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Performance curve and Plateau

A performance curve plots performance versus practice or time and shows improvement and consistency which are both important characteristics of learning. A performance curve is also helpful when tracking progress and figuring out if new plans need to take place with an athlete. For example, if I were to plot my race times over the first 5 years or so of me swimming, the performance curve would look very much like the typical negatively accelerated curve or the Power Law. In this curve, there are large improvements at first and they get smaller as practice continues. As I moved from the cognitive stage where I made large improvements due to simply narrowing down the correct strategy, to the associative stage, my improvements started to decline. I say the first five years only because after five years of swimming, many outside factors contributed to a new large gain in improvements such as a growth spurt, change in teams, and increase in motivation. If I were to include all 13 years of me swimming, the curve would look much more like an ogive curve (s shaped) because swimming is a complex skill, and many factors go into my performance.

I also experienced a very common problem in swimming and in many sports of the performance plateau. In this time I stopped seeing improvements and even started seeing slower times. This again was impacted by variables such as injury, high fatigue, and low motivation. Like the story I told in the arousal example, I had a very large time drop at the end of my high school career after experiencing poor performance all season. My increase in performance was not because I had learned or improved my stroke greatly but more because of my motivation and the situation I was placed in. Lots of factors impact performance, but from a learning perspective, the overall trend over my 1000 races would be similar to the S-shaped (or several s-shaped) curve.

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I have been and always will be a distance athlete--I can not get explosive speed to save my life. I always swam the long races no one wanted to swim like the 500 free and the 400 IM and now I am involved in distance running and triathlons that last upwards of three hours a race. Although I only race endurance events, I also work on sprinting and speed work to keep up my pace for when I do swim/bike/run the long events. Even though to me the sprinting action and the distance action seem TOTALLY and horribly different, they are a part of the same generalized motor pattern.

A generalized motor pattern represents a class of movement patterns (not every single variation). Invariant features of a GMP include the order of events, phasing, and relative force. In swimming freestyle for example, the order of events within the stroke will always be the same. The hand enters the water out in front, catches water under the body, and extends out the back. Because the order for freestyle stays the same, the stroke is under the same GMP regardless of it is a sprint free event or a distance. Butterfly, backstroke, and breaststroke however would be a different GMP even though it is within the same sport of "swimming". Next, the phasing or the internal rhythm of freestyle is the same in the two variations: sprinters just spin their arms and kick their legs faster than a distance swimmer. Finally, the relative force used by any two muscles is constant when going slower versus fast. Sprinters may use more explosive power in their legs when kicking, but the amount of power used in a ratio between the gluteus medius and the psoas major muslces will be relative to the force used in those muscles in the distance race. GMPs also have variant features such as overall duration (distance swimmers obviously swim for a longer amount of time and yardage), overall force (sprinters typically use a more powerful stroke), and muscle selection although variant doesn't change a ton in the two variations of the distances.
(Me after a one mile open water swim)

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Central resource theory

There are two resource theories: the central-resource and multiple-resource theories. The central resource theory claims that there is one, central reserve of attention that all of our actions compete for. This resource is flexible in size and dependent on the circumstances. One circumstance thought to be important is arrousal or the stage of excitability as shown by Yerkes-Dodson law. At low levels of arousal and very high levels of arousal, the capacity for attention is low as opposed to a middle, optimal level of arousal. With less available attention performance can suffer, and this can be seen in high-stakes competition situations when stress levels are high.

Often it is seen where an athlete gets so nervous about a race that they think too much about it and choke--their performance declines. In order to avoid getting too worked up over a race I would let myself be nervous up until about an hour before I swam. In the next hour I would loosen up and occupy myself with anything non-swimming related like listening to music, talking with teammates, and not watching other swimmers. This typically kept me pretty calm behind the blocks but I was still just nervous and excited enough to keep my arousal from dipping too low. This optimal level of arousal helped me perform my best like in my last race ever as a high school swimmer. I knew that my times had been struggling all season, and I also knew that it was my last chance to get a best time and to prove what I have been training for. I was very nervous, but I also told myself that this was my last race and that I needed to relax and have fun. In that race I dropped over 15 seconds and had a lifetime best for the first time in over a year. This was the most collected I ever remember feeling before a big race, and keeping my arousal levels at a middle ground helped my central reserve for attention stay high and allowed me to focus in to have the best reaction time off the blocks, keep a good feel for my pace throughout the race, and to focus on my strengths off of the walls. Staying calm but also alert in stressful situations is difficult but beneficial to performance.

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Practice variability

Even after a thousand practices, there were still days that were different than any other practice before. It was important to practice a variety of strokes and distances from day to day in order to be prepared for any race from the 50 free to the 400 IM. One important skill learned through many trials is related to the Schema theory. The Schema theory is about practicing a class of movements to acquire rules to determine values necessary to produce different versions of the action.

In swimming there are many different lengths of races including sprints like 50 yards/meters, or 100's, and long distance races like the 500 and 1000 free. These distances are different variations of the same action, but because they are different in length, adjustments have to be made in speed and energy expended throughout the race. A distance swimmer can not start a 1000 yard race at the pace that they use for their 50 yard race. By practicing different length sets before competition, over time a swimmer develops a schema to decide how they must pace themselves. This pace becomes innate because a swimmer typically can not see a clock while they swim, so they use feelings of fatigue to determine how hard they are going. I have practiced such a spectrum of distances that my schema lets me predict the pace and speed that I am capable of for any novel distance, even ones that aren't normally seen in competition like 175 yards or 250 yards. The variety of races in swimming emphasizes the importance of practice variability and developing a schema individualized for each swimmer.

