Speaker 1today on the perception and action podcast how can we logically and rationally analyze a practice drill like kicking a soccer ball against a wall so we can improve its representativeness and connect it with what's happening on the field what are the effects of adding decision making to practice activities so it's time for a call to action hi this is rob gray from arizona state university i've been on a now over 25 year journey as a researcher professor and high performance consultant to understand how we acquire and adapt our perceptual motor skills welcome to the perception and action podcast where i discuss how psychological research can be applied to improving performance accelerating skill acquisition and designing technology before we get to today's topic i want to tell you about my new book learning to optimize movement harnessing the power of the athlete environment relationship available now on amazon in paperback and ebook formats this book is the follow-up to my best-selling skill acquisition book how we learn to move in it i discuss how we can go beyond learning basic coordination to becoming an elite mover evidence-based principles for learning and coaching opportunities optimal movement take your game from proficiency to mastery now on to the show hi everyone this is rob gray from asu and the perception action podcast again in this episode i wanted to touch on kind of two things the first is a controversy that happened on twitter probably about a month ago now maybe a little bit longer um in which people were arguing about a practice drill that was posted and there was a lot got very heated as usual very out of control and i'm going to talk a little bit about that and i want to connect it also to a very an interesting recent study looking at decision making and practice and different levels of decision making so i'm going to connect these two things so this activity i was talking about what what it was was someone posted a picture of a team practice in soccer so all the kids were there on the field ready for soccer practice and what they were doing was they were all standing in the line passing the ball off a wall back to themselves right and they obviously people the person posted said this is you know they're focusing on technique of passing and receiving the ball etc right and as i said people lost their minds on both sides and what i don't want to do here is i don't want to go into the specifics of this i'm not going to show you the post i'm not going to go into the specific comments reactions what i want to do instead is i want to show you that there's a much more rational and logical way we can analyze the situation and we can analyze the situation and we can analyze the practice drills like this and practice activities and try to understand how we can improve them by making relatively small changes and how they fit together right when you know practicing at home versus practicing on the field right so that's what i want to try to do and then as i said i'm going to connect this with this new research paper okay so we have this practice activity where a soccer player is practicing uh passing and receiving the ball by passing it off the wall off a wall or surface to themselves right that's what they're doing the way that i like to assess this and this is something i talk about in the last chapter of my new book i give you an example of this tool i like to use the what kind of my own version of the representative practice assessment tool rpat and this was developed in a kind of a series of studies mostly looking at tennis by lyndon kraus and colleagues and damian farrow and tim buzzard and the great group from ais and i'll be forthcoming i was actually involved in this you know what he did in his first uh paper first study was he uh solicited you know he while he was developing the tool he got feedback from a kind of uh you know a expert panel right and he uh and i was one of them right uh you know quote unquote expert panel and he got us to kind of comment on whether they thought the questions were appropriate and so on right so what this is the representative practice activity is this series of questions that concepts of representative design and you score them on this and it's really not the number itself the absolute number is not really that relevant it's just what's low what's high what can we improve and so on so let's let's use this to analyze this passing off the wall right so the first question is does the goal detail specific purpose i would give that a five out of five yeah when the people talk about this they they say the reason we're doing this is to improve passing and receiving the ball can ball control right and so i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to go ahead and that's a specific purpose so that's fine right um whether the task achieves that or not is a different story but they have a purpose for what they're doing is the information number two is the information used for control what it was like in the game i would give this a two right it's not nothing right the information for passing is not anything like in the game right you're not passing to a player's feet or lobbing it putting it through some defenders there's no information there for like the specifying information for how you actually control a pass right so that is completely lacking if the information for the passing part the information from the receiving part is of getting the ball when the ball comes back to you right it's not completely there obviously you watch the passer uh should pass you the ball uh there's that information is is missing but the soon as it hits the wall right it has a tau it has a bearing angle it's still a ball coming at you right that information is all there right so it has there right there's some information that's like in the game does the task require the player to make decisions right one at the lowest one out of five which is the lowest score no obviously they're