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Stages of Motor Learning for Taping an Ankle

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Stages of Motor Learning for Taping an Ankle

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Sports have been a passion of mine for as long as I can remember. Throughout my life, I have played football, basketball, soccer, softball, and ran track. Participating in sports allows me to do something I love while staying healthy. When it came time to decide what I wanted to go to college for, I knew I wanted to do something that allowed me to stay involved in sports for my career. I did some research and came across athletic training. I knew this was the perfect path for me because giving care to athletes as well as providing prevention and rehabilitation programs for them sounded like a dream to me. I decided this is what I wanted to do and stuck with it. I am now almost done with my first of four semesters in the athletic training program on my way to become a certified athletic trainer.

Athletic trainers do many different things to prevent injuries and ensure athletes are safe at all times. One of the most common preventative measures athletic trainers provide is taping. Sports medicine staff for the Badgers football team have implemented a rule that requires all players to be taped or braced at the ankle for all practices and games. As you can imagine, it is pretty hectic before each practice when there are a limited amount of certified athletic trainers and athletic training students on site to tape the ankles of almost everyone on the team.

I first learned how to tape an ankle in a first aid and athletic training class I took in high school. I practiced the steps and technique for the class but did not continue practice after that. The same thing happened when I re-learned how to tape an ankle in an athletic training class my sophomore year of college. As soon as I found out that I was accepted to the athletic training program and that I was going to be working football camp, I practiced until I knew how to do it well. I can describe my learning of taping by using Fitts and Posner's three stage model. The first stage of their model is the cognitive stage. In this stage, I picked up the skills needed to perform an ankle tape job. I also learned how to move my body to do the task most efficiently and used verbal ques to help myself remember the steps. Looking back, I don't think my performance of the actual task improved much in quality or consistency, but I did get better at the strategies I used to complete the task. The stage that I am in right now is the second, or associative stage. I have arrived at this stage through a lot of practice and have noticed that I am becoming more consistent, improving gradually, and no longer have to verbally talk myself through the steps. I am also at the point where I can recognize the mistakes I make. The third and final stage of the model is known as the autonomous stage, where the task becomes automatic. People in this stage complete a task without even realizing that they are doing it. I am personally not at this stage in my ankle taping skills yet but some of the certified athletic trainers may be. With more practice, I will eventually reach the autonomous stage.

Image: http://www.athletico.com/2011/11/15/5-ways-to-reduce-your-chance-of-an-ankle-sprain/

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Physical Proficiency Abilities and Weight Lifting

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Physical Proficiency Abilities and Weight Lifting

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Staying physically conditioned is something I believe has many benefits for me as well as anyone else. Working out, eating well, and getting adequate sleep are crucial to living a healthy life. Since I began competing in sports, I have made it a priority to lift weights as often as I can. I can attest to its many benefits because I have experienced many of them first-hand. Weight training has proven to increase lean muscle tissue, reduce body fat, reduce stress, and lower the risk of disease, the list goes on and on.

In class, we learned about 9 measurable physical proficiency abilities. These include static, dynamic, explosive, and trunk strength, extent and dynamic flexibility, gross body equilibrium, and stamina. Each of these abilities relates to weight training and I have found each of them to be prevalent in certain aspects of the task. Explosive strength is the ability to expend a maximum of energy in one explosive act. I have used this ability while performing 1-rep maximums in bench press, squat, and deadlift. Static strength is defined as the ability to exert force against a relatively heavy weight or some fairly immovable object. An example of static strength that I have used is a plank, where I am working my core muscles against my body weight to stay upright isometrically against the ground. Dynamic strength is the ability to repeatedly move or support the weight of the body, an example being push-ups that I complete every day. Trunk strength is a type of dynamic strength focused on the core. I have worked on my trunk strength by doing crunches, military twists, and other exercises. Extent flexibility requires stretching the body as far as possible in different directions. To increase my extent flexibility, I have performed leg swings and arm circles. Dynamic flexibility is the ability to make rapid, repeated movements that require muscle flexibility. When I use a rowing machine to erg, I am working my dynamic flexibility. The ability to maintain total body balance without using vision is known as gross body equilibrium. I have worked on this skill by balancing on one leg with my eyes closed. Gross body coordination requires performing a number of complex movements at once. An example of this type of coordination that I have done is balancing on a foam pad while doing single leg squats. Finally, stamina is the ability to exert the entire body for a prolonged period of time. I have done this by performing a lengthy workout on a stationary bike after my weight training workout.

