We often discuss the training of novice versus advanced athletes, and
conclude that the latter usually need far less attention to technical
training. We also hypothesise a great deal on the training of isolated
muscles in various neuromotor pathologies or injuries.
While the need for motor training or retraining generally appears to be far
less necessary for the competent performer or the uninjured, there is the
well-known phenomenon where experienced and highly skilled athletes make some
pretty basic technical errors and require specialised training on the basics.
This is particularly common among golfers, whose caddies sometimes help far
more than the pros. We also seem to lose many skills in simple acts like
sitting and standing if we experience fatigue or loss of focus, even though
these postural acts after so many years of life should have become
involuntary and reflexive.
On the other hand, we also know that we can return to a sport that we have
not played for many years and within a short time play with comparable skill.
Apparently, skilled motor patterns are very competently stored in our
nervous systems and can be recruited fairly readily even with minimal
practice.
In addition, research and experience show us that motor skills under
conditions of more demanding or maximal effort are not the same as those
under less onerous conditions, even though they are quite similar. How are
we able to call upon what appears to be a fairly approximate motor model and
adapt it to different conditions as readily as we do in competitive sport?
Would anyone care to speculate on all of these observations? Why do some
very basic skills seem to be 'forgotten' by very experienced individuals?
Conversely, why do some skills remain so persistently present? Does this
imply that all this effort by therapists to "re-educate" or train individual
muscles or joint actions (such as involvement of transversus abdominis and
multifidus) is periodically doomed to failure unless we find out more about
the "half-life" or persistence of neuromotor patterns, or the entire process
of motor learning in general?
Mel Siff
Dr Mel C Siff
Denver, USA
http://www.egroups.com/group/supertraining
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