# data[].attributes.headline
Teaching During Camps  - Procedural Memory  

# data[].attributes.subject
Teaching During Camps  - Procedural Memory  

# data[].attributes.body
I've been serving a volleyball since about the age of 6. It's something that I picked up on by simply being around the sport so much with my mom as a coach and hearing step by step the way she taught her players. When I switched to jump serving I picked up on it pretty easily, but the movements weren't very fluid. I played through the verbal cues in my head every time I served. Eventually after countless repetitions, this skill became one in my procedural memory system.

The knowledge of how to jump serve became something that is very automatic and is not something I consciously think of step by step when I do it. Now when I coach volleyball camps I often have to break down the skill for younger athletes and resort to a more declarative thought process that is based on step by step facts and procedures. Due to the extensive practice the skill became part of my procedural memory, and it became far easier for me to show people how to jump serve than it is for me to verbally describe when to toss, or when to jump during the process.

Below is a GIF that shows a jump float serve. Because this is something that I do far more often than I teach it, I usually need to serve a few balls and consciously think about when I do certain components of the serve before I can teach it to someone else.

# data[].attributes.body
In volleyball, a setter is often compared to a point guard in basketball or a quarterback in football as they are forced to make quick decisions about the offense based off what the defense is doing. As a setter I’ve spent a lot of time working on reaction time and being able to make quick decisions on the fly.

One of the major components of being a high-level setter is being able to read if the middle blocker of the other team is leaving early or cheating one way or the other. In order to do this, I am forced to take a peak over to the other side of the court between the time I get my feet to the ball and the time I actually contact the ball. This means I have less than a second to look and decide which way I want to set the ball. At first this was really hard for me because I felt the need to completely turn my head and see where the blocker was, which made my sets super inconsistent.

After many years of practice, I came to realize that all I need to see is one part of their body. I typically use my peripheral vision to see the feet of the middle blocker because it allows me to have an abundance of information. By seeing their feet, I can determine whether they have shifted one way or if they are off balance and leaning towards one side. Through practice I was able to focus only on the important environmental cues that led me to the increase my visual efficiency and make faster more efficient decisions.

In the picture below, the middle had taken a step towards my outside hitter causing me to make a split second decision to set my right-side hitter.

# data[].attributes.headline
Hitting Approach - Gentile's 2 Stages of Learning 

# data[].attributes.subject
Hitting Approach - Gentile's 2 Stages of Learning 

# data[].attributes.body
When I was little all I wanted to do was be a hitter and one of the most basic things that a hitter learns is their hitting approach. For a right-handed hitter, you hear “left, right, left” in a clapping rhythm in your sleep over and over again. I remember practicing these steps as an awkward, un-athletic kid trying my hardest to just even get them right and maybe get a swing on the ball. The size of my steps varied with every step I took and where my steps took me was different every time, which made being an effective hitter very hard. This period of time was representative of Gentile’s 1st stage of learning, where I started to figure out the idea of the move and the pattern it is performed in. It required a lot of attention and focus for me to even take the right steps and I struggled to make my arms work with my legs to produce momentum through my movement.

As I got the hang of the steps, I began to do them with rhythm and some athleticism. The amount of effort and visual attention decreased, and I figured out how to make my arms and legs work together. I was able to take my approach in different directions that allowed me to get my feet to the ball and get an effective swing on the ball. I was able to adapt to a bad set and hit the ball in specified places all because I could effectively take a good strong approach. This can be seen as Gentile’s 2nd stage of learning as I figured out how to adapt, be consistent and became far more efficient.

Below is a video of someone teaching approaches the exact way I learned. These girls have definitely learned this before, but this is a good representation of how many young volleyball players start out learning approaches.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
AVCA Video Tip of the Week: Three Step Approach for Young Players

# data[].attributes.headline
Serving throughout Practice - Practice Variability 

# data[].attributes.subject
Serving throughout Practice - Practice Variability 

# data[].attributes.body
In volleyball, serving is often compared to shooting free-throw in the sense that you are completely in control of every part of the movement and it should be a relatively easy thing to execute (even though is never seems to never turn out that way).

In high school, we often started or ended the practice with a block of time spent on serving. Once I got to college, a bigger emphasis was placed on serving and executing an aggressive serve in very specific high-pressure situations. Instead of serving solely for long periods of time, we do various types of serving drills throughout the practice. Sometimes we will serve for a block of time to work on technique but often we will get sent to the end line and be told to execute X-number of aggressive game serves. Through the use of practice variability our serving numbers have gone up exponentially.

By randomly sending us back to the line to serve, contextual interference occurs because we’re focusing on some other skill and then are forced to recreate a plan that is conducive to executing an aggressive serve. This is part of the Action Plan Reconstruction Hypothesis that states when you’re forced to recreate a plan it becomes more memorable and performance numbers increase even if error is higher during practice.

# data[].attributes.headline
Football = Volleyball - Transfer of Learning

# data[].attributes.subject
Football = Volleyball - Transfer of Learning

# data[].attributes.body
One day during practice, Coach Sheffield brought out about 8 footballs and told us to find a partner. Naturally, we all listened thinking that we we’re just going to have some fun and play catch with footballs… and we did for a while.

Suddenly he stopped everyone and told them to watch me. My dad was a football coach, so I’ve known how to throw a football pretty well since I was a little girl. What to me just seemed like throwing a football actually included a lot of the correct mechanics. Kelly pointed out the fact I opened up my hips, my footwork to move laterally, and my throwing motion (with my elbow low and back, followed by a high hand over the top with a high release). At this point, I thought maybe he just wanted our team to be able to throw a football for some reason until it finally clicked. Throwing a football is almost identical to our arm swings to hit.