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In addition to running short distance events in high school, I also high jumped. This was my favorite field event to practice and perform at meets. High jump is a very complex event and requires remembering and executing a series of mental and physical steps to be successful. During my high school career, I made it to sectionals my sophomore, junior, and senior years and advanced to the state meet my sophomore year. The picture below shows one of my attempts at the state meet.

As I mentioned, high jump is a task that demands many complex movements. In lecture, we discussed coordination, which is the patterning of head, body, and/or limb motions relative to the patterning of environmental objects and events. High jump requires coordination between all body segments relative to the height of the bar. To do one trial of a high jump, I began by starting at my pre-measured mark, began to jog toward the pad, picked up speed as I turned the corner and exploded up and over the bar while curling my back around it. This doesn't seem that difficult, but there is a lot more to it. Before I perform each trial, I have to calculate my error from the previous trial to decide if I have to move my starting mark based on that as well as if the height of the bar increased. Once I have done this, I start by jogging and counting the number of steps I make with my left foot and accelerate around the corner with a slight backward and outward lean and when I get to the bar, explode straight up off my left leg while raising my right arm, finding the back corner of the mat with my eyes, and pushing my hips up. Once I sense that I am over the bar I kick my feet to prevent them from knocking the bar off. As you can see, there is a lot more coordination between body parts than what meets the eye. High jump is a difficult task to learn and the challenge was what made it fun for me.

Image: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=272541776232228&set=t.100001301967848&type=3&theater

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Track and field is another sport I enjoyed in middle and high school. I ran track from 7th grade until my senior year of high school. I was primarily a short distance runner, competing in the 100, 200, and 400 meter dashes and the 4x100, 4x200, and 4x400 meter relays. My high school is known for our successful relay teams and we placed high at state all 4 years of high school in our short-distance relays. My favorite individual running event was the 200 meter dash and my favorite relay was the 4x100 meter relay.

The mental practice unit we covered in class brought me to question how I have used this strategy in my life. The first thing I thought about was how I would mentally imagine myself running the 200 meter dash before the race even started. Mental practice is defined as the active cognitive rehearsal of physical skills in the absence of overt physical movements. Mental practice requires the individual to be fully focused on the skill. Looking back at the technique I used in track, I would say I followed these guidelines when preparing for my races. I would begin my mental practice as soon as I started warming up for the race. When I was walking to the starting line and becoming more nervous, this mental imagery would become more vivid in my mind. I imagined myself in position at the starting blocks waiting for the gun to signal for me to go. I then pictured myself driving as hard as I could straight out of the blocks and keeping a low stance as I accelerated, slowly bringing my head up and reaching my top speed. As I rounded the corner I would see my opponents in my peripheral and pick the one closest to me and try to catch him. This pattern continued throughout the race until I reached the straightaway and gave all I had to finish the race hard even though I was exhausted. I continuously ran these images through my head before each of my races and I believe that it attributed to the success I had. The type of imagery that I explained closely relates to internal imagery because I was imagining being inside my own body while performing my race while experiencing the sensations that I would during the actual race.

Image: https://www.facebook.com/LaurieMathesPhotos/photos/t.100001301967848/1640990866115530/?type=3&theater

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Contextual Interference In Football Practice

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Contextual Interference In Football Practice

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Football has always been my favorite sport to play and watch. I played football from 6th grade until my senior year of high school. I have experience in many positions including quarterback, tight end, wide out, linebacker, defensive end, safety, kicker, and punter. I also had the privilege of being a student athletic trainer with the UW football team this year, my time with the Badgers has been a great experience and something I'll never forget. I am from the Fox Cities area so I am also a big Packers fan. My dream job is to be an athletic trainer working for a college football team.

From my experience participating in and watching football practices through the years, I have a general sense of how practices are structured. There are certain aspects of the practice where repetitions are blocked and others where they are random. These strategies align with what we learned about contextual interference in class. Blocked practice has low contextual interference and consists of each movement pattern being practiced in its own unit of trials. An example of a situation where blocked practice is used in football includes position-specific drills that are performed individually to improve performance in specific movements involved with that position. These types of drills are usually structured so that the players perform multiple repetitions of one movement before moving onto the next movement. Random practice has high contextual interference and consists of movements that are randomly spread throughout trials. This strategy is usually utilized in game-like scenarios during practice. For example, during a scrimmage, players on defense don't know the play the offense will run or what their movement pattern will be until the play unfolds. In studies that test blocked vs. random practice, blocked trials usually look better in practice whereas random trials usually lead to higher performance in competition.

Image:
https://www.facebook.com/LaurieMathesPhotos/photos/t.100001301967848/1529730697241548/?type=3&theater

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protective equipment in gridiron football