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Learning new skills, especially in the beginning of your cheerleading career, require you to follow the stages of learning presented by Fitts and Posner. When I was in early high school, I was beginning to learn a skill called a standing backhand spring back tuck. I started in the cognitive stage which is heavily based on cognitive or verbal processes. I developed good strategies by verbally saying to myself "bend, jump, bend, tuck" as I performed the skill. At first, my landings were inconsistent, but after practice, I moved to the associative stage. In this stage, my performance became more consistent, I stopped saying my verbal cues out loud, and I started to refine my movements for optimal performance. After this, my skill became largely automatic (autonomous stage). I never needed to think about doing it, I just did it. Furthermore, I was able to detect and correct errors that I felt in my body while performing the skill.

This is me in the associative stage of my backhand spring back tuck. I am thinking about refining my movements and still analyzing the skill itself. However, my landings were fairly consistent and I was not using verbal cues.

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It's A Bird, It's A Plane, It's A Flyer!

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It's A Bird, It's A Plane, It's A Flyer!

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When it comes to stunting, there is a lot of trial and error...as well as a lot of falls. It is important that the bases (girls holding up the flyer) know how to properly and safely catch the flyer as she falls down. However, in some instances, when we are practicing pyramids, there are multiple flyers very close together. If more than one girl falls, it is often difficult to figure out who you should be catching as it happens so quickly. This is an example of stages of information processing. As multiple girls are falling at once, my brain must go through these three stages: stimulus identification, response selection, and response programming.

The stimulus identification stage allows me to sense that a stimulus has occurred and identify what it is. In this scenario, the stimulus are multiple flyers falling down. Next, I go through the response selection stage in which I decide on an appropriate response to the stimulus. The appropriate response should be to stand in an athletic stance with arms extended upward, however, I also need to decide which girl to catch. In cheerleading you are trained to, in almost all instances, catch your own flyer. Lastly, I proceed to the response programming stage. I begin to prepare and initiate the response by spotting my flyer, calculating her body position, and adjusting my extended arms in this manner.

A video of our failed pyramid. As you can see there is a lot of stimuli going on in such a small space. This required us all to go through the stages of information processing very quickly.

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In my 12 years of tumbling and cheerleading, I have found more instances of negative transfer than positive. Sometimes one skill can have a beneficial effect of previous experience on learning another skill. In this case, a standing back tuck can have a beneficial effect on learning a round off backhand spring back tuck because the back tuck park is essentially the same (spot, set tuck, land). However, in more cases, when learning a new skill, there is a negative effect of prior experience on the performance of a skill so that the individual performs the skill less well than she would have without the prior experience. An example of this is when I was trying to learn a power hurdle front-hand spring front tuck. In the past, I have ONLY done a power hurdle into a round off, therefore, when attempting it into a front-hand spring, I often fell onto my face because I was confusing these two skills. This shows how my previous experience of learning a power hurdle round off negatively affected me learning a power hurdle front-hand spring.

Unfortunately, I don't have a video of me failing (showing negative transfer), but here is my successful power hurdle front-hand spring front tuck. This demonstrates that while prior experiences may effect new skills sometimes, it is possible to overcome this!

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Proprioception is essential for tumbling, stunting, and overall allowing your body to know where it is in space. Proprioceptors in our bodies provide us with knowledge about the position of our body parts in relation to each other and general orientation of our body in space both prior and during the movement. This is arguably one of the most important concepts within cheerleading. Everything we do deals with knowing where our body is in space and relation to other parts of our bodies. For example, when performing a stunt called a switch up, you start on your non-dominant leg, get tossed up, and quickly switch feet at a very specific time. If you replace your foot too early or too late, the stunt will most likely fall because the bases cannot grab your foot. Therefore, your body must know where it is in space in order to replace at the correct time. Furthermore, it is essential you replace your foot in the exact spot your non-dominant foot was. Proprioceptors help your body know relations between body parts and this helps me know exactly where to place my foot.