passing every time and receiving every time they don't have any decisions involved at all okay um number uh number four does the task require the player to adapt their intentions right what they're trying to achieve no right they're told they're passing right and receiving there's no change in what they're trying to do at all does the task require the player to adapt their movement solution right this is i would give a two right it's not the lowest right there's not much adaptation required because the ball is going to come right back to you you can pretty much receive it in any way but there is going to be some variation right you might hit the wall in the lower or higher my bounce funny right you're going to have to adapt how you're receiving the ball next question does the task provide an appropriate level of challenge for the player i put this in the middle could be better right this could be challenging for a brand new player right um or for a skilled player it's probably not challenging at all right um number last next one are the task dynamics the timing and the force that is what like it required in the game i would give this a three out of five for could be better again the passing hardly at all right to you specific direction on the pass because you're hitting it off a flat surface right the actual control of the passing chipping it lobbing it rolling along the ground there's no requirement from the environment for that right so the task dynamics of passing are quite poor i would argue the task dynamics of receiving it are pretty good right you're still receiving a ball coming at you that you have to control obviously they could be better too right you could have a player around you you could have to receive and then pass as quickly as possible so the advantage is none last one does the task induce pressure or emotional reactions in the player uh i would argue that this has got to be one right this is boring as heck i would think right there's no real you know pressure on you to perform there's no real excitement here that you're just hitting a ball off the wall right so overall this probably has a fairly low score right um and which is what brought the ire of a lot of people on the twitter post right it's a low representative task mostly due to the lack of decision making lack of perceiving affordances the information for the actual passing part of the drill is is quite poor okay so what i want to do you know there's a couple things here right so the first one is we have to acknowledge the fact that people are going to practice at home by themselves right when i practice at home by myself i cannot create the same information for passing i cannot create this emotional pressure i can it's very hard to communicate realistic decision making i cannot create the same information for passing i cannot communicate realistic decision making so should i just not do anything should i just stay inside and watch tv until another person can come over right no so i think that's unreasonable to say we'd never do this right what we want to do is realize that in certain situations there's some of these things on the rpat tool are going to be completely on impossible to achieve right um i can achieve you know the correct information without another person the specifying information so in that situation what i'd rather do is i'd rather do a little bit of a practice and i'd rather do a practice and i'd rather do a little bit of a practice and i'd rather do a little bit of a practice on improving the things that i can instead of completely throwing saying this drill is useful and throwing it away right so first of all one of the things we can do is having player the one question does it require the player to adapt the moving solution we can make this much better by using an uneven surface right having them pat where the ball is going to do unpredictable bounces and things like that so you have to adapt to things we could vary our distance our angle right we could have a some you know something where pass it to we could put a net behind it and have sometimes where you you know you hear a number or something in one situation you pass it one place you shoot it right? Obviously, that's not game-like, right? You're probably surprised. But to me, I think you have to accept the nature of the situation, right? If I'm going to be playing at home in my backyard, there are certain constraints, right, that I cannot get over, right? And to me, to throw out the drill and say it's completely useless because it can't be perfectly representative of real soccer is not very smart. And that's one of the things that sometimes scares me about the idea of representativeness, that we have to have maximal representativeness all the time. I don't agree with that, right? We can move away from fully representative for specific purpose and also in specific situations where it's not achievable, some of these things on the scale. Obviously, this is a completely different story when we actually come to practice, right? When we come to practice on a soccer field and there's other players, there's a net, there's a goalkeeper in their field, we do have the opportunity to add decision-making, change in attention, change of adaptation, and make the task, the action fidelity better. So that is what kind of makes people upset, right? The idea that you are wasting practice time by not taking advantage of the fact that you could push all these representative numbers up when you get. And I agree with that, right? Because most people, if they brought this up, they would have been like, oh, I'm not going to do this. I'm not going to do this. I'm not going to do this. I'm not going to do this. I'm not going to do this. I'm not going to do this. And I agree with that, right? Because most people, if they brought this up, this actual drill to practice on a team practice, they would argue that the reason they're doing it, the reason why they have to do it in the practice session