455 – Do We Really Need to Learn The “Fundamentals” of a Skill Through Decomposition and Repetition First?

[Music] Today on the Perception and Action Podcast, do we really need to use decomposition, prescription, and repetition to drill the fundamentals first? Before we move into a more representative game-like context, a direct comparison of drills and the CLA. So it's time for a call to action. [Music] 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 technologies. Now on to the show. Hi, everyone. This is Rob Gray from ASU in the Perception Action Podcast, back with another article review. In today's episode, what I want to tackle is this, the common bug-a-boo we have about the fundamentals of skill. And the idea I think I've expressed this before, I have a lot of coaches that accept, or they really like variability, self-organization, exploration, and movement skills, after they teach you the fundamentals, right? How can we possibly let a soccer player play a small-sided game before we teach him to dribble or pass? Right, we need to teach the fundamentals typically in a very isolated, decomposed, repetitive, prescriptive way first, get that down, and then we can move them up to these more realistic, representative environments. We're going to plug that basic skill into those representative environments. That's an idea that is really strong, and it's hard to get rid of. A lot of people really, really still believe that. So what we want to do in this paper is going to challenge this idea. And this paper is going to look at soccer. It's called Train As You Play, Improving Effectiveness of Training and Youth Soccer Players by Dukor et al. G-Leach-E-Chow, Former Gaston, the podcast, one of the authors of the course, known for non-linear pedagogy. Right, so this is this paper. So let's have a look. Okay, so kind of a background, right? Research on you typically coming from a cognitive psychology information processing perspective is the idea that you have to build up these motor programs on the fundamentals first. And then you can plug them into the game. And deliberate that as it goes along with Erickson's idea of deliberate practice. You identify what's involved in the skill, what the ideal technique is, and you train to develop those. So we need to isolate the skill so we can develop these automatic motor programs before we actually play the game. Okay, this, you know, has, creates this kind of asymmetry that we've talked about a lot, right? Where the coach knows all the answers, right? The coach knows the correct technique. The coach knows the fundamentals you need to learn. And they're going to prescribe them feedback correct so on. Okay, and so these are all driven by cognitive theories. Also a common thing you still hear now. This is really consistent with cognitive load theory, right? We need to make everything easier for you because your processing capacity is limited. Your attention is limited. Your working memory is limited. We can't throw you in a game right away until you learn these fundamentals. Right? And this has led to this kind of dualistic tradition in sports coaching, which we commonly call traditional coaching that some people get mad at that we use that term, but I don't know how you can't see that that's there. Okay, so this is this persistent idea of the fundamentals or certain set of movement skills you need to learn first in isolation, decoupling, prescription, et cetera, then we're going to plug them into the game. Okay, that's this persistent idea. It's going to be challenged in this paper, right? So we're going to do a decontextualized practice phase to acquire these technical skills, these techniques only later can we put them in once we have those down, can we get them into the game and learn decision making skills? And you still see this, right? You know, and this is I don't this is not a strong hand or characterization from my experience. You typically see a session where 90% of the session is focused on repetition of some desired technique or form, right? I talk about 10th practice, I always see a student soccer, basketball, where the first part of a football practice where all of it, the first part of it 45 minutes of an hour practice is is is repetition of some technique isolated out of the game, no opponents, right? Let's get this technique and then only the last 10 15 minutes do they actually get to play against an opponent if that, right? And there's this hope that this, what we developed in this isolated out of context, unrepresented training will transfer into a game context. There's no real evidence to show that it does, but we have this kind of consistent persistent belief that it will. Okay? We also see this, you know, the, you know, coaches in soccer and other sports are starting to introduce small sighting condition games, right? To start, but they're not, they don't seem to, instead of taking that and replacing the isolated, decontextualized repetitive practice with small sighted games, which can achieve the same thing, they just add it on, right? So they're not taking out, they're not reducing the amount of time done in this isolated product. Okay? So that's kind of a thing, okay? So that's, this is, so this is the thing that they want to challenge in the study, right? We're getting some, right? So what they're going to do is they're going to compare the traditional sequence where you learn the fundamentals in an isolated way and then play with a non-linear pedagogy approach, basically a constraint set approach where you're going to play small sighted games designed to develop some of the basic skills, right? And then, you know, we're going to have much more kind of representative. And what they're going to do that's kind of unique in the study, right? So one of the things when you, in most of these studies where you compare an ecological approach to a traditional approach, right? Where you expect an ecological approach to shine is in highly variable game-like