics that went into that success more likely to happen in future movements directed at the same goal.

What precisely causes this effect? That hasn’t been pinned down by science, so we will leave that out of the current discussion. But, the effect is robust. Successful movements get reinforced and that reinforcement is in the form of increased likelihood of using a similar motion when striving for the same goal in the future.

With enough of this reinforcement (which is correlated with success and, as such, quality movement) the movement becomes automatic. So, the very training that leads to in the general direction of quality motion also leads to automatic control.

And, remember, we can’t have fast reactions without automatic control.

Repetition Leads To Automatic Control

Now we see that automaticity of motion and efficiency of that same motion go hand in hand.

Think of the NHRA drag racer. Their skill of having very fast reaction times on the drag strip would not transfer to the rink. If you are saying “duh” right now, fair enough. However, with this understanding of the effect of reinforcement, it is now easy to think through exactly why.

In the full progression, hockey training is a process involving learning movements for simple motions first and building gradually to ever more complex ones. A hockey player who has trained through this progression long enough to have robust automatic control of complex skills also is very likely, through reinforcement, to have pretty darn high-quality skill.

So, the two are inseparably linked. As a result, at the highest levels of the game, you really only see people with very high-quality skill, robust automatic skill, and, partly due to that automaticity, fast reactions to the changes in the flow of the game. Yet, if I had to sacrifice either of skill quality or fast reactions for hockey, I would go without super high-quality skill because fast reactions still tell most of the story at the highest levels.

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