themselves, right? Instead of just letting, telling players to do it at home is they want to give technical feedback about how to control the drill, right? Which obviously is not kind of my way to do it. So, so I kind of agree with the sentiment. I don't think this is an overall, an effective use of team practice time, right? On this representative practice assessment tool that we could massively bump up, right? If we, we have the opportunity when we have other players around and right. And then there's the expression I've used a few times in the podcast. So you can, in this picture, you have a person passing off this special wall, right? That's a practice tool and there's lots of practice tools out there, right? And the expression I like to say is the Brex, the best practice tool ever invented for sports is another player, right? Don't, there's nothing else that can be better. No flashing lights or beeping sounds or walls or whatever. Other players are the best thing we have, right? And you can constrain the other players. So they have to pass only in certain ways and they can't do a really hard pass. And we've talked all about that. But the bottom line is, you know, I, I hope that people kind of take, instead of having these emotional reactions and accusing people of all these things and blah, this representative practice assessment tool, as I said, I talked more about in my new book is a great place to start. And it just gives you a way to think about, okay, how can I change this? How could I improve this representative of this part and that part and realizing that people are going to practice at home and things like that. So we're going to leave that. Okay. So that's the first part of the month. What I wanted to do next was to talk about a related study, right? So there's this interesting new study, uh, come out by Coutinho and colleagues, uh, called exploring the effects of tasks with different decision-making levels on ball control, passing performance, and external load in youth football. So this is, I thought this was a nice connection because they're going to evaluate soccer drills in terms of that one particular component we were emphasizing in the RPAT decision-making. So in the, the, uh, their background, they, you know, they, um, you know, recognize that, you know, there's a strong tendency to focus on technique. Okay. Um, in the idea that we spend most of our practice focusing on drills with no decision-making at all, you're passing to a person that coaches told you to pass to, you're standing in lines passing. Um, and then we play the games at the end. Okay. And everyone, you know, by now knows this is getting more and more criticism because it's decoupling perception for action. There's no multiple affordances available, blah, blah, blah. I'm not going to go through all that again. Um, they also, you know, the alternative, of course, most people promote in soccer, specifically, but in other sports like basketball, hockey, et cetera, is small-sided games. Okay. And they recognize, you know, there's been research on small-sided games showing the benefits, but one of the things surprisingly there, there's not a lot on actually evaluating decision-making specifically. A lot of it is on how small-sided games develop passing ability, shooting ability, et cetera. Okay. Um, so there's this growing understanding of these different training conventions. Um, but you know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of, there's a lot of this, you know, to quote this, for instance, despite game-based situations, having been suggested as practices that may be more relevant to prepare players to act during competitive performances, coaches of youth players still spend a vast amount of time using prescriptive and repetitive tasks, right? So this common theme that yes, there's, we're pushing these small-sided games, showing some of the benefits of them, but people are still going back to kicking out off walls in practice, as opposed to tasks that involve decision-making. So what do they wanted to do in this study was to kind of provide some further support for the benefits of things like small-sided games by, by showing how they, uh, they improve and affect things specifically related to decision making, creating space, things like that. And what they're going to have is they're going to train people under three different tasks, low, moderate, and high decision-making. They're going to call them, and I'll explain these in detail in a second. Um, they, they're going to look at how this works. So let's say they're expecting the, the, the, um, high overall, the high, the decision-making to be better, right? Um, low decision-making is going to kind of hurt people's ability to find open players, move the ball well, right? Because it's not giving them opportunities to perceive these affordances. So, um, and so those are kind of the basic ideas they're looking at. So they're overall just basically predicting that overall, the high decision-making training is going to result in better ball control. And so they're going to look at how this works. And so they're better decision-making, better passing, you know, all these kinds of things. Okay. So what did they actually do? So they took 20 youth, uh, male players at age about 12, 13 from a Portuguese club. So relative unexperienced, not a ton of experience. Um, they did kind of an interesting thing that for me, I'm going to, as you'll to foreshadow is kind of problematic for me. They did kind of two things. They're kind of, so what they did was they used a within subjects and they used a standard pre-post design. So they played a small side of game in which their performance was evaluated, which I'll talk about in a second in terms of passing, shooting, et cetera. Then they trained under one of these conditions. Then they played the small side of game again. Right. Um, and then they looked, so they looked at how the differences between the pre and post performance in the small side