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Fitts and Posner's Learning Stages

From swim lessons to championship swim meets, I moved through the three learning stages that Fitts and Posner identify. The first stage is the cognitive stage, and this is mainly characterized by learning "what to do" and using multiple strategies to figure out what works. I was in this stage as a brand new swimmer in swim lessons way back when I was five years old and even before formal lessons as I tried to figure out how to move in water the first time I was in it. During this time I worked through what movement patterns were moving me in the water and which were preventing me from staying afloat. My performance was inconsistent, but because I was starting to gradually pick the correct strategies, I was seeing large performance gains.
As I moved from doggy paddle to splashy freestyle I started swimming on a competitive team when I was eight. During this time I got augmented feedback from coaches and additional practice hours that helped me figure out the best strategy. Once the best strategy for my stroke was picked then I moved into the Associative or Refinement stage. I became more consistent with my swimming, and I was able to detect when my stroke was bad but I didn't always know how to fix it. I knew that I wasn't kicking at the right time during my butterfly because I wasn't going anywhere! But at that time I just didn't know how to time out the stroke.
Finally, as I moved my way up on the team and throughout my high school and college club swimming career, I entered into the Autonomous stage. My skill requires little attention, and I can perform simultaneous activities such as calculating my times and yardage in my head or talking with someone during a kick set. I can also detect and correct my own errors like when I am too far away from the wall when I turn over on a backstroke turn, I know how to lengthen my arm pull and pick up my kicking to get my feet close enough to the wall without being disqualified. My extensive experience and hours of practice, feedback, and rehearsal moved me through the learning stages. I can now swim without much thought even after much time out of the pool (retention), and this shows the learning that occurred over my 13+ years in the water.

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Augmented feedback

As an instructor, it is important to consider the skill level of the swimmers I instruct and what feedback would be best for them. Most of my students are young and beginners, so it is best for them to receive limited augmented feedback after their performance and prescriptive verbal knowledge of performance.

Limited augmented feedback is important so my swimmers do not become dependent on my feedback and so that they can learn to use their inherent feedback to analyze their stroke. For example, a common problem in backstrokers is for the swimmer to pick their head up too much causing their legs and hips to sink. If I were to tell them every time they did that, they wouldn't be able to use their inherent feedback from their senses like proprioception to feel that their chin is tucked and that their body is sinking. To avoid too much feedback I ask my swimmers before they start their lap to think about their head position during their swim, and then after a few laps I ask them to tell me what they felt their head, hips and legs doing to analyze their own errors from the inherent feedback. By directing their attention to one aspect of the stroke it avoids them being overwhelmed and allows them to learn how to use the inherent feedback that they must rely on during a race. Prescriptive verbal knowledge of performance is also important in beginners to help correct errors. If I were to just tell my swimmer that their legs were sinking, they would not know yet what they should do to correct the error. Instead I tell them to keep their head tilted back to lift their legs up. The association between what to do and how it fixes their error is beneficial to them remembering and learning the position.

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Adaptability and transfer

One of the characteristics of learning is adaptability. This is defined as the capability of performing a skill different from the practiced skill or in a different context. For the majority of my swimming life I have been a competitive swimmer in pools, but in the past several years I have started competing in triathlons that require open water swimming. Open water swimming differs from pool swimming in that there is far less visibility, no lane lines to guide me from zig zagging across the lake, no walls to flipturn off of, and waves that create quite the obstacle. These characteristics are part of the context of swimming, but there is also a slight variation in the motor patterns for open water swimming because in order to see, open water swimmers must lift their heads up out of the water occasionally in a technique called spotting. The open water swimming for me is a transfer test that shows that I can adapt my knowledge of how to perform the skill of pool swimming in a new context and slightly different skill variation.

This skill also shows the concept of positive transfer as my practice of pool swimming improves my skill of open water swimming. Because swimming in a lake is more dangerous and harder to access, I do not practice it often. Instead, I practice pool swimming and then experience improvements in my open water swimming in the few trials I have out on the lake. This reflects the Identical Elements Theory because the two tasks share a great number of shared elements and therefore facilitate transfer. The component parts such as the observable movement patterns and the elaborated automatisms (such as the force used by the arms to pull the water) are similar but not identical.

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Declarative and Procedural Memory

As a swimmer of 13 years, the skill has become automatic to me so that I can devote so much of my attention to other areas that I often forget that I am swimming and snap back into my stroke 1,000 yards later. Because I can perform this skill unconsciously and automatically, my knowledge of how to swim is in my procedural memory, or my "how to" knowledge.

However, it is interesting because even though swimming is in my procedural memory, I have no trouble recalling how to swim from my declarative memory. I have been a swim instructor for 7 years, and my ability to explain swimming to beginners and more experienced swimmers comes naturally even though when I do the action myself it is automatic. When an expert tries to harness declarative memories in the execution of a skill  stored in procedural memory, this typically results in choking like shown in both Beilock and Flegal's study on golfers making putts. In Beilock's study, the experts had a harder time describing their previous putt than the novices did, and this showed that experts relied more on procedural memory and novices on declarative. Flegal's study showed choking when there was a negative influence on the good golfers when they were asked to consiously analyze their putts (Lecture Notes 2018). The difference between me teaching however and the definition of choking is that my teaching is separate from my performance--if I were to think about my stroke during my race it is possible that my performance would decline. Although, I think that the results between discrete or serial skills like the golf putts would be different than continuous skills like swimming in regards to performance when relying on declarative memories of a task stored in procedural memory.