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When I first started playing football, I obviously had little to no skill in the sport.  I was in the cognitive stage of learning.  I had to be told and shown how to do things constantly, but I improved rapidly. I remember I was one of the bigger kids in middle school, so I had a physical advantage over a lot of the kids we played. I went from knowing very little about the sport when I began practice to being a starter on the offense and defense. After I had established my base of knowledge, I moved into the associative stage. This is where I developed the finer points of my game. I would notice small cues from the offensive line we were playing and began to be able to read defenses more easily. I didn't have as many big gains in skill as I did when I first started, but I was sharpening my skills and becoming a more concise and accurate player. In high school, I started to reach the autonomous stage. I didn't really have to think about what I was doing as much as I used to. I pretty much was able to flow with what was occurring in front of me and react to changes and correct for it. However, I was still improving my skills and learning small new things.

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When I tore my ACLs, I had to obviously go to rehab in order to regain full function of my knee again.  The most difficult skill or motor function to regain after an ACL surgery is being able to activate your quadriceps muscles, specifically your vastus medialis.  I found out how hard you have to work and how much practice you have to put into getting the function of that muscle back firsthand.  In the beginning, it was the weirdest sensation.  No matter how hard you flexed your thigh, the muscles just wouldn't contract.  You remember in your head what you had to do to make the muscles work before surgery, but now that same process lead to little to no results. My PT came up with many different ways to practice and try and get my strength back.  It began with just sitting there and trying to flex the muscles.  She would tap on the muscles and this tactile sensation made it a little easier.  Then I would have this machine hooked up to me that displayed the muscle activity.  This visual feedback helped me to know what was right and what was wrong when trying to contract the muscle.  Eventually, I would be able to contract and control the muscles, but not without great deals of practice.  Practicing a skill and practicing it using different techniques was very beneficial to me in regaining my quad control. This is a prevalent method of motor learning and it proved its worth here.

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In baseball, I also pitched. I learned how to pitch from an early age, but I was always amazed by professional players being able to throw 90+ miles per hour. In the early stages of my career as a pitcher, I would try to throw as hard as I possibly could. When doing this, my accuracy would definitely decrease. Cue the speed accuracy trade-off that was talked about by Fitt. His theory was that as you increased the speed at which you did a skill, the more errors you would make. This was certainly the case for me. I would over throw my arm and end up missing my spots. I had to learn to slow down my pitches until I had the control required to throw fast and be able to place the ball where I wanted to. This was a challenging concept to grasp as a young kid who just wanted to throw smoke like the big league players. However, I did learn to slow my pitching down and this benefited me. I learned to place the ball well and put spin on my pitches to make the hitters miss. And as my control developed, I was able to put more speed on my pitches as well.

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For as long as I can remember, I have played soccer and baseball. In soccer I played goalie and in baseball I played shortstop and third base. While you may not think that these are very related, I think they are. When playing goalie, you have to judge the flight of the ball, play different bounces and be able to react quickly. Many of these skills are also used when playing the left side of the infield in baseball. Transfer of learning occurs when you practice a skill that is similar to another skill and this practice then benefits said skill. I believe this was the case with me. I think that playing baseball significantly improved my soccer goalie skills and playing goalie had a benefit on my baseball skills. Also, these sports probably had other effects on some of the other sports I played, but I thought this was the most obvious connection.

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In high school football, my head coach had an obsession with "visualizing" before our games every Friday. This involved sitting in the end zone of our home field if the weather permitted or sitting in the weight room where we put in the long hours of off season work and visualizing us being successful in the upcoming game. For me, I was a running back so I focused on making cuts, catching passes, making blocks, crossing the goal line, and handing the ball to the official after I had scored. Now unfortunately, due to two successive ACL surgeries, I was unable to put any of this visualization to work very often during my football career. However, as we have learned, mental practice is a beneficial tool for improving skill. In this case, it was mostly used as a motivational tool, but studies have proved that while real practice is better, mental practice is more beneficial than doing nothing. At the time the visualization techniques that my coach taught may have seemed cheesy or useless, but it turns out he knew what he was talking about.