Part 4: Dynamics of Skill Acquisition in Figure Skating

BY GARRETT LUCASH, KEITH DAVIDS, PH.D, AND FABIAN OTTE, PH.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 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 that require each of the athlete’s limbs to act in independent ways (think of a level 4 step sequence when the legs are performing different turns and steps and the upper body is enacting choreographic movements).

“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.”

Another point to consider is that all young athletes grow and mature over time. Their coordination tendencies (the unique way their bodies move) evolve as a result. Therefore, an athlete in adult form most likely resorts to different rhythms and coordination patterns they did as a child. For example, if a child learns a triple Axel before puberty, that skill might need to be redeveloped after the child grows and matures into an adult. The triple Axel in child form would look different than the triple Axel in adult form (and this has been an observable phenomenon in both the men’s and ladies’ divisions in recent years on the world stage), even on the same athlete.

The principle of generality and specificity of practice complementing skill adaptation and athletic development, outlined above, encourages coaches to consider how to prepare figure skaters for these experiences. A skater with a diverse base of general athletic movement experiences could better develop, adapt, and refine their skills over time because that base invites a broader range of movement opportunities. Suggested activities and sports for developing a generalized movement base in figure skaters include gymnastics, dance, parkour, martial arts, track and field, skiing, and skateboarding.

Conclusion

In summary, this article introduced an ecological perspective on skill acquisition training that we practically transferred to the context of figure skating. In particular, we discussed principles that may help coaches develop their practice designs to support individual learners at different skill and experience levels. To make a scientific theory of ‘how athletes learn’ more understandable for figure skating coaches at various performance levels, we put forth several principles; these include athlete-environment centered coaching, the practice session design (with a focus on exploration, problem-solving, and constraints manipulation), and the specificity and generality of practice (see Figure 2). All presented learning and coaching principles are based on the constraints-led approach, which stresses the emerging interactions between three categories: individual, environmental, and task constraints (see Figure 1 for examples). These constraints need to be well understood by coaches and incorporated into practice, depending on the needs of individual learners. Further, athletes’ roles as problem-solvers and coaches as facilitators, guiding attention towards relevant action opportunities through constraint manipulations, were highlighted. Finally, we would like to recommend the proposed books and (openly accessible) paper references for coaches motivated to dive deeper into psychological, pedagogical, and motor learning theory.

References

Bernstein, N. A. (1967). The Co-Ordination and Regulations of Movements. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Button, C., Seifert, L., Chow, J.-Y., Araújo, D. & Davids, K. (2020). Dynamics of Skill Acquisition: An Ecological Dynamics rationale (2nd Edition). Champaign, Ill: Human Kinetics. Chow, J.-Y., Shuttleworth, R., Davids, K., & Araújo, D. (2020). Ecological dynamics and transfer from practice to performance in sport. In A. M. Williams & N. Hodges (Eds.), Skill Acquisition in Sport: Research, Theory and Practice (3rd ed.). London: Routledge. Davids, K., Bennett, S., & Button, C. (2008). Dynamics of skill acquisition. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. Lucash, G. (2020). The athlete’s navigation device. The Professional Skater. March-April. 12-13 Newell, K. M. (1986). Constraints on the development of coordination. In M. G. Wade & H. T. A. Whiting (Eds.), Motor development in children: Aspects of coordination and control (pp. 341-360). Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff. Otte, F. W., Davids, K., Millar, S-K., & Klatt, S. (2020). When and how to provide feedback and instructions to athletes? – How sport psychology and pedagogy can improve coaching interventions to enhance self-regulation in training. Frontiers in Psychology - Movement Science and Sport Psychology, 1(1444). 1- 14.doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01444 - Available online at: www.frontiersin.org Otte, F. W., Davids, K., Millar, S-K., & Klatt, S. (2021). Understanding how athletes learn: Integrating skill training concepts, theory and practice from an ecological perspective. Applied Coaching Research Journal, 7. Available online at: www.ukcoaching.org/resources Rudd, J., Pesce, C., Strafford, B., & Davids, K. (2020). Physical Literacy - A Journey of Individual Enrichment: An Ecological Dynamics Rationale for Enhancing Performance and Physical Activity in All. Frontiers in Psychology, 11. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01904 – Available online at: www.frontiersin.org Woods C., Rudd J., Robertson S., and Davids K. (2020a) Wayfinding: How ecological perspectives of navigating dynamic environments can enrich our understanding of the learner and the learning process in sport. Sports Medicine – Open, 6 (51): 1-11. - Available online at: https://sportsmedicineopen.springeropen.com Woods, C., McKeown, I., Rothwell, M., Araújo, D., Robertson, S., & Davids, K. (2020b). Sport Practitioners as Sport Ecology Designers: How Ecological Dynamics Has Progressively Changed Perceptions of Skill “Acquisition” in the Sporting Habitat. Frontiers in Psychology, 11. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00654 - Available online at: www.frontiersin.org Wulf, G. & Lucash, G. (2021) Optimizing Figure-Skating Performance part 2. The Professional Skater, March-April, 10-13