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1. I Never Thought Ugly Ankle Tape was Something I Would Say

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1. I Never Thought Ugly Ankle Tape was Something I Would Say

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As an Athletic Training student, one of the most common taping techniques I will ever do is an ankle tape. Compared to most skills in my life, this skill is a newly acquired skill, as I learned how to tape an ankle roughly 5 months ago during the spring semester. My first ankle tape was extremely ugly and not very supportive, to put it plainly it was bad. Now this was my first try, so it could only go up from there, right? Wrong it got worse, I ended up doing a few steps backwards so now not only did my ankle tape look ugly, but it was doing the opposite what it was supposed to do. After my first class of ankle taping, I was defeated, to say the least, Athletic Training is the profession that I wanted to do and I couldn’t even do an ankle tape. The saying “practice makes perfect” is cheesy, but true if I had given up then I would have never known how good my ankle tapes could be because I was predicting the ability of my skills off of my early practice trials. The number and types of abilities need to perform a certain task change as time and practice continue, this phenomenon is talked about in Ackerman’s Model. Ackerman’s Model tells which abilities in a task are most important during the 3 stages of motor learning. General intellectual abilities are the most important in the cognitive learning stage, this includes how we process information. The associative stage is when perceptual speed abilities are the most important, things like identifying important information in a scene and the use of memory is used in this stage. Finally, the autonomous stage utilizes perception and motor abilities, this includes things like reaction time. Now flash forward a few months to August and the beginning of football camp, I am taping roughly 20 ankles a day and I am starting to have a few regular customers that really like my ankle taping and come back to me specifically.

Because I did not give up and stayed determined, I am now successfully taping ankles that look both pretty and they are functional. If I stopped because of my first try I would never feel satisfaction like this kid does.

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I am one of 6 girls that are 1st years in the AT program, I am not the shortest and I am not the tallest. We have 4 guys that are 1st years in the AT program, 3 of the guys are very tall and 1 is average height. As a girl, I would say that I have smaller hands than most guys, this makes it easier for me to rip tape especially the 1in and .5in. This ability of mine to easily rip tape is something that is relatively stable and that is largely unmodifiable by practice. My abilities can also be looked at as a limiting factor, it’s a lot easier for the taller guys in my program to wrap a shoulder spika because they have the reach to wrap an ace bandage around a large football player, like the size of my hands my height and wingspan are something that I will never be able to change. My individual differences make me really good at somethings, but not so great at other things.

I swim on the UW- swim club. I am in the middle row, 3rd from the left. As you can see I am not super tall (5'6"), but not really short either. Compared to the guys I swim with I look quite short, this is very advantages in some case.

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When I was learning how to tape an ankle, I learned in a controlled classroom setting with about 10 other students. We were all quiet and watched attentively as are professor demonstrated the technique on a student. We then broke up into our groups and practiced on each other. We were all very quiet, trying to concentrate on the task at hand. As we started to get more skilled at the technique we would have conversations with our partners. The first day of football camp was a stressful mess, to say the least everyone was being pulled in every direction and there are 10 brand new 1st year AT students who were clueless for the most part. I had only practiced an ankle tape in a very calm controlled setting and now there are 105 guys waiting to be taped, lots of yelling, talking, loud music playing, and college students being their normal crazy selves. It became very hard to keep my attention on the ankle tape job I was doing. According to various Theories of Attention, our attention capacity is fixed and there is a certain limit to what our attention can handle. Central- resource theory states that all the stimuli around us will compete with each other for my attention, this can exceed my maximum capacity and that’s when things start to go wrong, instead of taping stirrups medially to laterally I started taping lateral to medial. This mistake pulls the ankle into inversion which is what an ankle tape is trying to prevent, this makes it a lot easier for a player to get an inversion ankle sprain. After I realized my mistake, I tore off the tape completely and started from scratch this time focusing on the ankle tape and blocking out all the craziness that was happening around me, in order to complete the task correctly.

The ATR has so many things happen and so many people talking at once it can be hard to focus on what you are doing, just like this lady that does not know what phone to giver her attention too.

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Football camp is a fast-paced environment, everything needs to be done correctly in the allotted amount of time. We have 2 hours in the morning, 6:30- 8:30 am, that the guys can come in and get treatment and get their ankles taped. Like most college students the players tend to procrastinate and the last 30mins before meetings is one of the most chaotic taping scenes I will probably ever experience. This is when speed comes into play I have about 5 mins to tape both ankles, ideally, we want to get them in and out as fast as possible, but there is a fine line between speed and accuracy. Because I am still fairly new to ankle taping I need to be both accurate and speedy, but when I get flustered it can be hard to maintain speed. I would rather be accurate and know that the tape job that I did is sold and no one is going to get hurt because my tape was not doing its job, instead of going as fast as I can and something being wrong with it. Fitts’ Law talks about the inverse relationship between the difficulty of movement and the speed with which the movement can be performed. Often times when task place an emphasis on accuracy, like ankle taping, we will slow down in order to remain accurate. If we change our strategy on accuracy and instead move at a fast pace, we run the risk of having to redo the task because we were not accurate enough.