conditions, right? Because you're being, we're helping an adaptable decision maker, you know, it's going to transfer. That's where you expect to see the biggest difference. So typically in studies, in my studies too, right? We test people in more representative conditions, right? So we test them in very representative conditions with lots of things going on, lots of variation in pitch speed in my baseball studies and things like that because that's where we expect to see the big difference. This study is actually taking the opposite approach. It's going to stack the deck in favor of the traditional approach. What it's going to do is going to compare the effect of non-linear pedagogy and traditional approach for very isolated tests. So typical tests you would use to test dribbling, passing, and so on, lateral movement. So what they're going to, in the pre- and post before and after training, they're going to do dribbling around cones and timing, right? So they're going to use very unrepresentative measures that are in favor of the isolate that are very similar to the isolated training to see this, right? So what they're going to, what they want to see is can the non-linear pedagogy approach constraints that approach still be effective even when you're testing and measuring in a non-representative environment and using non-representative tests, which we do eventually want to move away from, hopefully. Okay, so in the study they had three groups, three groups, one control group and two treatment groups they called the play and practice. The practice is the traditional isolated repetitive prescriptive coaching play is small-sided games. There are 40 players from a German amateur and a Scherzacher club around average 10 years. Okay. There was a little bit of a thing. It's not that big a deal, but a methodological issue is that they decided to use, they had, they took them from teams that were playing at different levels. They took the first team was all the control group, right? So that was the control group. The control group was actually a higher playing at a higher level than the rest of the other two, right? Which it's problematic in a way because, you wouldn't expect the control group to show much training benefits. They're a high, as much training benefits just from the start because they're at a higher level, right? You have smaller gains. But, so there's got like a compound between skill level and training group, okay? But at least they decide that to the control group and not one of the other ones. But they split the remaining players into 14 players in the play and 14 in the practice. Okay. All groups went, would did standardized out of context, pass, dribble, and changes direction testing. So they had to do dribbling around cones, passing to a certain things. And they did this post training and after a five week retention period, right? So the deck is stacked towards traditional isolated training because that's what we're going to actually measure your performance under those conditions. If we believe that's effective, if we follow the specificity of practice idea, then you should be better and after traditional training because that's what you're being tested in. Very, very similar to what you practiced in. So the deck is stacked against the CLA or ecological approach and this one, it looks like to me. So what are the training do? So the first group, the practice do decompose training. So they did, they practiced the regular training. The control group just did the regular training. The seven. seven sessions over five weeks, 30 minutes of regular, they did it 30 minutes at the start of training, right? The practice group did a lot of drills, right, dribbling around cones, passing, they were given explicit instruction about the best technique. Their practice was designed to get you to develop this technique. The coach picked the task, they gave them feedback, corrective feedback, and so on, so very traditional coaching. Here are some of the examples of the exercises the coaches can pick from, right, so dribbling around a cone of course of cones to get your ball handling skills, dribbling, adding a passing component to the course cones to get your passing skills and so on, right, so very, I don't need to go into a lot of you, very what you almost always see on traditional soccer practice, right, so drilling, basically drills, and that's what was in the practice group. The play group followed the key principles of nonlinear pedagogy, small-sided and conditioned games, so they didn't do any of the cones or any of that. They had a bunch, they manipulated the constraints, right, they talked about, they manipulated the instruction or the goal of the practice activity, so maintained possession, play over through or around your opponent, try to score, so they had different, and for different activities, they had different goals, they had different rules, they scored possession versus scoring a goal, they varied that, so to change kind of the task constraints, they also changed the field size to create more pressure, the number of balls, at most three, they needed to explain the area, they added change, made it neutral players, so they had a lot of different constraints manipulations they did, right, and they're kind of targeted at developing the skills, but no repetitive, no talk about technique or form or anything like that, so classics, the LA, from the small-side games. So what did they find? First off, I should point out what we're essentially looking for here, unlike a lot of the other studies we've done, because we're measuring in an unrepresentative way, so we're measuring your speed dribbling around the courses, our tests before and after, what we're expecting to see is really no difference, right, what they want to show here is that training in the CLA and doing small-side games is likely effective for developing these fundamentals as doing the isolated practice, and that's really what they found, so