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In China, almost all the people learn driving in some local driving schools, and I also learned driving in a driving school in the city I lived in. When I first start to learning driving, I seated very closely to the steering wheel, held the steering wheel very firmly, kept staring at the front, and my whole body was extremely stiff. At the time, I thought the car is going to go to random direction if I don't hold the steering wheel tight, and I am going to hit on things if I don't stair at the front. I hit the cones by the side of the driving school several times because I never look at the sides when I turning, and my driving coach yelled at me a lot because of that. Although I was still very anxious about driving, in order not to hit on things again, I decided to force myself looking to both sides while driving, and I made it! Finally, I passed the driver license test, and get my driver license in China. However, at the time, I still had no idea about what I should pay attention to while I was driving since most of my driving experience was driving on the practice road, and I rarely drive on a road that has lots of traffic. Soon after, I start to drive in the "reality" with the company of my father, who are an experienced driver. My hometown is a big city with eight million population, so the traffic was very busy, and the main streets are very wide. As a result, I was shocked when I first start to drive in the city since I realize I have to pay attention to everything while driving. The car driving next to me wants to overtake, there are pedestrians jaywalking, and I have to make sure I drive within my lane... Every time, when I freak out and don't know what to look at, my father always tell me: just look around, don't focus on one thing. Lucky, I feel much more comfortable about driving, and I haven't get into any accident so far. After learning about the visual search, I realize that the process of a start as a new driver to become an experienced driver, being able to perform an effective visual search, and pick up important information is important. And the most effective visual search for a driver is to look at everything and catch the change of condition, and response to it.

This video is taken in my hometown city Shenyang, which reflects the driving environment that when I was driving. This driver was driving from downtown to the suburb in the morning, so lucky he didn't encounter too many cars and traffic jam. Please start to watch from 1:00 to 2:30.

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driving from City center, Taijuan Jie to Shenbei, North of Shenyang.

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Finally, knowing why my table tennis coach asked me to practice random combination. 

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Finally, knowing why my table tennis coach asked me to practice random combination. 

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I started to play table tennis since I was 10. My table tennis coach was a very patient and kind old man. Every time I told him I didn't feel like to practice a certain skill, he would give me time, and let me practice the skill until I have the mood. However, the random combination is the only exception. To do the random combination, he would give me commands about what types of stroke I should play, such as " only use forehand" or " one forehand follow by a backhand". Then he would hit the ball to my side on the table and let the ball randomly land on either left or right side of the table, so I need to pick what kind of foot movement I need to take every time the ball come to me. Most importantly, when I hit the ball, I have to ensure the ball land only on the left or the right side of the table, so that I could have good control of where my hits would go. For example, if he give me the command that "one forehand follow by a backhand", and he feeds my the first ball at the left side of the table, I should stay in the middle of the table, and hit the ball back with the forehand. Then if he feeds the second ball still lands on the left side of the table, I should jump across the left corner of the table, and hit the ball with a backhand stroke. If he feeds the third ball lands on the right side of the table, then I should take a pivot step to go back to the right side of the table, and hit the ball with a forehand stroke. This random combination training is very tiring and required me to make lots of fast judgments about my foot movements, so it was my least favorite thing to practice; however, it was my coach's favorite practice. I didn't realize the effectiveness of this random combination training until I learned that the high contextual interference (random practice) could maximize the performance on retention task. I start to appreciate my coach even more since he is not only a coach that has a great personality and teaching skills but also a person that want all the best to his student.
I cut the following GIF from a table tennis tutorial video, and their training pattern is very similar to what I did during the random combination training. However, they are playing in a pattern but mine was totally random.

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Thinking about the movement actually help!

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Thinking about the movement actually help!

