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When I wrestled, our practices were streamline... for the most part. Warmups and cool downs were run by the captains, and those were the same every day. But once we got into the meat and potatoes of the practice, you didn't know what to expect.

My wrestling coach would mix up the practice by including drills such as takedowns, escapes, top moves, shadow wrestling, stance in motion, hand fighting, specific move drilling, conditioning, strength exercises, king of the mat, pit man, and so on. With all of this variability, you had to have your ears open and be a very responsive athlete.

This practice variability ultimately helped up develop into phenomenal athletes! All of the contextual interference from performing many different drills/exercises throughout the duration of each practice helped to simulate a better competition setting while working on specific skills periodically. I think the action plan reconstruction hypothesis explains the resulting performance of my teammates and I very well; task representations were continuously reconstructed and were thus more memorable with random practice.

No wonder were were able to hit all those chain wrestling moves during competition matches!

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For the past four summers I have been employed by my dad who is a carpenter. Through this job I have gained a plethora of handy-man skills. Like any job, timeliness is definitely a factor, especially in carpentry. The faster you get a job done, the faster you get paid. However, speed isn't always the answer. "Why?" you might ask. Well I'll leave that up to our ole pal Paul Fitts to explain.

Back in 1954 Fitts did a systematic analysis of the relationship between speed and accuracy. What Fitts came to find was that as an individual performs a task faster (decreased movement time (MT)), the accuracy of that movement decreases; this is known as the speed-accuracy tradeoff.

So as I previously stated, I've worked hard to become more skilled and increase the speed that I can accomplish tasks on the job. But one thing that I've noticed is that if I try to work too fast, my work gets sloppy. I'll miss nails when hammering, make cuts that are slightly too short or too long, and make marks on finished products; and in the end, these "inaccuracies" end up taking more time to fix as compared to if I would have originally just taken my time!

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Just like Dory, every now and then people have trouble recalling or explaining something. Now maybe it's not because we all have short term memory loss... nevertheless, it's definitely irritating! In my case, I sometimes have a difficult time explaining or recalling a key term in my internship for strength and conditioning with UW Athletics.

Once I finished my last season of high school wrestling, I was officially done with high school sports. Having been an athlete nearly my entire, I yearned for an outlet to continue training. This is when I transitioned to lifting weights. I have been an avid weightlifter for approximately three years now; now by no means am I an expert, but I have definitely transitioned majority of what I do in the weight room into my procedural memory. In example, queuing certain muscles to fire, stable, or just performing a movement properly is done without conscious thought.

This procedural knowledge is great for me, but as an intern it becomes an issue at times. When I see an athlete performing a lift inadequately, I really have to jog my semantic memory in order to correctly explain the movements so that the athletes can lift more efficiently and safely. Although this procedural knowledge seems to present a challenge, and sometimes the athletes look at me like I'm a knucklehead, I appreciate the challenge. In the end, we both get the job done, and we help make one another better at what we do. Thats what it's all about!

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Throughout my youth I participated in the sports of wrestling and football. Commonly people will say that some of the best football players have also been wrestlers. Why is this? Perhaps there is some positive transfer of learning between the two sports.

In wrestling, wrestlers are often observed in a "crouched over" position. This is referred to as their stance. To achieve a takedown, wrestlers have to change their level, or get lower in their stance before they take a shot and properly drive through the hips. Similarly, in football, players have to change their level and drive through the hips to tackle the offensive players.

I mean this in the most modest sense, but my fellow wrestling teammates and I were quick to develop proper tackling form compared to our other football teammates. Clearly positive transfer of this skill was occurring. Thorndike's identical elements theory can explain this transfer by stating that there is a large similarity between skill and context components in the act of changing levels for wrestling and football.

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Coming into my freshman year of high school, I was a mere 135 pounds and stood 5'8". I had a very thin build as I stretched out from a recent growth spurt. As one might assume, this kind of physique didn't necessarily give me an advantage in any sport. Nevertheless, I was determined to continue participating in wrestling, a sport that I was in since the 4th grade.

I was never the best athlete, mainly for reasons associated with a lack in confidence; paired with this mental weakness, was a weak body. Jumping into high school wrestling from the middle school scene presented me with a whole new level of competition. These athletes were cutting to make weight classes, and had highly developed strength and skill sets. I soon learned that I didn't quite match up to my competition, even in my weight class. My size, which was an ability and also a limiting factor, was definitely holding me back.

Throughout my freshman and sophomore seasons i attended various open mats, summer camps, summer tournaments, and worked diligently to fine tune my skills. Throughout this time I also grew 2" and 20 pounds; this growth should not be seen as the variable that led to be my success, for it was the time I put in to develop my skills that changed my outcome. With a newly refined skill set from all of my hard work, I was now the competition I used to fear. The skills, modified by all the practice, were now top tier. I ended up claiming many titles throughout my junior and senior years.