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This summer I worked for the National Park Service on the trail crew at Rocky Mountain National Park. A main part of my job consisted of brut and repetitive physical labor such as digging, breaking rocks, moving rocks and manually cutting down trees. In a typical 10-hour workday, sometimes my crew and I would do the same thing for six or seven hours. One of our projects consisted of reclaiming and rerouting a trail that had been destroyed by a landslide in the 2013 floods. In order to do this we had to dig using a tool called a pick mattock to break the rock, clay, and soil and pull it down to make a path. The digging took many days. While on the outside it may seem like a boring repetitive task, the Gentile’s Classification of Motor skills begs to differ.

The first classification on the taxonomy is the function. As we swung into the ground time and time again there was no transport associated with the movement but there was object manipulation. Each swing required us to manipulate and control the pick mattock. The next classification is the environmental context. Because the land was unstable, the environment would be classified as open. We had to be aware of sliding ground and loose rock, and act accordingly to the moving regulatory conditions. Sometimes we would be digging clay, sometimes decayed rock, sometimes hard rock and sometimes sandy soil. This variance in material created inter-trial variability. Gentile’s Taxonomy of Motor Skills would consider digging on a landslide a stable movement with object manipulation, moving regulatory conditions and inter-trial variability. By classifying the movement we see that it is not so simple and repetitive because no two trials will be the same.

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When I decided to try out for the rowing team, about 100 girls with no rowing experience also tried out. Much to my surprise, almost 90 made the team. It seemed silly at the time that so many girls would make a team with limited resources when the coach could instead pick the top girls after the first week of tryouts.

The problem with choosing who will succeed in a group of girls who have never rowed is that predicting who will succeed by measuring performance after a short practice period is only about 50% accurate. In the scheme of a sport like rowing, a week is a short period of time, and those who are less skilled in the first week are not necessarily going to be less skilled after practice.

A few months later, the coach needed to make a decision about picking the top 16 girls to attend a winter training trip. Because the team had been practicing for a long time, there was a higher correlation between the performance of each rower and how good they would be in the long term. Predicting who the top 16 girls would be in the Spring after a lot of practice in the Fall was easier than deciding who would be the best in the first week, because with practice, the novice rower learned the motor specific abilities to rowing.

Learning about predicting future achievement has explained to me why so many girls initially made the team. During the short period of tryouts when the coach needed to decide who would make the team, it was difficult because early performance alone is a poor measure of success in the long term because abilities that are important for a person’s initial performance are not as important later in practice.

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While in school together, my sister Julia and I shared the same passion for triathlon. We loved to compete, especially with each other. We were also pretty much inseparable. We shared a room, so by default had the same sleep schedule. We would wake up in the mornings, eat the same breakfast, go to the pool, do the same workout, go to school, eat the same lunch, either run or bike together after school and then go home and eat the same dinner. Despite doing identical workouts, eating the same foods and sharing a sleep schedule, our performances were drastically different from each other.

Of the dozens we have raced each other, the results have never changed. I have finished the swim before her and she has caught up to me in the run each and every time. Not once has this changed. Why is it that she can’t keep up in a pool but will out run me to make up the difference?

Julia and I have different abilities. No matter how hard Julia trains, she probably won’t catch me in the water. Although practicing in the pool improves her skill, her ability is her limiting factor. On the flip side, no matter how much I train, I will probably never keep up with her running. According to Henry’s Specificity of Motor Abilities Hypothesis, there are thousands of motor abilities that are independent and unrelated. This theory explains that even though Julia and I train together and are very similar in many ways, we have different motor abilities which explains our differences in performance.

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Last week I was working out with my roommate Christine and I mentioned that my favorite thing to do in the gym is climb the rope. She looked at me with wide eyes, she was surprised I was able to climb the rope. I told her that if she knew the technique she would be able to climb too. She looked at me doubtfully as she stepped up to the rope. “wrap your right foot in the rope and, wait, no…wrap your left foot and then push your right, no left, foot…” After failing a few times at explaining to her how to climb I told her to watch me. I stepped up to the rope and did it for myself. After stepping up to the rope and trying to climb, I was able to remember the steps to learning to climb.

I found myself unable to explain how to climb the rope but I had no problem actually climbing. This is because when I learned to climb the rope in middle school gym class, I used declarative memory. I thought about my feet and how to wrap the rope around them each time I climbed. At that point would have had no problem teaching someone to do it because it was in my declarative memory. As I practiced rope climbing more, now almost 10 years later, I could not explain the steps to doing it because it had became an autonomous, procedural process for me.

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I’ve been ice-skating since practically before I could walk. When I was 3 years old I received a pair of figure skates for my birthday and proceeded to have a tantrum— I wanted black skates. I didn’t want to be a figure skater, I wanted to play hockey like my brothers. Since I learned to skate and play hockey at such a young age, skating comes naturally to me. When I was in high school I decided that I wanted to change things up. I wanted to take time off of ice hockey and learn to figure skate. I was pretty burnt out and thought learning a new sport would be fun. And so I did. The first time I got on figure skates I fell many times and had trouble getting around the rink. The second time I got on figure skates I was pretty good. I could skate without falling and even do some tricks, go backwards and jump. Soon after learning figure skating my performance plateaued.

An S shaped learning curve properly represents my pattern of learning figure skating. The first time I switched to figure skates I was really challenged but it didn’t take long for me have a very steep improvement. After my initial progress my improvement really slowed down. I Playing ice hockey may have helped me learn the skill of figure skating faster because of having similar balance requirements, but once I was sufficient on them the two skills became evidently different.