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When I got to college, I had very little experience with weight lifting. Luckily for me, one of my new college friends took me to the gym and got me hooked on working out. I have been consistently working out for about 2 years now and I still love doing it. It has increased my self-esteem and confidence to the point where I began noticing improvements in other aspects of my. Setting goals and reaching them is satisfying and motivates me to keep doing more. I have learned a lot about weight lifting and its dangers. You can seriously hurt yourself if you are not safe and you could also be setting yourself up with health problems for when you get old. Learning good form and correct mechanics of all the different exercises is important for seeing results and keeping yourself safe. Lifting weights uses generalized motor programs. GMPs are motor programs that represent a class of movement patterns. Different exercises can be extremely similar in terms of the movement pattern. The bench press is one of the most well known exercises and a personal favorite. It involved pushing the bar up while laying down. The movement can be altered slighted by changing the orientation of the body. This includes how close your hands are relative to each other on the bar or at what incline you push the bar at. The GMPs allow you to develop many different movements at the same rate. If you practice/enhance one movement, there will be positive transfer to other movements that follow the same GMP. Features that may put different exercises into the same GMPs are the muscles that are utilized during the exercise or the actual direction of the movement of the exercise being similar to another exercise's movement direction.

In this GIF, the boy is doing bicep curls to develop his bicep muscles. This specific movement can be put into the same GMP as the movement that a chin up would produce. By improving in one of these movement, he will improve in the other.

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Soccer has always been my favorite sport. As a very young player, I had a lot of success as a forward. I loved the feeling of scoring goals. I felt like the pack caught up to me by the end of my soccer “career” in high school. I was not as much of a stand out player as I was going into high school. Soccer is a very difficult sport that I do not believe gets the respect it deserves. So many factors go into making a player talented. One key feature of great soccer players is good awareness. There are many things on the field that require your attention. There are two components of soccer, width and direction. Width is referring to the things in the environment and can be broad or narrow. Direction deals with environmental versus sensations within. It can be external or internal. For broad external attention, it is important to know where all the other players are on the field. This is so you know what you should do which is related to narrow external attention. After assessing the field, you need to react appropriately to the situation or else you may cost your team a goal or an opportunity. Internal broad attention is thinking about how your body is oriented to make a play. As an attacker, you want to open and ready for someone to play the ball up towards you. Internal narrow attention would be preparing to make a specific kick. There are an infinite amount of places to strike the ball in and you could use many different surfaces of your foot to get different results.

In this clip, Cristiano Ronaldo, one of the best players in the world, is using a combination of all the types of attention to make a play and prepare himself for what to do next.

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In high school, I played soccer, tennis, and I dabbled in basketball. I really enjoyed sports, especially when my team had success during the season. The closest I got to the top of the mountain of success in high school sports was my spring senior semester. My tennis team was extremely talented with younger and older students. We had first time players and players returning for their third or fourth year of varsity. It was a great group of guys who were a lot of fun on and off the court. High school state tennis in Wisconsin is hosted on the UW-Madison campus at Nielsen Tennis Stadium. When my team qualified for state, I was extremely excited and nervous. Playing at Nielsen creates many more performance variables compared to playing at a local park’s outdoor tennis courts. Thankfully, I have lived in Madison my whole life and played a significant amount of tennis at Nielsen. My dad and I love to go there and play each other. Depending on the results, we may end up not talking to each other until we finish our time together at Subway. The heated, competitive matches that I practiced with my dad at Nielsen were very helpful for me playing in the state finals. Performance variables are the things that have immediate and temporary effects on performance. Playing at Nielsen was like playing on a big stage in front of a lot of people. I was able to limit my feelings of being nervous through the previous experiences that I had at Nielsen. In the two rounds of state finals, I did not let the performance variables distract me from playing my game. I did not focus on crowd size and the magnitude of the importance of the match while I played. Those performance variables would have negatively impacted my play as I did not typically  perform well under a lot of pressure. I played good tennis but our team still only got runner up. Although winning it all would have been amazing, I still had a great time and was proud of the team.

This is an image of the courts at Nielsen Tennis Stadium. The ones of to the side are not as intimidating to play on as the ones in the center where everyone can see you from almost anywhere in the building.