of game. And then they looked at how the differences between the pre and post performance in the small side of game. And then they looked at how the difference between the pre and post performance in the small side of game. And then they looked at how it depended on what they did in between. Okay. And as I said, they did this for everybody. So there it's a within subjects design and across seven weeks, they, they did, they all experienced all of these conditions. They were randomized in order, right? So every session you would do a low, immediate, moderate, high and random order measure before and after, before and after, before and after for each. Right. So importantly, they're really measuring what they call the acute effects. So what's the immediate effect, right? After you do a high decision-making practice on what you do immediately after you perform immediately after they're not really evaluating long-term training effects, retention effects, transfer effects like that. We typically see, right. Cause they're not looking at, at those things. They're only meta measuring these immediate effects. Okay. So that's going to be important later on. I'll get to that. They did get players, some general instructions about, you know, orient your body to the ball when you're receiving, you know, look for players, when you're judging the path, but no real technical, technical instructions. Okay. So that's the, the basic design. So as I said, they're going to do a, the pre-test is a, is a small sided game. It's four on four with goalkeepers, right? Just a normal small sided game. They play that for six minutes. Then they do one of the training interventions. We'll talk about each of them in a second. And then they do the same four by four on four small sided game afterwards. Right. So every week they're doing this three, every session they're doing, three of these, right. So they're doing six small sided game, some kind of intervention, small sided game, then they're doing other ones. Okay. So everybody's getting every kind of training. Okay. The low decision-making. So let's go into each of the training, the low decision-making training involved basically standing in a square and passing the ball around the square. So you're receiving the ball from another player, but you know exactly where it's coming from and exactly where you have to pass it. And the focused on was on the rhythm, going around, right? So it was coordinated passing, no decision-making involved, right? You know exactly what you have to do with the ball before you receive it. Okay. So that was the first that's low decision-making. The moderate decision-making was basically the players were standing in a circle and four players, and there were two balls and they were passing it around. And basically they were told pass the ball to a person that doesn't have a ball, right? So they tried to avoid having a person that doesn't have two balls at once, right? So obviously there's some decision-making here involved, right? You're, you have to decide who to pass to based on where the ball is. um they call that moderate decision making obviously it's it's kind of ungame like right you don't make decisions about passing based on where the ball is right you have the ball when you're passing so it's so it's kind of a moderate one right and then the last one was basically uh a small it's kind of a small side of game you had a three on three you basically was three on three with two neutral players that could support either the defense or the offense um the three on three basically their goal was to maintain the ball maintain possession right so obviously there's a lot of decision making here you know who do i pass the ball to on my team do i dribble it do i pass it right so it's very high decision okay so those are the three and remember everybody's doing all of these every session um what do they measure so they use this tool the game performance evaluation tools basically when a scorer watches people perform in a small side of game and looks at every play they make right and they give a score of zero to one based on their their performance their execution their decision making so if i passed a ball to you and it bounced off your feet and went away you'd get a zero for receiving execution right if you um may try to pass if i'm wide open and you try to pass the ball to me but you miss me you get a zero for um a passing execution but you get a one for decision making right because i was clearly a wide open right so someone's watching the video scoring all this and it's either a zero to one they scored a total of almost over 900 actions and importantly for these kind of designs they had two observers so they took a subset of the whole thing and had a second score do them and they looked at how close they were corresponding and it was between 0.83 and 0.94 whereas one is the maximum right so that's quite good right you're not never going to get perfect agreement but that's quite good and it's important that they do that and they also had gps units on people running around and running looking at how much they measure okay um okay so that's what they're measuring what did they find okay their findings are quite modest beyond all these different things they basically looked at the differences between pre and post and they compared the different conditions right remember this is immediately after you're doing the drill and so they looked at execution how what was your body oriented to the right uh the ball execute uh decision making all these things and they basically found three significant differences um after training in the moderate decision making task there was a decrement in your ability to identify offensive players that were open um after the high decision making task there's an increased ability to receive the ball towards the space and finally in in the ball control variables were mostly lower in the low decision making task compared to the moderate right so some things but