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Transfer, or no transfer? That's the question.

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Transfer, or no transfer? That's the question.

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I know what you all are thinking. He’s talked about tennis and baseball now… aren’t they pretty much the same sport? They both require hand eye coordination. They both use a “stick” in hand to hit the ball. If you are good at tennis, shouldn’t you be good at baseball and vice-versa? In my case, yes, I was a reputable player at both tennis and baseball. The gross musculature in both tennis and baseball are similar in many ways. For example, the use of the lower body and hips to rotate and generate power upon impact is a commonality between the two sports. In addition, a backhand in tennis is like a swing in baseball with the use of muscles in the shoulders and arms. I therefore could take advantage of elaborated automatisms that were similar between the two sports. Although I could take advantage of positive transfer between these two sports, I have a friend who is a great tennis player who is utter trash at baseball. My theory about his struggles, a major change in the timing structure. In tennis, you are constantly moving around the court to reach the shots that are coming at you. This allows players to establish a rhythm of movement before striking the ball. You are able to move your feet into position, and use the flow of the game to your advantage. In baseball, my friend would always shuffle his feet before the pitch, which would lead to difficulties with getting set to swing on time. Baseball is more of a reactionary sport, where there is no flow to the game. You don’t move to the ball, you wait for the ball to come to you. Because of this, you have no control of the rhythm during the course of the game, the pitcher controls you. Since my friend was unable to adapt from the feeling of having a relative timing structure in tennis, negative transfer occurred from tennis to baseball in his case.

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To keep the family tradition of playing music alive, I was forced by my mom to learn how to play the viola throughout middle school and high school. Learning to play string instruments are particularly challenging due to their dependence on asymmetric bimanual coordination. First, you must hold the viola up with your left arm/shoulder and place fingers on the correct strings to produce notes with your left hand. Once you have learned how to hold the instrument, you use your right hand to begin plucking the strings to produce sound. At first, this challenge seemed insurmountable, especially at the grade school level. The human body prefers that you have both hands performing the same movements at the same time. Symmetrical bimanual movements are hard to overcome, and took my orchestra class 3 months to conquer overcoming symmetrical preference with plucking before even adding a bow in 5th grade. Adding a bow to the right hand made the tasks even more difficult, as spatial biasing was more likely to occur. In high school, there was one song that took me months to overcome this spatial biasing phenomenon. The song consisted of slurring multiple notes quickly with one stroke of the bow. These slurs occurred back-to-back throughout most of the song. I struggled to overcome my natural tendency to botch the slurred bowing with my right hand since my left hand was fleeting over the strings to cover all the notes. In this case, the right hand’s bowing task (the simpler task) was drawn toward the left hand’s movements, leading me to bow the music incorrectly. Being wise beyond my years and thinking into the future, I reminded myself that asymmetric bilateral coordination and overcoming spatial biasing are possible with practice, so I went to work. By the time of the concert, 2 months after receiving the piece and practicing every other day, I was playing the piece rather effortlessly. I could control both hands simultaneously, even as they performed different movements. Looking back, I’m glad my mom made me play an instrument; it really taught me how to be patient with myself and learn persistence.

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Though I am not much of a complainer (I know, people who start sentences off like this are usually ones who complain… I promise that’s not me), I’d like to give some pointers to one of my least favorite coaches of all time, my junior year baseball coach; let’s call him Coach Mean/Rude/etc. Motor learning as well as motor performance are largely influenced by the feedback given by coaches. Specifically, augmented feedback, most often, allows players to enhance skill acquisition if done correctly. Coach Rude was the king of correcting error performance, which is not always awful. To be honest, I would much rather receive feedback focused on what I did wrong. Research shows that feedback largely focused on correcting errors is essential to becoming better at the skill. Here’s where Coach Vicious needed improvement… motivational coaching. Hearing what you’ve done well at gives you the motivation to continue giving your best effort and maintain interest in the task. The only compliment, rather back-handed in my opinion, I received the entire year was when Coach Hostile yelled, “Look Moe, you’re FINALLY letting it fly” when I grew out of my defensive slump at third base. Coach Sour’s Knowledge of Performance (KP) feedback was also poor. As varsity baseball players, our skill-set was closer on the continuum toward “expert” rather than “novice”, yet Coach Nasty tried to give us very specific prescriptive KP on how to fix our mistakes. Novices benefit from prescriptive knowledge most, since they are unfamiliar with the skill and need strategic pointers on how to better their performance. Experts benefit from descriptive knowledge, as they likely have the skill set and strategies to fix their own errors. A happy medium of prescriptive KP toward the beginning of the season moving toward descriptive KP toward the end of the season therefore would make the most sense. Yet, Coach Malicious thought it was best (in-game might I add) to scream how to fix your errors as if it were little league practice. Not only was this embarrassing for us players, it greatly decreased the morale of the team. Needless to say, our record was 4-22 that summer, and multiple people quit the team.

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Fast forward to the summer after my junior year… I’m finally getting a chance to start on the varsity baseball team. I’d been working on my arm strength and batting all off-season to start at third base. Throughout the preseason, I’d proven myself to the coaching staff, displaying my ability to play defense during practice. When the games began to roll around, my defensive play began to decline. The lack of experience playing in high pressure situations started to show. I began to “think” too much and choked under pressure. Instead of trusting my arm and using my procedural/automatic memory system to make the throws from 3rd to 1st, I overthought the throwing motion, and began to rely on my declarative/conscious memory system. These lousy throws would get the same criticism from my coach, “Let it fly!”. Despite the fact that I was not a fan of my coach, he had a point. I could feel my limb-segment coordination stiffen up as I cognitively thought through my throwing motion. Instead of freezing my degrees of freedom in my arm, I needed to release them and throw more naturally like I had practiced all off-season. About halfway through the season, I finally found my rhythm. I became much more comfortable with my role on the team, which led to my confidence increasing (I also cared a lot less, since my coach was a schmuck). Who said you can’t learn from annoying coaching?

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77 points and 11 comments so far on reddit

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Spring semester of freshman year had finally come. Although I played tennis with my parents throughout my life, I never had proper training or lessons as a child. When the first day of practice came around, Coach Jim and Coach Hue put me right on the ball machine, practicing forehand and backhand shots. They kept instructing us players to hit the ball cross-court, the most effective shot in doubles. Being a slim kid, power was not my strong suit when striking the tennis ball. Instead, I tried to impress the coaches with my accuracy. When it was my turn to hit the balls, I’d watch as they approached over the net, then immediately fixated my visual attention cross-court. As you’d expect, I was mishitting the balls more times than not. After a few rounds on the ball machine, Coach Hue pulled me aside. He explained, “You can’t hit what you can’t see. Instead of focusing on the court where you want to hit, fixate your eyes on the ball. Let your body position determine the direction of your shot”. At first, I thought this advice was total bologna. How was I supposed to hit the ball cross-court if I wasn’t looking cross-court? Nonetheless, I took Hue’s advice. The next round of balls, I only mishit 1 out of 7 shots. I was in total shock. Although my shots weren’t all hitting cross-court, I was striking the ball much cleaner. As a novice, my visual search was flawed, as I focused on the court instead of the ball. Coach Hue, being more of an expert, corrected my visual search, fixating my visual cue on the ball. When I play now, I can tell when my visual search becomes poor, as I fixate on where the opposing players are too much rather than focusing my eyes on the ball, leading to mishits. Luckily, I play intramural doubles with a friend from high school, who reminds me often, “Moe, you know you can’t hit what you can’t see right?”.