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I have been playing tennis for my entire life. I have so many memories of going up to my neighborhood's tennis courts and playing with friends, coaches, and my family. Tennis has played an important role in my life. I have made lasting friendships through playing in different leagues and at my high school. I have accomplished many goals in tennis like winning tournaments and going to team state in high school. I really enjoy playing tennis with my dad when we can find the time. He is a very good player for his age and he is the reason I got started in tennis. The earliest organized tennis I can remember is when I was in middle school and I was getting lessons at my neighborhood’s golf club. Hawks Landing Golf Club is where it all began. Me and my friends from school who also happened to live in my neighborhood would occasionally take tennis lessons together because they were so much fun. We loved playing games and getting into competitions on court. I did not realize at the time that I was learning the basics to a sport that would be so impactful in my life. Smashing tennis balls over the fence in the absence of our parents was all that my friends and I were concerned about. The lessons we took were very systematic for maximizing our potential learning of the sport. As beginners, the tennis pros teaching us were giving us blocked practice for a reason. Contextual interference is defined as the disruptions that result from practicing multiple skills or variations of a skill within the context of practice. It is used in different ways to enhance the practicing of an athlete. We learned that age and skill level limit the effectiveness of random practice, or a practice that has high contextual interference. With young kids who are at a low skill level for a sport, it would make sense to have them do a blocked practice, or have low contextual interference. At my blocked tennis lessons from when I was very young, I remember getting out the courts and repeating the same movements over and over again. The pro would line us up and have one person at a time step up and hit a certain number of forehands. After getting through the line, we would move over and hit backhands from the other side of the court. Later in practice, we would all practice serving ball after ball from a big bucket. Finally, we might be asked to stand at the net and hit volleys back at the pro. If we were moderately well-behaved, we would likely finish with a fun game. Fast forward almost a decade, whenever I work with a tennis pro or sign up for a group lesson, just about the entire practice is dedicated to playing out points and simulating an actual match. This kind of practice is very randomized because you cannot predict with 100% certainty what is going to happen. That is very similar to playing in match against an opponent that you know nothing about. The high variation in my random practice leads to better retention of the skills I learn during practice that I can then use to help me perform well in my matches.

This picture is pretty accurate in terms of what happens at practice for beginners. It is a lot of repetition to learn the basics.

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My first job was at a place only known to Wisconsin. A cross between a farmer's market and a grocery store, Brennan's has been a family run business for many decades. There was once a total of 6 locations in operation throughout Wisconsin. A couple of years ago, all the stores were closed down except the one that I worked at. The store manager bought the company and decided to keep his business alive. I have stuck around, working when I can fit shifts into my schedule. I am approaching 5 years of  employment at Brennan's. When I first started, much of responsibility was working on preparing and stocking a lot of the fruits, vegetables, and other items we sold. Every summer shift involved working in the back, cutting up watermelon, and using the wrapping machine. I became very comfortable with the wrap machine and had many people tell me that I was the best at wrapping the produce. After the first year passed, I began training the new people that worked in the back with me. I would show them how to perform all the responsibilities our position had. The area where the most training was needed was on the wrapping machine. It looks a lot easier to handle than it actually is. You have to pull out just the right amount of the wrap; you do not want too little or too much. Then you have to get it around what is likely an oddly shaped object. A scorching hot plate and bar are what is used to cut off the wrap from the machine and make seals with the plastic. All the workers knew from experience not to mess around too much with those parts unless they wanted to get burnt. Using just your own two hands and the hot plate, you had to finish the wrap job on your item. I got better as time went on at training people how to perfect their wrap jobs. However, it was quite difficult for me to transfer the knowledge about the skill that I had in my head into the heads of my co-workers. We have two memory systems in our brains, declarative and procedural. Declarative memory system is based on facts and concepts that a person knows. Procedural memory system is used to perform a skill and is nonconscious. I was using my procedural memory when I wrapped and when I  tried to explain the technique to the new people. It was very difficult for me to explain what to do and I normally just tried to show them an example of what they should do. Procedural knowledge is very difficult to verbalize. Just because I knew how to wrap did not mean I knew how to explain it to other people.

The image is pretty spot on for what I was like when I first began to train people at Brennens.