Engaging in cognitive behaviors is something that humans excel at. In fact, if you teach a person a technique, they can usually pick up that technique and repeat it time and time again, gaining stamina, accuracy, and precision after repeating a task several times. Through stages of steps, people gain more and more readily available precision skills, and these skills can be related back to self-coaching, growth, and professionalism in regards to one's own behaviorism. It's easy enough for people to learn new tasks, and as they learn they understand more and more about how they're preforming a task, how it relates to them, and exactly how they perform a task. The difficulties lie in understanding that no simple- one to one correspondence exists for any one task- meaning that everything can be done another way. ![]() In this article, we'll discuss how people learn difficult tasks, how they self-correct through repetition, coaching, and analysis, and how the body learns through muscle movement and the nervous system to master various subsets of a near-indefinite amount of Degree of Freedom (DF) functions that focus on motor control and motor learning. The first step at hand is simply understanding what should be done. We're forced to repeat movement time and time again to develop the proper strategies to perform a task, and our early performance is inconsistent and hard to "track". The difficulty, according to Bernstein, is incorporating various forms of organization to our mechanical freedom problem so that we can legitimately see the true dynamic of the actions that we are performing, and the increase or decrease of constraints on what we're doing (Tsuji, 2005). While learning and legitimizing a task are important, we eventually fixate on what we're doing. This means understanding that we're doing something right, can repeat the task and can further expand our knowledge of our actions. Our performance becomes easier to predict, and we're learning things on a consistent basis. In this stage we persist for a long period of time, making small, gradual changes until we've eventually accepted the form in which we recreate an activity (Rothstein, 1981). Eventually, a skill becomes autonomous in nature, we can perform a task with relative ease (i.e. piano music, applied work skills, even tasks like sewing, cooking, or performing a minimized sport task like bowling or throwing a Frisbee) and little inference, but we feel as if the task is boring, because we haven't really got to "pay attention", even though the body is integrally processing each individual action as it happens (Schmidt & Wrisberg, 2000). For an individual to progress, we see the Degree of Freedom required for motor skills dramatically increase, despite the lack of evidence suggesting such. The difficulty is understanding how exactly our body responds to difficult tasks- through Bernstein's understanding of neurological muscle and reaction development. The central issue remains how we're performing a task and why, a "relevant" task still must be dynamic and multifaceted to continue to grow (like fine motor sports e.g. tennis, golf, football, or soccer), Bernstein suggests that a task must be increased and decreased for the understanding of new task demands to really grow and progress through muscle growth and development (Stelmach, 1992). This equates to lifting weights, toning muscles, and exercise activities that force the body to be pushed to its limit consistently. Very little research has developed these points, as it's very difficult to manipulate and perform consistently in a "professional fashion" (Villa, 2012; Tsuji, 2005) for a long enough period of time to perform in a research experiment- however we know this phenomenon happens, because we observe various "professionals" in task in our daily life- in industry, music, and performance activities, it's simply impossible for their brains to legitimize the action that makes it repeatable for others, because it's second nature to them- or the entire principal surrounding developed motor skills and learning. References:
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A little bit of technical, a bit of physical, a bit of mental...all tennis. We're looking at topics that will help coaches as well as students appreciate their tennis journey.
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December 2018
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