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Do We Learn This Way?...
Yours and my kid look just like this, beneath the facade of their human nervous system with skeletal chemicals to supercharge their oxygen, blood, muscles, bones, and ligaments to fire and work as beautifully as they do. Underneath it all, we are all cute little robots ready for the download. The techniques are meant to be a one-size-fits-all approach in how they were developed and how they are meant to be learned and deployed in real-time. Unique individual movement patterns were not in the manual of textbooks stating the correct technique to perform an action. Let’s read on.
Games used to be free to play. Backyards, streets, and parks were filled with kids of all ages learning with one another in artful ways. Technique comes from the Greek word "tekhnikos," which derived in Latin in the early 1600s as “pertaining to art, experienced in art, made by art.” Structured sports are developed and facilitated by adults through an adult lens of understanding. Sports today, in general, are aimed at future glory, monetary gains, entertainment, and hopefully physical joy in their pursuit of health and well-being throughout our lives into older ages.
It would seem that all our beautiful young kids, with their different ages, stages, and myriads of differences—be it tall, small, happy, sappy, rough, smooth, black, white, shades of color, with smiles or frowns, legs that are fast or slow, jump high or hippity-hoppity low—are treated the same when it comes to ‘the one way to rule them all...’ Every sport has its special techniques that have been written down as the ‘correct way.’
"Techniques" is a loaded word with its practice and the idea that they are the bedrock of fundamentals that allow adults to give young players the Right to Play. Who hasn’t heard, ‘they need to learn some fundamentals before we let them play a game.’ How else will they get better unless we tell them how to do it?
I’ve heard many times that we can’t have them play until they learn the fundamentals. Who tells us when we’ve learned enough fundamentals to play a game? What is the magical number? Five techniques or fifteen? Maybe even as far as 50 different moves to work on proficiency to show your technique.
Academic research, coaches, physical education teachers, possibly prior professionals in sport, or college players—if you played basketball for 2-3 years in high school, would you have enough background to impart the fundamentals to our young people starting out? One coach passes down to another coach, to another, and another. Everyone in multiple sports is starting to look like our player up top in the picture in white and black. Homogenized—Losing diversity and everything becoming the same. Miniature robots.
“There are some people who might have better technique than me and some may be fitter than me, but the main thing is tactics. With most players, tactics are missing.’ ‘Technique is not being able to juggle a ball 1,000 times. Anyone can do that by practicing. Then you can work in the circus. Technique is passing a ball with one touch, with the right speed, at the right foot of your teammate.”
—Johan Cruyff
Is this idea of tactics not intrinsically learned by our decisions playing games?
Quick History
In the early 1900s, Behavioral Psychology became popular with the idea that we could be stimulated by repetitive behavior and soon we would habitually gain proficiency or common outcomes. Thorndike was influential in our modern educational psychology and studied the behaviors of cats. Pavlov became famous with his dog’s theory—remember the whistle blow when food was given to dogs? Over time, the food was taken away and the whistle was blown, and the dogs still salivated as though they were about to be fed. We are products of the procedures and repetitive behaviors imposed upon us. The idea is we are not interacting with our environment; the environment dictates stimulus and we respond accordingly to how we repeated the behavior.
Later in the 1940-50s, Cognitive Psychology and Informational Learning Theories emerged with the influx of understanding computers, technological advances, suggesting we can download knowledge by stating what we want as an action (technique). Repetition, rote learning, and imparting knowledge are key, with the idea that you repeat over and over again to lose unwanted variables. This approach operated on the notion that we learn and function only from the neck up. A computer cannot have a glitch, or it crashes or malfunctions the desired outcome. So, get rid of the noise and tell a person exactly how and what you want done. Thank you Prof. Keith Davids for some of these insights.
The military did the same thing through their drills: assess an individual on how well they can do a procedure and select the ones who do these activities in the way deemed correct. It’s a very top-down approach to keeping control of personnel—no glitches in the system.
This may sound harsh, and I agree it is harsh—especially in how young people are treated as machines to be designed in the fashion we say is correct. This is the essential idea behind a technique: repeat often enough to eliminate any unwanted inefficient movement. It doesn’t take into account that life is messy and doesn’t work in perfect form.
