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As mentioned previously, the majority of my childhood-adolescent years consisted of practicing gymnastics. When I got to middle school, I wanted to be a part of a team at my school and realized that out of most of the sports offered, I was awful at all of them because I had no experience with any components of the sports. I decided that cheerleading was the closest to gymnastics because it involved similar skills. According to the Identical Elements Theory, since gymnastics and cheerleading have these similar component parts, there can be a transfer of learning. Transfer of learning is how the practice of one skill can lead to proficiency (or incompetence) of a similar skill. Since the practice of these gymnastics skills lead to improvement of cheerleading skills, this can be called a positive transfer.  For example, tumbling in gymnastics and tumbling in cheer have similar observable patterns so they transfer well. However, gymnastics does not include stunting, like cheerleading does. Although I had never directly performed this skill, I had experience with proper form, technique, strength and flexibility from gymnastics so I was able to quickly learn and become a proficient flyer (the person in the air during a stunt).  In addition, according to that same theory, gymnastics and cheerleading evoke similar elaborated automatisms. For example, balancing on a high beam in gymnastics requires the same force coordination and muscles as balancing on my bases’ hands during a stunt.  Since I already practiced these skills in gymnastics for years prior, I had no problem positively transferring that knowledge to cheerleading.

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You may have heard before that gymnastics is a mental sport, meaning we may be completely capable of performing certain skills but we are too afraid to do it because of the possibility of getting injured.  I, for one, am a prime example of someone who gets mentally caught up in my sport which in turn kept me from trying some new skills/just took me forever to build up the courage to try a new skill.  Although this particular “metal game” can be detrimental to advancing in the sport, there is a mental game that can beneficial- mental practice.  Mental practice is rehearsing a skill or routine your head without physically performing it.  Before every routine during a competition, I would visualize exactly what I was going to do in my routine.  This gave me more confidence in not only remembering the sequence of my routine, but it also gave me confidence that my performance would be better than without the mental practice.  Out of the two roles of mental practice, for me, it was used to aid my performance of already practiced/well-trained skills.  Since this mental imagery was performed directly before my routines I used cognitive imagery to visualize exactly what I was going to perform in my routine, and I used motivational imagery to imagine nailing my routine and getting a high score to build up my confidence in executing the routine.  Obviously physical practice was my primary source of preparation to a competition, but I found mental practice to be a useful supplementary tool to improving my performance in gymnastics competitions.

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Once again, the sport of gymnastics consists of endless different skills for different apparatuses with interesting names, most of which do not describe the skill at all- for example, Yurchenko, Tsukahara, Arabian, Tkatchev, Gienger, even a “full” like what does that mean?! Because of this, coaches need to have proficient declarative memory systems in order to verbally describe these skills to us. I remember when I was first learning the tumbling series round-off, back handspring, back full on the floor exercise. My coach tried to explain that I just need to perform a back layout, pull my arms down to my left hip and my body would automatically twist 360 degrees while flipping in the air. At first, every time I would try the full twist I would have to talk myself through what I was going to do with my arms and legs and the timing of each part. This is because I was in the 1st stage of Fitts and Posners 3 Stage Model of motor learning- the Cognitive Stage. I tried different strategies, like bending my elbows and pulling my arms into my chest to twist or keeping my arms straight and pulling them down to my side or what time I should pull my arms in, for example. After deciding which strategies worked better than others, I transitioned into the 2nd Stage, the Associative Stage, where I established motor patterns.  I would decide which strategies for each part of the movement worked the best (which ones caused me to land the full), detected when I made errors and used this information to become more consistent with the skill. This information helped me learn the skill to the point where it became completely automatic and I did not have to think about any part of the skill because I was in the 3rd stage, the Autonomous Stage. In this stage, I could detect and correct my errors during the movement. For example, if I pulled my arms in too fast or tight, I would know to release them sooner so that I did not over rotate. Now that this skill is automatic, it is very difficult for me to explain to a novice exactly how to execute it. It would be much easier to simply show them and use my procedural memory system.

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Get a job they said, it'll be easy they said...

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Get a job they said, it'll be easy they said...

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Last year, I was a group fitness instructor here with RecSports. I taught a variety of classes: group strength, HIIT, hardcore, etc. on stage in front of my peers, professors and community members. I have never multitasked so much in my entire life. While teaching my high intensity interval training class, for example, I had to explain the upcoming exercise (what it was, how to perform it, which muscles were being used, etc.) while performing the exercise prior, and give encouraging feedback to my participants all to the correct beat of the music in order to stay on time with the routine I had planned. This was definitely very difficult at the beginning and took a while to master. While I was training to become certified, we would have to create a short 10-minute HIIT sequence performed on beat to a song, giving form cues and cues about which exercise was up next and we had to execute the sequence in front of my boss. In addition to the apprehension of performing in front of my boss, multiple different sources of attention were at play which led to a lot of interference. According to the Central-Resource Theory, we have a reserve where all activities compete. If the tasks are simple/not performed in a chaotic environment, the activities will not exceed our attention capacity. Since we have a limited set attention capacity, according to the Theories of Attention, if the tasks become too difficult or are performed in a chaotic environment, they will exceed our capacity and one or all tasks will suffer. In my example during training, there were many difficult tasks that I had not practiced before in a high stake situation so you could say all of these tasks were competing for my attention. When I performed my 10-minute routine, I would either explain and perform the correct exercise but be completely off beat, or be on beat and perform the right exercise but forget to explain what I was doing, etc. Since I was a novice at these skills, performing all the tasks simultaneously caused one or many of them to suffer. After practicing many times and improving, certain skills became automatic, like being on beat or cueing at the right time. Since these skills became automatic and did not require attention and I only had to think about which skill I was going to perform next, I was able to performe all of these tasks simultaneously and successfully without interference.

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“If you like falling gymnastics is the sport for you.”

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“If you like falling gymnastics is the sport for you.”

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I was a gymnast for pretty much my whole life- age 3 to 18.  In that time, I learned many new skills through trial and error. Gymnastics is a sport that has thousands of different skills that are extremely difficult to be verbally explained, so you pretty much just need to give it a shot and see what happens. Generally, you need to fail a million times before finally nailing the skill. Since these skills are also very complicated and are performed on very small apparatuses like the balance beam and uneven bars, they require precise timing and positioning of the body to assure you stay on the apparatus. For example, on the uneven bars, we would perform skills called “releases”. This is usually performed on the high bar where you swing your body around the bar and at a certain point you release your hands, use the momentum you created to do some variety of flip and/or twist in the air and then find the bar, grab it and continue with the rest of the routine. In order to know exactly when to release and catch the bar, we use Tau- time to contact. Time to contact is the inverse rate of expansion of an image on the retina to determine when to act. In order to use this method, you need to be familiar with the object you wish to come into contact with and practice the skill in order to determine the best rate of expansion. So, when I was first learning how to perform a release, I would try different timing methods to learn what worked best. I would say once my feet come higher than horizontal with the bar I will release my hands and once I can see the bar again I will grab it, for example. After many, many times of missing the bar and landing flat on my face, I learned exactly what to look for and how close the bar needed to be (expansion on my retina) in order to be able to catch it.