Judgement Day 10th June 2014

Session 12

The time was finally here, my last session, to prove to myself that I have even a slight chance that with more training I could have what it takes to make it in the NFL. To get that multi-million dollar contract, the fame and the woman that all are part of the parcel of being a top level athlete. Through the development of practice, a skill has the ability to become automatic (Anderson, 1981). A reoccurring guideline to skill acquisition is that it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill. In Gladwells book Outliers, The story of success, quotes neurologist Daniel Levitin:

"The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert—in anything" (Gladwell, 2008)

This seems to be a general rule when it comes to how long it takes to master a new skill. However when it comes to motor acquisition there are 3 stages involved

1. Cognitive
This stage is for the new learners who require alot of visual and verbal feedback and help with the gross movements involved. For my learning this was used in my early sessions that involved the 4 stages of pass. Since I recorded my movements this allowed for visual feedback. The cognitive stage is regarded as having alot of gains in short amount of time with little consistency in execution.

2. Associative (Motor)
The associative stage (also known as the motor) is characterized as refinement of the gross movements, with less feedback than the cognitive stage. It is when you start to involve conscious performance, start to include an outcome focus. Once I developed an understanding of the basic throwing movements I started to record my success rate with hitting my targets allowing me to determine if i was improving or not.

3. Autonomous
The last stage of motor acquisition, this stage requires years of practice to reach the autonomous stage. Only top level athletes tend to reach this level, it is when cognitive processing demands are small allowing the athlete to focus on other things rather than the movement. In my learning I do not think I have made it to this stage as I still required a large amount of feedback for each throw and it was not very accurate.
(Huber, 2013)

Session

For my final session I planned to record all my throws (excluding warm up) and see if i have improved over the 12 sessions.

10 throws from knees (warm up)
10 throws standing (warm up)

5 throws to stationary (10 metres)
5 throws to moving (post pattern short)
5 throws wile moving in a back diagonal motion to moving (post pattern short)

5 throws to stationary (20 metres)
5 throws to moving (post pattern deep)
5 throws wile moving in a back diagonal motion to moving (post pattern deep)


In my final session I hit 21/30 throws, this is 70% success rate. I found that during the session I was comfortable with the short throws wile stationary but when I had to move and throw it would take my body out of alignment and cause me to miss my target. I struggled with the deeper throws as I had less confidence throwing further, and this effected my performance.

Moving in a back diagonal motion wile throwing, note I keep my feet underneath me for balance and center of gravity.

Throw to Post pattern (short)

Conclusion

Over all of my planned sessions I only threw the ball approximately 400 times and 6 hours of practice all added up. This is a very small amount of hours (0.06%) of time in Gladwells (2008) concept of 10,000 hours practice. Therefor even though I have completed my 12 sessions I feel am still in the cognitive/ associative stage of learning, now I need lots of repetition if I wish to fulfill my dream of being a star QB in the NFL.


References

Anderson, J. R. (1981). Cognitive Skills and Their Acquisition. Lawrence Earlbaum Associates.

Gladwell, M. (2008). Outliers: The story of success. New York: Little, Brown and Co.

Huber, J. J. (2013). Applying educational psychology in coaching athletes. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.