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Since high school, my participation in highly competitive sports has decreased (unless you count intramurals). I find new ways to incorporate competition into my life such as watching UW sporting events. One example is that I have become a fan of watching our Wisconsin Badgers Volleyball team. They are currently playing in the NCAA Tournaments Elite Eight. I love watching volleyball because of the gracefulness of the movements. Incredibly, a majority of the plays in a volleyball match include the same bump, set, spike pattern, but yet it is so enticing to watch. This pattern can become a predictable for players of the defending team. The defending team can use temporal and spatial anticipation to enhance the performance of their block. They know to time their block following the setter's pass to an outside hitter. Spatial anticipation, relating to location, is used when knowing to mirror the location of the hitter's on the court when the ball is near its third hit. An intelligent setter can take advantage of defenses using anticipation. In the video, Wisconsin Badgers setter Sydney Hilley does this by setting the ball over on the second hit. This goes against the anticipated time and location the defense expected and they are unable to respond in time.

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A new activity I have been trying out over the past few months has been boxing. I've only been to a few classes, but boxing can be broken down into four major punches. They are jabs, crosses, hooks, and uppercuts. The video attached shows how to perform each one of these punches. Jabs come straight on from your non-dominant hand. Crosses come straight on from your dominant hand. Hooks are made by either hand from the side. Lastly, uppercuts can be done with either hand and come from below. One way to practice them is by doing a drill where one partner wears pads on their hands and the other boxes. During this drill, the boxer is supposed to react to the position of the pads and attempt the coordinating hit. The partner is not supposed to place the pads in a pattern that is blocked. This would be if the partner did all hooks at once followed by jabs and so on. It is considered blocked practice because the same skill is being performed repetitively with no variation. Practicing this way can lead to good performance during the acquisition phase, and I would look better during practice. But this will hinder my performance during retention and transfer tests that are conducted later like in the ring.  Randomized practice leads to better retention and transfer tests, but performance during the acquisition phase is worse than blocked practice. An example of randomized practice during pad work would be when the partner comes up with a random order of the punches in their head.

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To view the next video in this series click: http://www.monkeysee.com/play/4958

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One of the most common skiing phrases people say is that "Skiing is easy to learn but hard to master".The first day I tried to learn to ski I got up within a few attempts. The rest of the day I never fell. I mastered the bunny hills and worked my way to the blue hills. Here I got to try out my sharp turns. My cousin at his first snowboarding lesson did not have the same experience. He did not get up on the bunny hill at all for more than a few seconds. The saying for snowboarding is that "It's (snowboarding) is hard to learn but easy to master." My gif shows what a predicted performance of snowboarding would be on the first day of learning. This can be explained by performance curves which measure the improvement and consistency of learning a motor skill. Skiing performance would have a negatively accelerated performance curve. At the beginning of learning, large improvements are made. However, there comes a time where performance reaches a plateau and it is harder to make gains. Snowboarding is the opposite and would have a positively accelerated performance curve. In the beginning improvements would be hard to make. But later on, there would be a moment when huge gains in performance would be made.

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My most cherished sport experience was being able to play goalie for my soccer team for many years. I loved everything about the position--the pressure, the unknown, and the stinky, smelly gloves. Being a goalie, was one of the most difficult motor tasks I've ever learned. Luckily, I had some of the greatest goalkeeper coaches along the way to always give me individual feedback and help me improve. But is all feedback, good feedback? Inherent feedback is information that can be perceived from the sensory environment and one's proprioception. Examples of inherent feedback I received whenever trying to save a shot included if I actually made the save or not and how my arms and legs felt after my attempt. Whenever a coach was told me about something I did wrong that was augmented feedback because it was coming from an external source. This enhanced my learning because coaches could point out components that I could not sense on my own. An occasional drill was when we would be scrimmaging my goalkeeper coach would stand behind me out of bounds and correct my every movement. He would give me instructions such as if I should come out for the ball or not. Since this feedback was given while I was practicing the skill, it is known as concurrent augmented feedback. By giving direction while the movement occurred, it hindered my performance because I had no opportunity to take into account my own inherent feedback. This phenomenon is called the negative learning effect. The concurrent feedback can become an essential part of the skill and the learner might rely on it to perform. In a game, I would not know if I was making the right decisions because the analysis of the inherent feedback was taken away from me during practice. The coach in my picture is not providing concurrent feedback instead he is giving terminal feedback. This is when a coach provides feedback after the skill is completed. For example, when the ball is cleared away or at half time. Terminal feedback is known to only enhance performance while concurrent can hinder or enhance based on the type of skill that is being performed.

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My motor learning progression began at a young age when my dad realized the closest thing he'd ever have to a son was me. My older sister Emma could not be less interested in sports and would rather watch the Wizard of Oz four times in one day (true story). When I was five years old, my sister and I went to a basketball camp together. That was her first and last basketball experience while I have been playing ever since. Because I loved hanging out with my sister I had to make some sacrifices such as watching TV occasionally instead of playing outside. The compromise was that while I was watching TV I would lie on the ground and practice my shooting form. I did this over and over and over again. Shooting a basketball is a high complexity task with many components. Through task analysis, it can be broken down into components: stance, gather the ball, adjust hands, jump, lift arms, release, follow-through, and land. Shooting also is moderately organized because spatially one's hands have to be in the correct position. Also, temporally one must follow the sequence in order and ideally shoot the ball whilst in the air. Since shooting a basketball has high complexity and moderate organization one way to practice would be part practice. This is what I did by shooting a basketball form on the ground because I only practiced some of the components of the skill. I eliminated my stance, gathering the ball, jumping, and landing. By doing this, it allowed me to focus solely on the elevation of my arms, release, and follow-through. An advantage to part practice is that it erases repetition of simpler components such as my stance and gathering the ball. This allowed me to be time-efficient and dedicate more time to the more difficult components - my shooting form. This is similar to the gif because in this situation the guy is performing part practice as well but only the stance, gather, and arm elevation components.