The title of this video says speed taping, but this person is actually very accurate with their taping techniques, they could speed up but they may risk the loss of accuracy

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This video uses the PowerFlex and PowerTape.

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Ankle taping, like many things, involves bimanual coordination. Bimanual coordination has 2 classifications symmetric and asymmetric. Symmetric bimanual coordination, our two arms/hands are doing the same thing at the same time. While asymmetric bimanual coordination, the two hands/arms move at the same time, but they do different things. Ankle taping and many daily skills utilize asymmetric bimanual coordination, yet research shows that we have a strong preference for symmetric movement. When trying to perform 2 different things one arm/ hand tends to experience spatial biasing, this is where one limb is drawn towards performing the task that the other limb is doing. Even though we tend to favor symmetric bimanual coordination, with practice we can learn to dissociate our hands from each other making it asymmetric task have virtually no interference.

When our hands work on asymmetrical task they have to work together to accomplish some amazing things. Just like the fish and chip department in this cartoon.

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Growing up I was a pretty accomplished swimmer and at one point I was one of the top swimmers in the state of Wisconsin. One of my favorite coaches on the team told us about her pre-race ritual, she would head down behind the blocks 30 mins before she was scheduled to race and would sit there with her eyes closed and replay her race in her head over and over again. She would visualize every part of her race, the start, the turn, and the stroke rate. I decided to try it one day before a race, I figured it couldn’t hurt, I ended up swimming really well. My coach said my turns look a lot better than they had in an earlier race and that I was finally swimming downhill instead of uphill for my breaststroke. I wouldn’t say that this turned into my pre-race ritual (I have a different routine that I swear by), but when I get nervous about something I will visualize what I am doing in my head and work my way through it and make slight adjustments where I feel they are needed. I do this every day before I go to football camp for ankle taping, I can be nerve-racking knowing what I am doing could save a player from an injury and I find this helps calm me, but also helps improve my skills. What I am actually doing is called mental practice and it is defined as the active cognitive or mental rehearsal of a physical skill in the absence of overt physical movements. It usually involves imaging oneself performing a skill. The Brain Activity Hypothesis, Lotze et al. (1999) supports this hypothesis, proposed that mental practice, especially in the form of imagery/ visualization, is effective because of neurophysiological similarities between the imagined and the actual movement.

This drawing shows a guy mentally practicing what he wants to do off the diving board. This is what I did for swimming and what I do now for ankle taping.

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8. Learning More in a Week Than In a Semester

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8. Learning More in a Week Than In a Semester

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Practice is so vital to learning that the quality of the practice can be overlooked by the quantity of it. When I was learning how to tape an ankle I practice on the same person, my partner was a very small person, so when practicing ankle tapes, I was practicing on a very small foot. Even though I practiced a lot of taping in class, because my practice was “blocked/ grouped” I knew how to perform an ankle tape to that specific person. Elaboration hypothesis is the idea that random practicing during practice causes people to elaborate/ discover the distinctiveness among skills. Action plan reconstruction hypothesis is the idea that when people sequentially perform different skills during random practice, they continuously forget and must reconstruct the action plan for each skill each time it is practiced, enhancing learning by leading to the development of a stronger memory representation. Now at football camp, I deal with guys ranging from 5’7” to 6’6”, the size of their feet differ with their height. They guys come in at random and the sit at my taping station at random, this allows me to adjust my taping techniques for each person while I am performing the skill. In this past week at football camp, my ankle taping skills have improved immensely because of the is “random” practice on different sized people.

I am learning so much at football camp that sometimes my head does feel like it might explode. I have acquired many new skills as wells as working my way to perfecting old skills with lots of random practice.

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7. I'm Sorry I Can No Longer Explain That to You

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7. I'm Sorry I Can No Longer Explain That to You

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When first learning how to perform an ankle tape it was broken down into roughly 7 steps, we learned each step one by one. Even though in the begging I was not very good at ankle taping I could easily help my classmates if they forgot how to do a step by verbally talking them through it. I could have probably taught my mom how to do it over the phone because I was relying on my semantic memory, I knew what movements I needed to do and was able to clearly explain them to others. As I become better at this skill I find it harder and harder to verbally communicate how to do the skill the 7 steps have now turned into one skill that is almost automatic. I still find that it takes up a good amount of my attention and I am still able to direct some of the steps verbally because I am still learning. Eventually I will be able to carry a much better conversation with the players than I do now and at some point this skill will become so second nature to me that I could do it with my eyes closed (I am positive that a few of the ATs employed by the school could do this quite successfully).

This is a photo explanation of how to tape an ankle, its just as confusing as I get when I try to verbally coach someone through an ankle taping