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When I was in high school (in China), every single school day, all the students in the school are required to get together on the playground between two of their morning classes and practice a class-break dance. There would be two students standing on the stage in front of all the students to demonstrate the dance, and a couple of students would demonstrate the dance off the stage in front of their classes. I was one of the students who demonstrates the dance off the stage in my school. When I was selected to perform this task, I was super nervous about this, since I was not very familiar with this dance, and I sometimes mixed some movements up or do the movement in the wrong direction. To better demonstrate the dance in front of my classmates, I started to practice the dance at home and some class breaks. However, since the high school students' lives are very heavy with studying ( the school starts at 7 in the morning and the ends at 8:40 at night, and I usually need to finish my homework after the school), I usually don't have enough time to practice all these dances. Therefore, I decided to imagery that seeing myself doing the class-break dance whenever I get time such as on my way home or showing. A few days later, I realize I was able to perform the dance much better than I previous did even though I didn't physically practice too much. This improvement made me feel more confident to dance in front of my classmates. Only until recently I learn the strategy of mental practice, and I realize I was using mental practice to improve the acquisition of motor skills. I improved my ability to perform the class-break dance by learning cognitive elements of the dance that when should I turn to a certain direction, and when should I kick my leg.
The video below is a Chinese high school Class-break dance example I found on the YouTube. Please watch from 2:40 to 3:50. This class-break dance is a mixture of aerobic exercise and Tai Chi, which is very similar to the dance I did in high school. (I tried to find the video taken by my high school, but I cannot find any since mainland China is banned from using the YouTube.)

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It is hard to explain without demonstrating

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It is hard to explain without demonstrating

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I am taking another Kinesiology class this semester called "Exercise Testing and Prescription". In this class's lab sessions, we usually need to have some small presentations in the weight room to explain some resistant exercises. Although each presenter would have another student as their demonstrators during the presentation, I still need to partially perform the exercise in order to have the words came up to my mind. During the first half of this semester, I feel very awkward and stupid about the fact that I have to have some movements while I explaining the exercise, and this situation made me start to be doubt about my English ability again (since my first language is not English). This doubt started to make me more self-conscious when I speak English in the public, and I could feel my heart start to beat faster and harder when I need to speak in English. This situation continuous until l learn from this class that there are two memory systems the declarative memory system and the procedural memory system. The declarative memory system contains conscious memory that we could talk about, while the procedural memory system is consisted by nonconscious, automatic memory that enables our daily activities but could be heard to talk about. After knowing that the controlling of body movement is stored in the procedural memory system, and it is not a deficit if I need to perform the movement in order to explain the movement orally, I feel more confident about myself, and my anxiety while I am speaking start to decrease. Also, in order to be able to explain the movement verbally without the help of movement, I write down the procedure of the movement down on a piece of paper. By remembering the sentences on the paper, I am able to recall the exercises through my declarative memory system, and I am able to explain the exercise verbally.

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It's hard to play a long-tone with correct timing with violin. 

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It's hard to play a long-tone with correct timing with violin. 

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I start to play violin when I was six years old. Ever since I could play a piece of melody, I always hated to play the pieces containing long-tones, since I never know how long I should play the certain note, and how fast I should extend my arm so that I could drag the bow from the end to the tip in a certain amount of time. In the aspect of motor performance, the task to drag the bow from the end to the tip of the bow is an anticipation-timing task. The receptor anticipation for me is to know when the last note would be finished; while the effector anticipation is to know how long does it takes to switch the direction of the bow to play the long-tone. Almost every time when I played a song in front of my mother or my violin instructor, they would point out that I was either too long or too short on the certain long-tones. However, every time when I play the songs composed by many short-tones, I could easily stay on the rhythms. To solve the problem that I cannot play an accurate long-tone, my violin instructor taught me to break a long-tone into several short-tones. So when I first practicing a long-tone, which for example, is broken into four short-tones, I need to press the bow hard on the string at the start of each short-tone, but my bow would need to stay on the same direction. This strategy, in fact, utilized the temporal speed-accuracy trade-off the shorter the required time is, the more accurate the movement time can be achieved. When I was playing a long-tone with one bow, I was performing a movement in a longer required time, which accuracy in timing would be relatively low. However, when I press on the string hard at the start of each broken short-tone, I was breaking a long movement required time into four short movements that require short movement time, which would have better accuracy in timing as a whole. By practicing this strategy on long-tones, I was able to play the long-tones with accurate timing. And by decreasing the strength of pressing, I was able to diminish the sound effect made by the "count off" on the bowing movement.
The picture below shows a little boy holding his violin bow. I circled two of the three stickers on his violin bow, which are very similar to the stickers I had when I just start to practice the skill of "breaking a long-tone into four short-tones". So for each "short-tone" I play, I need to let the bow drag through a stick so that my arm extending speed is consistent throughout the whole playing.