Kelly then proceeded to explain all the similarities between the two and we played catch every practice for the next two weeks. For me, having an extensive family background of football, I had a natural positive transfer of learning to the correct mechanics of a hitting arm swing for volleyball. According to the Identical Elements Theory, positive transfer occurs when there are similar component parts and movement patterns are related. For us, the major focus was opening our hips, moving the elbow from low to high with a high release point (which is similar to the high contact point of attacking a volleyball), and using our core to rotate through the throw. Many of the girls on my team had not learned how to throw a football so when they learned the components of throwing it allowed them to feel what was right. From there they went back to hitting volleyballs, and it was easy to compare what we learned with the football to the correct way to swing at a volleyball. This allowed for our coaches to more effectively fix the arm swings of some high-level athletes who were stuck using bad technique through transfer of learning.

Below is a GIF of a football being thrown. This movement is the exact movement we practiced for two weeks in order to fix our teams arm-swings.

# data[].attributes.body
As a college athlete, we are constantly under experiment. We are manipulating our training metrics, recovery tactics or mental practice. As discussed during class, there are three different dependent variable that can be manipulated: performance outcome, performance production levels and neurological measures.

A major performance outcome that I use as a setter is location targets. As part of my workouts I set up various targets in spots where my sets need to go. This allows me to work on consistency and accuracy with instantaneous feedback. This type of performance outcome, one that is focused on hitting spatial targets, is seen as a one-dimensional error measurement.

Another dependent variable that is manipulated is performance production. One branch of this is kinematics which is focused on the quality of movement, while another is kinetics which is the role of force on motion. As athletes we spend a lot of time in the weight room trying to get faster, strong and more explosive. We are tested about 4 times a year on various velocity-based kinematic tests on how fast we can move certain weights. This allows our coaches to see what we need to improve upon based on where our weaknesses lie.

Additionally, neurological measures can be manipulated as well. We are just starting to do a little more with manipulating neurological measures. We’ve recently invested in individual Compex units for each athlete. The thought is that we can activate certain muscles and cause contraction or relaxation through the electrical stimulation. I believe the plan is to use these once we get further into season during some of our lifts so we can reduce the load of workouts but still keep intensities high.

Below is a picture of someone using a  Compex unit while doing squats. This causes the muscles fibers to fire at a higher level in turn manipulating the nervous system in various ways.

# data[].attributes.body
Just after I had finished week 7 material for this class, I was asked to give private serving lessons for a girl who was from Latvia. She had never really been taught by anyone who was very knowledgeable about volleyball and would have been considered a novice at the sport. I was asked to do 3 sessions for 2 hours each and I was pretty stressed out about how to go about teaching someone who had never been taught about the sport and then I thought about the information I had learned recently in this class. As I went through my sessions with Paula, I used various techniques of augmented feedback on top of the inherent feedback that she could gain visually based on where the ball landed or how the ball moved.

Day 1: I knew I was going to need to start with the basics and provide a lot of instruction. I focused on giving terminal feedback, after she was done performing the skill, with mainly verbal prescriptive feedback so that she knew how to fix what she had done wrong. On day 1, the feedback was given almost after every skill, allowing her to put words to what she had just felt.

Day 2: Paula had become a lot more aware of what her body was doing in comparison with what her body was supposed to be doing. I continued with terminal feedback, however I reduced my frequency of it. I often asked her what she felt to see if she could feel when something wasn't right. This allowed her to intrinsically analyze what had just occurred before I could confirm or deny if that is also what I saw. I think this was a major part of her learning process.

Day 3: I allowed Paula to direct the frequency of the augmented feedback. She served ball after ball and when something felt off she would tell me. If everything felt good, she would continue serving. I believe this was extremely helpful for her because it put her learning in her hands. There were a few times when she felt good, but I saw something that was not right. In cases of this, I used performance based bandwidths, if it was major we would discuss it but if it was something minor, I would let her continue on.

Overall, I was very pleased with how quickly she picked up on the skills she was learning. I believe a lot of it had to do with the feedback tactics I had learned a few days earlier. These ideas allowed her to play an active role in her learning and really feel the way things were supposed to feel.

Below is a picture of us teaching the smallest campers how to serve, and they too need different feedback than the feedback given to Paula over the 3 days.

# data[].attributes.body
Blocking is a complex movement that is very dependent on where the other setter sets the ball and what that specific hitters tendencies are. However, when broken down into just what the arms and hands are doing there is two separate types of bimanual coordination going on. At the highest levels of volleyball, teams tend to use a type of blocking called swing blocking, which is highly thought to increase power and momentum during the jump. During the swing blocking movement, you use symmetric bimanual coordination, meaning both limbs perform the same motion, with your arms as they swing back behind your waist on your first step of footwork. Often symmetric bimanual coordination is also used during the pressing of your arms over the net. However, we often talk about "independent hands" when we talk about specific hand positioning over the net. This would be an example of asymmetric bimanual coordination as our hands turn different ways in oder to take away different parts of the court. This allows the block to take up more space at the net in order to make it easier on the defense. In order to work on this we do various drills that force you to see what is going on with both eyes, but read and react correctly with independent hands.

The video below shows some drills we run at practice. At the 1:55 time point the idea of independent hands is discussed directly. It is essential for our hands to be able to work independently in order for our blockers to know which hand needs to drop into a seam to help the defense.