not quite what you would expect right if you really believe this there's importance of and their hypotheses like you don't see consistent differences between low and high on all these variables right it's kind of just a subset of these variables that came out significant but there's something there and it's kind of in the direction that you would expect right so what do the authors conclude the authors conclude that these training tasks can be used to increase the frequency of technical actions um what they found in they did find some evidence of lower transfer right the performance in the small-sided game after the you know the ability to find open players the ability to execute passes was not as good there was some evidence that was not as good after low decision making tasks they also by the way found evidence for less movement obviously in the low decision making tasks in terms of the gps how much different and so they concluded here's a quote overall prescriptive tasks that is low decision making tasks that are repetitive in nature may affect players perceptual attunement whereas static tasks moderate decision making may limit their ability to locate players in more offensive positions moreover game-based situations high decision making seem to be acutely enhanced players performance possibly due to the contextual dependency right so we're giving them more opportunities to make decisions and we perceive affordances perceive openings right so this kind of on the surface supports you know we're talking about the criticism of kicking off walls which is obviously a zero decision making task okay so that's kind of their conclusions my conclusions i'm not as really as you know i think this is enthusiastic about the results as the authors are um to find just kind of these three random kind of differences and all those things is not um is not you know super strong evidence i think and the clear benefits of high decision making now there's some things there but it's not overwhelming i think this is but i think what they found actually is not surprising to me at all i'd be worried if they found difference what they were looking for why because when within within subjects first of all acute effects are these are a small-sided game is a playing the long game right we're trying to improve you over the long term we don't expect a meat a lot of immediate things right away right those are going to be fairly small so they're hard to find second within subjects design think about it so in some of the training sessions you're going to do the low decision making condition after you've already done the high decision making and then each day you you're going to do the low decision making and you've done three days before of high decision making if if we got the low decision when always bad that would be terrible that would mean the high decision making we've done the day before or the few minutes before had no stickiness right it didn't have any impact on you in the long term it didn't help your skill over the long term there's going to be massive carryover effects in this kind of design right once you practice a high decision making hopefully it changes you changes your ability it changes your attunement changes your information movement control that sticks right and it's gonna gonna stay there and be there no matter what you do next day whether you do a low right so that that's the idea so i'd be surprised i would be worried if we got clear differences here um another issue i have i think people need to know is that there's a lot of people who are not familiar with high decision making so i think people might point out is you know essentially the high decision making task is a small side of game right and the test they're doing is a small side of game a four and four versus a three on three with right so there's very it's very near transfer right it's essentially measuring the same thing just a different variant so i think people might say of course you get better results from the high decision making it's basically the same type of task right a small side to game so i think there would be a bit of criticism there so so overall i think people need to learn more about this but i think looking for acute effects in a within subjects design is probably not the best way to go right um but i think you know what they did find does support kind of why we push for having decision making using other players in practice right but the bottom line what i want to emphasize today is a take-home message right i think you know each of our practice activities i think we can analyze them and most and more importantly improve them in a very logical and rational way by using the high decision making tools like the rpad the representative practice assessment tool and if you want to have a look up for that paper you can find it online it's free to adapt what i want to focus on what can we improve right we're going to play at home in our backyard when no kids are available what can we do to improve that how can we add some variability how can we add change your decisions maybe right instead of just throwing everything the baby out with the bath water and say never do that right that's that's not the right way to go and then at the same time though when we get to practice on the field being more effective and taking more better use of practice time by bumping up those representative variables that we can't do at ourselves by our home look particularly giving people a different perceive affordances for passing shooting driving the ball and making decisions we can't do those as home and making the information more specifying right passing a ball to a player with a defender in between for example right you have you have you have to perceive how the task dynamics of passing are going to change in that way right so hopefully uh you know you kind of appreciate kind of this approach okay so thanks for joining me cheers for now and keep them coupled
PodcastTranscript AI