There is no fundamental technique that must be shared or downloaded. There is no perfect technique; it doesn’t exist. Yet, we have programs in the name of teaching, drilling the discovery and exploratory period out of our youth to produce movements that have already been experienced by someone other than the child in front of us.
Repetition Without Repetition
There are similar movements that can look identical and rather different. These movements are all different. "Repetition without repetition" was coined by Nikolai Bernstein, who recorded research proving that repeated movements are comprised of smaller movements to perform the task. We adapt our movements according to the affordances within our perceived abilities. Hence, the term 'repetition without repetition' was born.
I prefer the phrase ‘adapting to the familiar.’ It’s true that what we call certain movements as a technique, under scrutiny, are never the same. A technique is an average on a continuum scale. Hence, adapting to the familiar.
If you have an interest in diving deeper into how our bodies move, I would suggest reading Rob Gray’s book, How We Learn to Move. In his book Rob explains that, "We repeat an action outcome but not by repeating the movement that produced it." Human beings are an amazing bunch of adaptive animals perceiving our environments and then making decisions on what to do next. We have done this for ages. Only through these decisions do the actions to follow resemble effective or less effective means by which we express ourselves through movement and discover the answers to the questions we have about life.
I’m Not Saying There is No Learning with One Ball One Player
I am saying that we do not need techniques taught out of context to learn how to play a game efficiently. We will adapt our movements to solve the problems. It is also a huge waste of time with the limited number of minutes any team has to work together on isolated movements. To play with a ball or puck on your own is a great way to explore yourself with the apparatus within your sporting interest. You can take breaks, reflect on a movement you never had done previously, and take your pace in getting acquainted with how your body moves differently than everyone else’s.
Team Play
When time is limited and precious, and the importance of getting together as novices on the road to developing better skills over time is high, the decisions we make and the actions we take will give us immediate feedback on whether something was successful or not. We don’t need a critical eye to place a judgment value on whether we kick the ball well or not.
Listen to the research by Martin Erikstad at the Department of Public Health, Sport, and Nutrition, Universitetet i Agder in Norway. You’ll here about the special environment that superstar Erling Haaland grew up in. It's on Stuart Armstrong's, The Talent Equation Podcast.
Reflective question: Who was flawless in anything we took up for the first time? Didn’t we enjoy the time to figure out how to do something without immediately being told that what we’re doing isn’t correct and we need to do it another way?
Autonomy
Autonomy is independence or freedom, as of the will or one's actions. We are there to support and not hinder exploration. We learn through the power of process. It is discovering the ways in which each of us is different than another. These techniques are handed down through books from before we were born. It is impossible to do a movement exactly the same way each time, let alone exactly how a book of movement says that an action must be done. These ideas are difficult to discard.
"...No ball arrives the same as another; no shot is identical."
—Rafael Nadal
Techniques only emerge as skill when we are in the process of 'doing.' The techniques come out of the play we are engaged in. Play to learn movement adaptations; don’t train techniques to then play. If a 6-year-old child is trotting and kicks a ball out in front of him, that very action is a technique. Once he has an opponent in front of him and he makes a decision to go around that player while kicking the ball, that technique or movement is then known as 'skill.' That action will be adaptive and refined as he grows and plays, naturally and organically.
Lastly, when we explicitly tell someone there is a way to do something, they are learning it out of context and will often employ the so-called technique at times that do not call for that movement. That is why these so-called techniques must be experienced through the doing of our actions to be relevant and representational to the problems we face in the moment. We interact with our environment; we don’t control our environment.
This is the barren landscape of learning a technique that is not born out of our experience. As I’ve heard Prof. Keith Davids and Prof. Rob Gray mention, a flock of starlings does not have one leader, but many in flight take on the role of leader and fall back to follower when tired or when wind currents change. Don’t limit the flight of our kids’ heights before they have a chance to explore their movement capabilities.
They are unique, blood-pumping, individually thoughtful, and active participants in sports. They are not robots under their exteriors. Let’s not treat them as information dumping grounds. Let our kids have independence; we’re built for variation and adaptability.
The days of team drills and technical training can be laid to rest. Allow some room to adapt to what is familiar. They may just surprise you with their skill, movement, and ability to express themselves beyond what any isolated technique could display.
“I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas;
I’m frightened of the old ones.” – John Cage
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