This gif shows me performing a switch up. You can see the delay in switching feet until I am right at the top of the extension. Furthermore, I switch my feet in almost the exact same spot. Thanks proprioception :)

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Bimanual coordination can be a challenging task when first introduced, especially if it is asymmetric. In this case, the two limbs (hands/arms) move at the same time, but they do different things. This concept forces me to flashback to my junior year on my high school cheerleading team. In our school song, there are many instances where one arm is performing a different movement than the other, however, one move was particularly difficult for some of the newer girls to catch on to. Even with a couple days of practice, either one arm started to perform the same movement as the other, or both arms produced a novel task. This occurrence is called spatial biasing. At the end of the day, we decided to change the motion of the movement so they could more easily perform the cheer. However, I believe, with practice, they could have learned to dissociate their hands.

Below is a gif of the new arm motions for the school song. We added a clap between the two "low L's" to simplify the motor movement and appease the new girls.

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One of the more difficult tasks to accomplish in cheerleading is describing how to perform a skill to someone else. After 8 years of tumbling and cheering, I became an assistant coach for my middle school cheer team. I often found it difficult to describe how to perform a tumbling pass or how to exactly produce a perfect stunt because honestly, some things work for some individuals and don't for others. Tumbling is all about feeling where your body is in space and knowing exactly when to pull or twist.

Since procedural memory is specialized to store information for skills such as motor and deals with "how to" rather than "knowing about" skills, I can tell most of my cheerleading skills are stored in my procedural memory rather than declarative. When performing a round off backhand spring full I don't think about the round off backhand spring because I've been doing this skill since I was 12. This has become so automatic for me that all I have to think about is my rebound, set, and a hard pull to twist 360 degrees. Therefore, when trying to help one of my cheerleaders learn a round off backhand spring, I had to stop and think how to actually do it since I usually...just do it.

This gif shows me doing a round off backhands spring full. The round off backhand spring is the automatic part of the skill. To me it's like running before a long jump.

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While practice is a key ingredient in improving performance, augmented feedback from teammates and coaches is crucial. Augmented feedback is information about a performance that supplements sensory feedback and comes from a source external to the performer.

One type of feedback that always helped me was video knowledge of performance. This is the ability to watch your own performance on video which in all helps you see the errors and make improvements for yourself. In cheerleading, our coaches had an app called Coach's Eye. This app allows you to watch your skill in slow motion, add lines to see if you are staying in the correct plane, and much more. I used to use this app a lot for my tumbling skills. My coach would record me and we'd talk through it discussing what I saw and how I thought I could improve.

The way my coach delivered feedback was terminal and only after I attempted the skill multiple times. By doing this, I was not distracted during the skill and I was able to make improvements based on my own opinion and feelings before she helped out. This gave me the opportunity to learn through practice and learn how to correct my own errors through internal feedback.

While my coach was generally good at feedback, she had a tendency to give concurrent feedback during competitions. In this short clip you can hear my coach yelling "slow" twice telling us we need to slow down the cheer. However, it is known that giving concurrent feedback can cause the learner to direct their attention from away from task-intrinsic feedback and toward the augmented feedback which can ultimately hinder performance.

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Whenever attempting to learn a new skill, whether it's tumbling or stunting, practicing over and over again is essential. However, the amount of practice must also be considered to avoid the downward effect of overlearning proposed by Melnick in 1971. Overlearning is defined as practice that continues beyond the amount needed to achieve a certain performance criterion. Melnick found that extra practice was beneficial, but only up to a certain point when it comes to skills that require less problem-solving demands.

Personally, I see stunting (throwing people in the air) as a skill with decreased cognitive demands. While you must continuously think about what to do next and how to correct little errors, most of the skill comes from muscle memory developed from practice. I can recall my body and mind telling me it’s time to end for the day because often over practicing a skill could actually hinder my ability to retain skills or even obtain them in the first place. Since the amount of practice is variable from individual to individual, it is important to understand your own limits and needs.

This is a gif of me my senior year of high school before a basketball game. My coach was very upset with us that we were not consistent with this skill before a major competition, so she had us go to the field and practice before the game started. She said we had to keep practicing until we hit five in a row. Clearly the amount of practice overloaded us and was NOT beneficial!! Perhaps a mental and physical break would have helped.