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Being painfully shy at the age of 3, dance started off as something that my parents used to get me interacting with other kids my age before starting preschool. For as long as I can remember dance has been a present activity in my life whether it be at home, in the studio, or on stage. Before I get too far along in my story, let's start by defining dance as a motor skill for those less familiar with the sport/art form. Using the one-dimensional classification system I will describe the primary musculature, distinctiveness of movements, and environmental stability to better define dance. Dance is a gross motor skill as it utilizes relatively large musculature of the whole body to produce movements. Because dance often consists of choreographed movements it is a serial motor skill. The movements have specific, identifiable beginning and ending points linked together to be performed in a sequenced action. Finally, dance is a closed motor skill. The environment remains the same when performing a routine and will likely remain the same from one performance to the next. There is no environmental condition that generally interferes the movements.

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At the age of six, I was awarded by invitation and audition a membership to the Academy Performing Arts Competition Team. In 2011 my team was invited to perform in the Orange Bowl Halftime show alongside the GooGoo Dolls. This gave me the opportunity to work with professional choreographers for the first time. What was most challenging was adjusting to their teaching style. Instead of teaching the routine piece by piece as my dance teacher had always done, they taught the entire routine at once. We learned all 7 minutes and 24 seconds of choreography before even hearing the music. My dance teacher had always utilized part-task practice strategy by teaching 8 counts of the routine at a time and then bringing together every component once we exhibited sufficient understanding of all the parts. The professional choreographers utilized whole-task practice strategy as they taught the routine in its entirety, just as it would be performed in front on an audience. I found my dance teacher's part-task practice strategy to be more effective as it allowed me to reduce the complexity of the routine and perfect each piece before putting it all together.

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I taught as a dance teacher's assistant for three years at my studio. My dance teacher would teach me a routine, I would learn it, and then I would teach it to students who had a difficult time learning disabilities. I remember my first day as a dance teacher's assistant. I spent hours learning the routine because I did not want to embarrass myself in front of the class. I performed the routine once so the students had an idea of what to expect. I did so perfectly! I then went to teach the routine and forgot everything. I froze trying to remember the first step! This was because the routine was only stored in my procedural memory and not my declarative memory. Procedural knowledge is a non-conscious or automatic memory, something that comes naturally once learned. This type of knowledge is difficult to recall when describing cognitive, perceptual, and motor actions after knowing how to do them. Declarative knowledge is defined as a conscious memory that a person can describe when asked. It was after this embarasing moment that I realized the necessity of learning in a way that I can store information in both my procedural and declarative memory.

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My senior year of high school I decided to join the junior varsity soccer team. Because of the time commitment I made to dance and homework after school I had never had the opportunity to play a sport before. Being that the third trimester of my senior would be less hectic academic wise, I figured I would try something new so I never looked back at high school and said, “I wish I would have been a part of a sports team.” Right away I figured out there were many perceptual motor abilities I wasn’t trained for to be good at a sport like soccer. One of these abilities was control precision. Control precision is the ability to make highly controlled movement adjustments to visual stimuli, particularly when large muscle groups are involved  This was something I never practiced much because I never had to apply it to dance. As a forward, whenever I would attempt to kick the ball into the goal I would either exert too much force kicking it over the goal and out of bounds or I would kick the ball too lightly and it wouldn't travel far enough to reach the goal. Over the season I got better at this but unfortunately never made a goal.

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The summer after graduating high school I auditioned for the Milwaukee Bucks dance team amongst 187 gorgeous women. At the end of the month long process, 17 of us remained and were officially allowed to call ourselves Milwaukee Bucks Dancers. Becoming a professional dancer after 15 years of training was a dream come true. I learned so many new moves and truly grew as a dancer. I believe a major reason for this is the process by which my dance coach taught us new dance moves. Initially she would teach us the new move on the left side. In dance, a majority of the movements are done with the right leg, right arm, or both. It is rare that you do anything on the left side because it most people's weak side. This is how my coach taught us, however. After learning a new move on the left side, we would learn and practice the same move on the right side and eventually we would go back and try it on the left side again. My coach utilized bilateral transfer. Bilateral transfer is considered to be an effect on a skill based on previous experience of a different skill. Practicing with on our preferred side in between the two non-preferred sides helped our ability to perform the second non-preferred side better than the very fist try.

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Motor behavior studies the learning, controlling, and developing of motor skills. After completing my undergraduate degree in kinesiology here at UW-Madison, it is my plan to continue on to graduate school for physical therapy. As a physical therapist, it will be my job to help my patients regain movement and manage pain in an attempt to recover from injury, illness, or surgery. Applying knowledge gained from studying motor behavior, I can execute the best treatment plan for my patients. Knowing which exercises to have my patients perform, knowing how to optimize learning and performance of motor skills, and considering age if necessary, will help me be the best physical therapist I can be.

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After spending a year in Milwaukee I transferred to the University of Wisconsin - Whitewater were I was on the dance team. We performed at every home football and basketball games. We would cheer on the sidelines during games and perform our routine during halftime. We would leave the sideline at the start of the second quarter and we would go to the locker room to prepare for our performance. For 10 minutes our coach would have us sit in silence to mentally visualize the routine. My coach was utilizing mental practice. Mental practice is the cognitive rehearsal of a physical skill without actually performing any movement. She believed that this form of practice would help us to perform better by focusing, relaxing, and gaining confidence in our knowledge of the routine.

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Last summer I worked as a group exercise instructor. Specifically, I taught the Silver Sneaker classes designed for senior citizens seeking to improve their health and fitness goals. My job was to provide group exercise instruction. I developed and instructed fun, energetic, and highly motivational exercise classes for all fitness and skill levels. I accomplished this by utilizing demonstration and verbal instructions. I would face the members of my class to allow them to mirror my movements throughout the workout routine. This allowed my class members to quickly pick up movement patterns and keep up with the timing of the routine. While performing the routine with them I also verbally indicated what I wanted them to do. I provided precise but specific instruction about form, repetitions, and where we were headed next in our workout.