Most sporting skill is from repetition leading to muscle memory so you are able to do the skill consistantly every time. There are lots of examples of pros with "bad" form that still exceeded in their sport just because they had become accustomed to this "bad" form.
Even more, it confuses unconsciously learned skills and skills learned by repetition. Repetition is not always the best or the only way to learn those skills that get mastered at an unconscious level (though it's definitely an important way to achieve unconscious mastery at some things). These sorts of skills often involve physical activity, movement, writing and coordination generally. If a person begins with "poor form" in such a skill, repeating the activity only makes the poor form more ingrained.
Alternative method include something directly guiding student physically and practicing in such a way that you get immediate feedback if you are wrong.
I have a data point/anecdote! I like to play certain sports. After about a year of intense focus and determination, you can get good at pretty much any sport. What I've noticed though is that on a good day, I'm messing up about 15% of the time. If I mess up significantly more than that, I get discouraged and want to go home and try again the next day. If I'm not messing up enough, I feel like I'm overfitting a particular technique and should probably be messing up more to become more well-rounded.
It is natural. This is because you take your skill seriously, so you'll always be trying to improve at it. It's true for other walks of life too (music, athletics, etc.)
Because you're doing the same thing over and over and don't have a lot of latitude to experiment.
Mind you, there can be some value in repetition starting out especially if you make regular minor adjustments. But for someone already at a high skill level, just doing the same old activity probably won't help their skills much.
I learned to swim on my own as a little kid. 30 years later, I decided to join swimming classes; I saw that swimming is extraordinarily complex. There are too many things to learn at the same time for someone to be able to pay attention and learn proper form for all of them. Inevitably, you'll learn proper form for one thing, and incorrect for many others, then, with one good habit in the bag, you can start focusing on the next one, then the next one, then the next one. From time to time, you will fall back to the old habits for some certain part of the motion, so you'll need to revisit it, and debug it again.
Tom Brady, who many people consider the greatest quarterback in the history of American football, still has a throwing coach (Tom House [1]), and he's still debugging his throwing motion. After 20+ years of throwing in a professional league.
So, for sure, unlearning habits is difficult, but learning only proper form from the start is probably an exceedingly rare exception. I think for most people the process of learning will involve learning incorrect form first, and attempting to fix this later.
Well I got really good at it after like 5 years of using it, and that muscle memory never kicked in for me. So maybe it's possible that it can be done, just not by everyone?
One issue is that skills don't last forever. You lose them if you don't practice (and I'm not even talking about body decline). And you can't practice them all at once due to time limitation.
Besides, some skills decline slower than others. For instance, "technical" sports, such as skiing, boxing or swimming, seem to be more engrained in the body. Whereas running abilities decline pretty fast. I usually favour technical sports for that reason.
Y that was my exact thought. You need enough practice (private or public) to achieve the state where you can let your muscle memories to handle the basics.
Muscle memory is only one aspect of it.
Muscle memory fails badly in stress or performance situations.
There also has to be a solid intellectual knowledge of the piece.
Mental practice can help with this.
This is about learning a very specific skill that requires a lot of practice and building a "muscle memory". To some extent this applies to students and some top sportsman, too. For the rest of us, however, most of the work related problems are not about us not being skillful enough, but about the amount of (fairly simple) things that need to be done. That's what's eating time for most of us: easy tasks, but lots of them, day after day...
>leave out the issue of technique. There are certainly times when I start heaving the ball at the ring with a lot less focus on technique and without taking the time to set my feet correctly. When I get my act into gear and concentrate on it I'd bet there is greater chance it's going in.
This is because you're a novice. Directing your working memory to step-by-step instruction will improve your skill performance. However, once the skill becomes more of a motor program (you become an expert), directing working memory to step-by-step instruction will decrease performance.
For me the trick is to know which side it was on when I threw it, and doing the exact same throw each time. You have to practice the same move again and again. Throw and catch throw and catch, like practicing music scales.
If you're doing the same throw and the same catch each time, it just becomes muscle memory (again, like playing an instrument) and you can get a good success rate.
If the play is so standard and automatic then where does skill come in? Or just skill just correlate highly with how many situations one has observed before and potentially memorized?
Most people consistently make mistakes. They're not really playing to win, and going over all their footage to ensure they have their fundamentals down. It's actually really hard to perfect your fundamentals.
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