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This semester I've been taking a class to become a certified basic EMT. There are a lot of skills and information that needs to be learned to pass all the requirements to be an EMT. This makes sense because you're being entrusted to help others and potentially save their lives. It has been a long semester and it's amazing to think how much I've learned 4 short months. One major concept that is stressed is the importance of efficiency. If someone's bleeding out or they're in respiratory distress, you don't want to dilly dally when treating them. It's important to correct the issue as quickly as possible. On the other hand, it is also super important as an EMT to be accurate in your movements. If you're trying to apply a tourniquet so quickly that you ultimately end up doing a terrible job, then the patient will bleed out and die. Same goes for a lot of other skills. They want you to be able to perform the skill perfectly while also doing it as quickly as you can.

Fitt's Law states that there is a speed-accuracy trade-off meaning the faster you perform a movement, the less accurate the movement becomes. This is an important concept to know in emergency response scenarios because you need to be fast and accurate at the same time. The National Registry of EMTs states that you need to determine an airway in a patient in 30 seconds or less. Determining an airway means measuring and inserting the correct oral-pharynx airway and then bagging the patient with a bag mask valve. Seems simple enough but if you try to move too quickly, you're hands fumble and you make mistakes that ultimately delay your ability to determine a patent airway

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I played volleyball for about 10 years and for the last 6 of those years I also helped to coach summer camps (I still do). I obviously have had a lot of experience with volleyball to the point where I could be considered an "expert" if we really wanted to get technical. I know how to perform all the movements and I know when a movement is incorrect. Throughout high school, I got saddled with teaching the kids how to do an approach and an arm swing when hitting the ball. The movements in volleyball are very quick and are usually performed in less than 10 seconds. I can easily demonstrate how to perform these skills even after a year of not playing. Although, when I tried to verbalize these skills and break them down to be taught, I probably looked like a buffoon that's never played volleyball. I would have to pause do the movement quickly, then do it slower, and then I was able to verbalize it to the kids. It's crazy to think that my procedural memory was spot on and as sharp as every while my semantic memory was basically nonexistent at this point. As I got older and started to coach older kids, the skills got a little more developed. One thing I try to teach is how to dive and roll. It is nearly impossible to verbalize how to do this movement and literally impossible to do it at a reduced speed. I've torn holes in my shirts and burned the skin on my knees trying to demonstrate these movements to high schoolers. The most accurate thing I could say to describe it is "play the ball, then hit the floor in a sliding motion, then roll your body away from where you started fast enough so that you can land on your feet". I can do the movement with no issues but describing it is definitely a bigger challenge.

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As a former UW volleyball player, augmented feedback was a large aspect of practices and workouts. One of our assistant coaches, Gary, used to be an engineer for the government so now that he's coaching, he'll geek out any change he gets. One common element of athletics is watching film. Film can be a great way to see your movements and what's correct and what's incorrect. Because of that, there are cameras all over the gym so that we can watch film individually, as a team, and during practice. Gary had this lightbulb of an idea to set up a camera on the sideline and hook it up to a TV at a certain time delay so that we could see our movement immediately after making said movement. As we have learned, augmented feedback can be good or bad depending on the circumstances. As elite level athletes, we tend to have pretty good intrinsic feedback for the movements of our sport because we've been doing them for years. It is also easy to see the feedback of what happened to the ball after you made contact with it. Being able to watch yourself right away was helpful at times if something felt funky but it usually wasn't. There wasn't a coach standing by to show you what you might've done wrong and the video is live-time so if you miss the movement then you miss it and you get back in line. It never dawned on me that constant feedback isn't the best way to go about learning and that sometimes it actually is redundant and even have a negative effect.

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When I was a freshman in college, the athletic department had this event called Mr. and Mrs. Bucky and basically what happened was that each team nominated a freshman to participate in these 'challenges' and the winners were Mr. and Mrs. Bucky for the year. One of these challenges was a dance competition. When I learned of this I immediately knew I needed to do something amazing and what's more amazing than the dance from Napoleon Dynamite. This dance is actually more complex than I had anticipated but luckily there was five part youtube series teaching the dance. I used the blocked practice technique because I would practice each fifth of the dance until I felt confident enough to do it from memory and then I began to piece it all together. I spent about two weeks learning this dance and I started to get pretty good at it. There were some transitions that were trickier than others so I made sure to practice those as much as possible so that I didn't have to focus so much on the movement. Finally, my day to shine had come and my teammates were very supportive of my dance moves. I was the talk of the town because I crushed it. Unfortunately, I was not crowned Mrs. Bucky due to my lack of hula hoop skills but I did get 2nd places and a spot in everyone's heart.

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When I was 8, my parents signed me up for musical lessons. I chose to play the violin because I thought it was cool or something like that. Looking back, I wish I had chosen the piano but that's beside the point. When I first started playing, I was god awful. It took me eons to figure out how to get my hands to do two different things. Placing your fingers in different positions on the string while also moving a bow across them is no walk in the park. We learned that our limbs prefer to be doing the same thing so trying to separate them like that while I was so young took a lot of practice. As I got older and developed more limb control, it was easy to have my hands do two different things. I like to think that even to this day, I have relative strong asymmetrical bimanual coordination. I still fell victim to limb interference with simple movements but I can pat my head and rub my stomach fairly easily. Even though limbs prefer to move symmetrically, they can be trained to move effectively and efficiently in different patterns.