How experts get even better

Monday, October 15th, 2018

A team of researchers in the UK asked expert and intermediate players of Gaelic football to perform 10 kicks from the ground (like a penalty kick in soccer) and 10 from their hands (like punting a football) at target zones on the gym wall for points and then had the players practice for 15 minutes, once per week, for four weeks, to compare how experts practice versus non-experts:

Experts work on their weaker areas; intermediates work on their stronger skill.

The experts spent a greater percentage of their time working on their weaker kick — 66% of the time, compared to the intermediate athletes who devoted only 27% of their time to improving their weaker kick.

Not surprisingly, the experts demonstrated significant improvement on their weaker kick from the pre-test to the post-test (improving from 14.4 points to 19.9 points). Their improvement was also more permanent, as their scores remained stable 6 weeks later on the retention test (19.4 points at retention test).

Conversely, while the intermediate players did make significant improvements to their stronger kick from pre-test to post-test (8 points to 14.7 points), their improvement was less stable, as they regressed on the retention test (12.7). And more importantly perhaps, their weaker kick did not improve at all.

Experts put in fewer repetitions, but expend more effort and energy on each one.

Both expert and intermediate footballers spent the same total amount of time practicing, but experts logged fewer practice attempts than the intermediate group (43.9 vs 56.4 practice attempts).

However, results from the effort and enjoyment assessments suggest that the elite performers expended more effort on each practice attempt.

Specifically, the experts rated their practice sessions as being less enjoyable than the intermediate players (57.7% for the experts vs. 75.8% for the intermediates, where a rating of 65-70% equals riding on an exercise bike at a comfortable pace for 20 minutes).

The experts also rated their practice as requiring more mental effort than the intermediate players (57.9% vs. 30.7%, where higher scores=more effort).

The experts rated their practice as requiring more physical effort as well (58.8% vs. 46.8%, where higher scores=more effort).

This is likely due to the experts and intermediate players’ focus on weaker vs. stronger skills. The more repetitions the experts did of their weaker kick, the less enjoyable they rated their practice time to be. And the more repetitions the intermediate players did of their stronger kick, the easier and less effortful they found their practice to be.

Experts do more planning before each practice attempt.

Based on the voice recordings of their spoken-aloud thoughts during practice, the researchers found that experts did more thinking and planning before each practice attempt.

On average, the experts made almost twice as many statements per attempt than their intermediate counterparts (3.3 statements vs 1.7 statements). In particular, they made more “monitoring and planning” statements before each kick. In other words, they seemed to be able to better utilize feedback from the previous kick and form a clearer plan for what they were going to do in the subsequent kick.

Experts do more random practice.

Experts spent less time engaged in a “blocked” style of practice — spending 17% of their practice sessions in this format, as compared with 22% for the intermediate players. Note: For this study, blocked practice was defined as spending at least 60% of the practice attempts in one 5-minute block on just one kick, with only one switch between kicks per 5-minute block.

The expert footballers also spent more time engaged in “random” practice — with 26% of their practice being considered random, compared with the intermediates who at 3%, did almost none of this kind of practice. Note: For this study, random practice was defined as 4 or fewer consecutive trials before switching to the other kick. Or in other words, to be considered random practice, athletes could do no more than 4 kicks of the same kind in a row.

Comments

  1. Ross says:

    Cool.

    When a computer does this on a set of classifier data it’s called “boosting”

  2. Graham says:

    The retention aspect is the most interesting to me. And the one that perhaps intermediate performers should most take to heart.

    Otherwise it actually makes sense that intermediate performers at anything would both play to and attempt to build up their strengths while keeping their weaker hands serviceable. Experts have the room and the reason to try to build out as well as up.

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