From the article: To become elite, you need elite coaching from the start. [...] If you are not getting it from the start of your career, and you are instructed to just do it, then by the time you will be an intermediate lifter, you will spend most of your time unlearning the bad motor habits while the rest of the world will be passing you. This is true not only for aspiring elite athletes but also for the non-elite participants who merely seek long-term continuous improvement. Scientific research fully supports this: Studies have shown that people, when left to their own devices, regularly select the wrong path for practice. They often practice what feels good even if it doesnt actually enhance their skill. Put another way by researchers, humans do not always choose the optimal learning strategy when given the chance to select their own training sequence, possibly preferring immediate positive feedback to the chance of exploring new, unlearned task components.(1) Also, remember that silly Gladwell book that identified 10,000 hours as the magic number for expert skill acquisition? The subjects in the underlying study that inspired this imaginary statistic actually had years, in some cases a decade or more, of expert coaching from an early age. The subjects practice activities were of the type designed by full-time teachers and coaches that are available for hire and supervise the personalized training of individuals at different levels of performance starting with beginners.(2) Gladwell conveniently left this out. The original research goes on to say that practice should be a highly structured activity, the explicit goal of which is to improve performance. Specific tasks are invented to overcome weaknesses, and performance is carefully monitored to provide cues for ways to improve it further. It thus allow[s] for repeated experiences in which the individual can attend to the critical aspects of the situation and incrementally improve her or his performance in response to knowledge of results, feedback, or both from a teacher. (2) 1. Huang, Shadmehr, and Diedrichsen, Active Learning: Learning a Motor Skill Without a Coach, Neurophysiol. Aug 2008; 100(2): 879–887. 2. Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. Th., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100, 363–406.
Posted on: Tue, 27 May 2014 21:45:45 +0000
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