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I didn’t start playing tennis until my sophomore year in high school. Even though I was new to the game, there were many parts of the game that came relatively easy to me. I was good at the net because of my hand-eye coordination I had developed in other sports, and my backhand developed quickly because it reminded me of my baseball swing from when I was younger. One thing that I could not get the hang of, though, was serving. I couldn’t get a serve in consistently for the life of me! I wasn’t able to be a productive server until my coach suggested that I slow my serve down a little. This is a perfect example of Fitts Law, which states that movement speed and accuracy of the movement are inversely related to each other. In my case, as I sped up my arm swing to get a faster serve, fewer and fewer balls landed in the service box. As I continued to play, I learned that serving is mostly about finding the balance between having a fast serve, but also getting your first serve in a high percentage of the time. I began to develop two different serves for my first and second serves. My first serve was a flatter, faster serve. It was better suited for getting aces and winning points early than my second serve, but I didn’t get it in as often. My second serve had a lot more top spin, and was slower. I needed to get a very high percentage of my second serves in to avoid double-faults, so I slowed down my serve in order to be more accurate. This is even seen in professionals, like Andy Roddick. As evident from the photo, his first serve is a whole 30 mph faster than his second serve! A major reason that the top players in the world are so good is because they can get fast serves in a majority of the time. Jon Isner on the other hand has one of the fastest serves in the sport right now, but his first-serve percentage is lower.

Another aspect of tennis that is affected by Fitts Law is when you need to make a passing shot when your opponent is at the net. I learned that a good strategy is to hit a shot into the deep corner and then approach the net while shutting off the cross-court pass by my opponent. This means that the only way for my opponent to pass me is to hit an accurate shot down the line. The reason that this shot is harder than the cross-court shot is because the target has a much smaller width, which makes the index of difficulty higher. There were many times where I would try to hit a shot through the smallest of gaps past my opponent, but my shot would wind up in the net because I didn’t slow my movement down enough to maintain the accuracy needed to hit the ball in the court. It’s fascinating to know that a sport I enjoy to play so much is basicaly a series of movements that are all tightly regulated by Fitts Law!

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Free throw shooting is often responsible for determining if a team wins or loses a game. Many times, at the end of games, the team that is losing begins to foul the other team on purpose in order to get the ball back faster. As a result, the team that is ahead shoots a lot of free throws, and all they have to do is make them to win the game. However, for some reason many players have a hard time making free throws in games when it counts, even though they are proficient free throw shooters in practice. A perfect example can be seen with Dwight Howard in the photo below. In practice, he is a very capable shooter, making around 80% of his shots, but when he gets into games he makes less than half of his free throws. This phenomenon is not unique to Dwight Howard though, and it makes you wonder why players cannot translate what they practice into games. One possible explanation that I learned this semester could be how coaches are implementing practice variability.

My high school basketball coach must have known about the effects of practice variability and contextual interference, because his practice schedule allowed us to maximize the efforts we put forth during practice. A lot of coaches will end practice with 20 free throws, and that is the extent of free throw practice that the players perform. The players probably performed well in these 20 free throws, but there isn’t any practice variability with this method. However, my coach mixed free throw shooting throughout practice. He would have us scrimmage hard for ten minutes and then have everyone shoot ten free throws. If you made seven or more, you could skip the small amount of conditioning that would follow. We would then continue practice with drills that worked on different parts of the game, like passing or dribbling. Occasionally, though, my coach would stop practice and have everyone shoot another ten free throws, with the same consequences as before. By interweaving free throw shooting throughout practice, we were forced to shoot free throws when we were fresh and tired. I can now say that the schedule of practice my coach used was small, randomized blocks. While we shot multiple free throws in a row, which emulates blocked practice, it was randomly dispersed throughout our practice so we always ended up coming back to it after working on other skills. It is proven that while performance during practice may not be as good with random, variable practice compared to constant practice, transfer and retention of the skill are both improved with variable practice. There were many times when I didn’t make the seven free throws to avoid running, even though I was a 90% free throw shooter in games, and I would think that it was so dumb that I had to run even though I was making my free throws in games. I now understand that I was most likely making my free throws in games because of those blocks of free throw shooting and running. By randomizing the practice, my coach increased the retention and transfer benefits of practice, and as much as I hated it, the running was there to ensure that I was giving my best effort every shot. So, compared to the Lakers players in the photo below, my percentage in practice was lower than my percentage in games when it mattered, and I have practice variability to thank for that!

