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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 %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%