Skill Transfer

I was just going over some of the articles I kept from the Motor Control class I took when doing my Master's a few years back and one of the articles that popped out was one on skill transfer.  For example, does the training an athlete does to work on foot speed transfer smoothly into the sport they are training for? Or, how does learning one skill transfer into learning a similar skill?  Let's take a look at both those examples to see what they mean from a training perspective.

First, we'll take a look at how learning a skill transfers into learning a new skill.  Let's take throwing.  It has been shown that you should first learn to throw correctly overhand, before learning a different technique, such as hitting a tennis ball overhand.   Many young children are put into tennis programs and being taught the overhand serve/volley, without even learning how to properly throw.  When you look at the actions of both the overhand throw and the overhand serve you will see the similarities.  Both involve weight transfer in the direction of a target, hip extension, and so on.  You can see how the skills learned in throwing can transfer quite seamlessly to the skills of an overhand serve in tennis.  And this can relate to more fundamental motor patterns such as running and jumping, which should be learned before more complex movements are taught.

For training, what exactly does this mean.  First, you need to make sure you cover the basics.  Take youth training.  Training for youth should cover running, jumping, kicking, etc. before the more complex movements take place.  When kids have the fundamentals, then the skills learned will be transferred a lot easier into the more sport specific movements.  Seems simple.  But this goes for older athletes as well, not just youth. Learn to squat before you learn to jump.  Learn to throw before you learn to learn to hit a volleyball.

And second we can look at how skills transfer from training into sport.  I will take hockey for my example here.  I take hockey because it's played on skates and much of the training is done, well, not on skates.  So, you would tend to think that training transfer might no be very good when taking what you learned on the ground to the ice.  But the transferability is still quite high from training to the sport.  Much of the off-ice training transfer quite well to movements on the ice.  I was training a young hockey player the other day and we were going over the cross-over start, foot positioning and body position. This was not done on the ice, but it has been shown that certain movements transfer well from off-ice training to on-ice game situations.  The trick is being able to decide and distinguish what movements can transfer well.  The more similar the movement to the skill of the sport, the easier the transfer.

This doesn't mean that all training should look like the sport you are playing.  You still need to get strong, get fast and get powerful.  It just means that certain aspects of training can transfer nicely into game situations.