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When I learned how to throw a baseball, I wasn’t thinking about what stage of motor learning I was in, or how I could get to the next stage. However, it just so happens that my development correlates closely to the Fitts and Posner Three Stage Model of motor learning. The Fitts and Posner Three Stage Model states that individuals begin learning in the cognitive stage, then advance to the associative and autonomous stages respectively. In the cognitive stage the initial improvements are large as individuals determine which strategies work the best. Additionally, individuals tend to talk through the steps out loud. When I learned how to throw, my dad taught me the “T, elbow, step and throw” technique. I would say each step to myself as I threw each ball to make sure that I was following the plan. In the video below, a similar strategy is taught to two five-year-old boys. The instructor has the two boys say each step out loud to make sure that their mechanics are correct in their throwing motion. You can see how the boys just want to throw the ball right away, but because they have to say each step out loud they remember to actually go through each step. Additionally, you can see improvement in the boys’ throwing motion and accuracy, even though the video isn’t that long. I remember that I got a lot better very quickly while playing catch with my dad the first couple of times, but I also made a lot of bad throws.
As I got older I began to play competitive baseball, which is when I moved past the cognitive stage and into the associative stage. I no longer had to verbally remind myself “T, elbow, step and throw”, I could just throw the ball without self-talk. Also, I could accurately throw the ball at a much more consistent rate, which was very important to be able to throw runners out at first base from second base where I played.
With consistent practice between playing games with my little league team, and playing catch with my dad, I advanced into the autonomous stage. In the autonomous stage, I no longer had to pay attention to the process of throwing. I could hold a conversation with my dad while playing catch and still be accurate with my throws. Moreover, I was able to detect when I was going to make an error and correct it before I threw the ball. For example, if I was throwing the ball to first but the ball wasn’t sitting in my hand correctly, I could double-clutch to make sure I was gripping the ball correctly before I let it go. Lastly, a big component of the autonomous phase is being able to ignore interference from simultaneous activities. Being able to turn a double play is a big part of being a successful second basemen, and requires the ability to ignore a runner sliding into the area by your feet and make an accurate throw to first. I remember the first time I successfully turned a double play, it was one of the most exhilarating experiences of my childhood. I know for sure that I was in the autonomous stage at that point, because I did not have to think about making the throw, and I was able to ignore a baserunner sliding towards me.

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Coaching Youth Baseball Catching Drills & Skills Pt

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Dodgers Baseball Prodigy Christian Haupt

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How to Throw a Baseball, Step One (5 & 6 year olds)

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In step one, your young player learns the proper mechanics of the throw. Coach Reiser borrowed this drill from the Baylor University Throwing and Catching video, and has applied it to teaching our five and six year olds at his Sports Teams 4 Kids Junior Baseball program.

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I was always drawing when I was younger. Whether it be completing coloring books, doodling in my notebooks during class, or making homemade cards for my mom's birthday. When I got into high school I continued to take drawing classes, and develop my skills enough to draw some pretty realistic portraits. However, I eventually ran out of drawing classes to take, but didn’t want to stop taking art completely. So, I decided to take an introductory painting course and see if I had a knack for that as well. As it turns out, painting came naturally to me, and in no time I was knocking out paintings worthy of getting on the fridge at home. It turns out, I was experiencing the phenomena of transfer. Transfer is when performance on one skill either improves or worsens due to practice of another skill. In my case, the practice that I had done with drawing throughout my whole childhood had improved my performance my ability to paint, even though I had never painted before! Additionally, since the practice with drawing was beneficial to my performance with painting, it is said that positive transfer occurred. One theory for why positive transfer occurs is the identical elements theory. In this theory, it is believed that the more similar the two different tasks are, the greater the amount of transfer that will occur.  I quickly learned that many of the skills I had developed in drawing were also very useful with painting. Many of the movement patterns were the same, the only difference being that one used a pencil while the other used a paintbrush. For example, when I attempted my first portrait in painting, Vince Lombardi, I started by outlining his head and facial features, just as I had done in drawing. My paintbrush followed the same pathway to shade in his face that my pencil would have. In fact, while working on the painting, I treated it as if I was just doing another portrait with a pencil, something I had done successfully many times. I think it is very fascinating that my skills as a painter had been developing during my childhood, even though I never picked up a paintbrush.

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I have been a server and bartender at Buffalo Wild Wings since before I was born it seems. I remember my first time training to serve, I was so overwhelmed with the amount of information I was responsible for remembering and the pace at which information came my way from customers. A lot of the times I felt like Rambo, just barely surviving the dinner rush while customers fired request after request at me. I didn’t think there was any way that I could remember a tables order, let alone an individual drink order, without writing everything down. It never occurred to me that there was a proven amount of information that individuals can remember at one time, I just thought I was a bad server! Miller’s number states that individuals can keep five to nine items in their working memory for about 20-30 seconds. This perfectly explains why I kept forgetting to get customers their cup of ranch after I had just stopped at another table, I was at my item capacity already.

As I became more experienced, I found that I could remember more information without writing as many things down. One of the strategies I developed was to repeat the order in my head until I could enter it into the computer. I now know that this is called active rehearsal, and this allows for items to remain in working memory for a longer period of time. Another strategy that I developed as a server is chunking. Chunking involves putting similar items into groups which expands the amount of information that you can keep in your working memory. For example, instead of remembering every individual drink order, I can just remember how many waters were ordered, how many dark sodas were ordered, and how many white sodas were ordered. Using this strategy, I was able to become a more efficient, and therefore a more productive, server. I didn't feel like Rambo so often at work, because I was able to spend less time writing down orders, and more time moving to meet the next tables demands.

Even though I have worked at Buffalo Wild Wings forever, sometimes I forget what the deals are because corporate changes them around. For example, in my old store in Wausau people could get a minimum of four wings per sauce on Boneless Thursday. However, when I transferred to Madison, I was told that the minimum number of wings per sauce was six. Many times, when I first started in Madison, I would forget that the minimum number of wings was six and I would allow guests to order four wings, which the kitchen did not like at all! This was a perfect example of proactive interference, where old information gets in the way of remembering new information. The old information I had learned in Wausau kept getting in the way of the new information I was trying to learn.