SPORT SCIENCE Garrett Lucash, RFS, RM
Part 4
Dynamics of Skill Acquisition in Figure Skating B Y G A R R E T T L U C A S H , K E I T H D AV I D S , P H . D , A N D FA B I A N O T T E , P H . D
Key principle 3 (specificity and generality of practice for enrichment) Specificity and generality of practice are necessary to enrich athlete performance. To summarize so far: in an ecological approach to practice, athletes are given many opportunities to learn to adapt and self-regulate their actions to dynamic constraints of varying performance environments. Particularly, learners should be encouraged to search and explore tasks in practice and choose functional action opportunities suited to their constraints (see Figure 1 for examples). Training environments in which individuals gradually take responsibility for their learning (key principle 2 in Figure 2) may best develop an exploratory and adaptive process in practice. Eventually, they can gain a more active involvement in co-designing those practice environments by working with coaches to adjust and refine specific task constraints, for example. This adaptive enrichment of the surrounding performance landscape means that practice session designs always need to be considered from the performer-environment relationship. In practice, task demands need to be carefully matched to each performer’s action capabilities and adapted as individuals learn to explore the landscape of action opportunities made available by coaches (e.g., through task constraints manipulations; key principle 2). In skill acquisition, specificity — as in sport-specific training — is an immutable principle of learning and practice: It is essential for skill acquisition. It has been highlighted in many professional education and development programs for sport practitioners interested in education, training, learning, and preparation for performance. However, over the years, less attention has been paid to the importance of more general learning experiences in coach education. More general movement experiences, from varied forms of (unstructured and structured) play and physical activities, such as skiing, gymnastics, dance, parkour, and skateboarding, may be most useful in preparing a young child to specialize in figure skating. A program of diverse activities can provide a repertoire that can enrich the foundational movement capacities
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and general athleticism of an individual, allowing them to quickly adapt to the perceptual, cognitive, social, and movement interactions demanded of performance. Generality of motor learning underpins an individual’s ability to learn new sports (i.e., transfer skills from skiing to figure skating), becoming more prepared for specialized, focused practice in a target sport. To develop general athleticism and functional movement capacities, a constraints-led approach to coaching suggests that individuals need to experience foundational ‘enrichment’ activities, often exemplified by unstructured play and practice, which can empower them to specialize when they are ready. An ecological approach suggests that, although high-level performance is unachievable without specialized practice, coaches should not omit generalized training from performance preparation, believing it to be ‘an ineffective use of time.’ Both specificity and generality of practice experiences are valuable for the enrichment of movement skills and capacities of the individual learner. They are particularly relevant in PE and early development experiences for children prior to specialization in sports training. This idea is consonant with the contemporary focus on ‘physical literacy’ in physical education (see Rudd et al., 2020, for an open-access discussion).
Application to figure skating. In figure skating, children tend to commit to intensive training at a young age, and the principle of specificity and generality is often overlooked. Figure skating coaches should consider challenging existing beliefs about the sport to explore the benefits of developing the athlete first and the figure skater second (all the while, developing the individual as the most vital goal of all). The idea behind developing a general base for an aspiring figure skater is that such a base provides a strong foundation for developing sport-specific skills including steps, turns, jumps, spins, and choreographic movements. Many figure skating skills involve both in-phase (the arms or legs swing forward and backward together) and anti-phase movements (the arms or legs swing in opposition of one another), those that involve upper and lower limb synchronization, and others