here's the overall results, right, here's the time need to complete the course, passing, you know, for pre-test, post-test for the playgroup, retention, right, so they're very, very similar, so there were no significant, mostly, for the most part, there were no significant differences between the group. People learned the fundamentals of handling the ball and passing and lateral movement, changes direction equally well, if they did an isolated repetitive practice focused on that versus playing small-side games, that were manipulation of constraints designed to develop that, okay, there were some evidence within the passing skills that the, they got poor retention in the practice group, the traditional group, right, so here, here's the control group, the red, the traditional groups gets better, and their retention, they get worse, right, so whereas the playgroup, the CLA group is continuing to get a little bit better, so there's some evidence, not very strong, some evidence of that there's better retentions, what, of course, what you expect to find, right, so what they're basically showing is the three groups are the same, as I said, you wouldn't expect this because you wouldn't expect the CLA to really shine here because we're not really testing on our conditions, right, that it's benefit. What we're showing here is that it's equally good at developing the quote-unquote fundamentals of soccer, right, as all the traditional methods. If we now did a gain test where you had to decide, you had to make decisions, you had to pass, then you would expect this group to be the CLA group to be much better, so it has the core teaching the fundamentals and all these other positive things, which has been shown in tons of other studies, right, that they're shown, right, so the, so overall, the originality of the studies that they're, as I said, they're stacking the deck towards the traditional poach by testing technical skills in a very unrepresented way, dribbling around courses, repeating, so if anything, you know, you would expect the isolated groups should be better because they're testing in the same conditions they practice under, but they're not. They also, what they did was they looked at in the practice the number of opportunities participants had to repeat the same movements and what they found was it was less in the small-sided condition games, of course, not surprisingly, and so they could are really challenging the idea that you need a certain number of reps, the deliberate practice, right, you need to develop the fundamentals, right, what they showed is variability seems to be more important than a certain number of reps, okay. The, so some evidence in their retention effects I'm going on here, so they had, you know, the greater variability seems to be more important than strict repetition, right, so I think pretty positive support for the ideas that, you know, this is something I try, we can, you can get the fundamentals in a representative practice, right. You doesn't mean that the representative practice has to overwhelm the person, right, this is not another common thing I hear. Well, if I'm just going to, if there are too many things going on that cognitive load, right, what we want to go for is simplification, not decomposition. Right. We do the number of players, the number of options, right, and then you can make it easier for a new learner, so it doesn't overwhelm them, but having them in the representative design, right, is going to have many, many benefits as shown in other studies, but at the same time seems to be developed these magical fundamentals we seem to be looking for. So I think this is pretty convincing evidence. So it's the finding state in that even a so-called technical skill, right, so the, as commonly shown, you know, commonly put forth in this is we need to develop techno skills, then tactical skills, right. Here we're showing we can develop them at the same time. Okay. Can be, you know, by not, it's more effective. There's, you know, through the retention effects, it might be even more effective. Uh, consequently, study provides further evidence for the possible advantages of non-linear training and skill acquisition, names to encourage coaches to design training to afford players to train as they play representative design, right. You can still get the basics in a representative practice environment if you design it correctly. That's the take-home message of this. I should also point out, right, this is another study I'm going to add to my list of studies that have made direct comparisons between an ecological approach and a more traditional approach, which you can find at perceptionaction.com/comparative, right. I think there's now how many. So I'm going to add, I think there's 16. I'm going to add to this one that I've shown benefits. Right. This is, from what I can tell, my, this is a second study that has shown this kind of idea that you can develop the basics of pattern of movement, the fundamentals, equally as well while exploring, right. There's, this was shown in a weightlifting study, very similar effect to the soccer study. So I think we need to move away from the idea that we need to, we have to develop the fundamentals by drilling. There's just not evidence to support that. And the evidence that's going to transfer into making good decisions is not well supported either. Right. So here's, I think this is a really, you know, for the most part, a very well done study that I said stack the deck towards the traditional approach and still didn't find any difference. Okay, that's it for today's episode. Remember you can contact me at [email protected] or follow me on Twitter at ShakeuAids. To find out more about the podcast, please check out perceptionaction.com. Finally, to support the podcast and receive bonus materials, including a monthly coaches meet up, please head over to patreon.com/perceptionaction. This is RobGrey from ASU. Cheers for now and keep them coupled.