Dr Rob Gray (Associate Professor in Human Systems Engineering at Arizona State University) talks about coaching in sport as well as skill acquisition in baseball and the future of virtual reality in sport
Timestamps
00:00 – 03:41 – Introduction to guest, background and topic
03:42 – 09:49 – What is skill acquisition?
09:50 – 14:08 – Consistency vs improvement
14:09 – 20:39 – The role of the coach in skill acquisition
20:40 – 24:19 – What would a typical study consist of?
24:20 – 35:10 – Virtual reality in coaching and skill acquisition
35:11 – 41:15 – The variability of the virtual world compared to the real world
41:16 – 48:35 – Where is research and coaching going in the next few years
48:36 – 51:42 – Where to find out more about the topic in the episode
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Welcome to the experts in sport podcast brought to you by the school of sports exercise and Health Sciences at lury University I’m Stuart McCay Naylor and in this Sports Performance themed episode I’ll be joined by Dr Rob gray an associate professor in human systems engineering at Arizona State University
Rob hosts the perception and action podcast and is responsible for at least a couple of Decades of research into how humans learn skills in sports such as baseball we’ll be discussing all things coaching skill acquisition and virtual reality in sport hi Rob welcome to the experts in sport
Podcast thank you st nice to be here brilliant so we’ll get straight in then I’m always interested in this question but what first sparked your interest in baseball and skill acquisition in particular yeah that’s a good so like many I think many sports scientists my own athletic career led into uh and
Failures in thereof um led into I was always I started skill acquisition I was my sports career a lot of I wasn’t always the most physically gifted but I was kind of I felt like I was a bit one step ahead of people kind of anticipation things like that so I
Always wanted to understand that baseball started um kind of twofold one is is I just thought it was a good skill to bring into the lab it’s very cons the people standing the same place every time instead of people running around a soccer field or ice hockey rink it would
Be hard to study I thought it’ be easy to bring into a lab and control things and then in the area I live there’s so much going on with with uh training baseball just having a fit uh to be able to apply it in in Arizona then what happened or what
Sparked the academic passion I guess especially everything’s different in different countries I know the system in the US is slightly different to the UK but what route did you take from that person who said playing sport passionate about sport to then being someone who had a lab where you could start to think
About well all right maybe baseball there’s less movement it’s a bit more static what’s the missing link in between that yeah so I started out in Psychology I started studying Vision kind of visual perception and I I recognized early on to though I always sport was always my main interest that I
I called myself a performance scientist and I studied things like driving safety and work with uh Pilots because I realize there’s more money there for funding and grants especially when I first started so I kind of broadly did I started research that way and and then I
Always tried to sell using sport as a way to understand skill and motor control perception generally like let’s let’s understand it when it’s working at its highest level um instead understanding for sport for sports sake to make better you don’t get many grants in especially North America for making
People hit balls better right so that was that was always my pitch and it was some sometimes successful early on and then yeah I got my lab going and as I got more and more I turned more to working with teams directly and more applied side yeah that quite common aspect
Really of having the one thing you’re really passionate about and the other thing that pays the bills and brings the money trying to find the right balance between the two yeah um and I guess even a lot of the work you do in skill acquisition if sport is a for learning
About skill acquisition many other fields are also interested in that as well and I think just before we move on a bit just to make sure everyone’s on the same page what do we actually mean by skill acquisition so skill acquisition yeah it’s it’s how we learn
New uh a new skill that has usually it’s some sort of movement component to it so not learning how to do math or read we’re talking about learning how to play cricket or soccer or ride a bike even um so how we acquire that skill um what
Kind of training we do what’s the best way to practice what kind of instruction we we receive and so obviously we do that our whole life in many different ways and and so on highest level of sport we’re talking about you know making people a little bit better than
They already are versus learning something completely new but but that’s the basic idea what we’re talking about and what does that skill acquisition look like so you said about trying to acquire a skill or trying to get a little bit better than they currently are in a simplified sense is there this
Holy Grail of this perfect Sports technique that basically everyone’s trying to achieve or we’re saying that’s the way you should be moving we’re acquiring a skill by trying to acquire that particular way of moving yeah that’s certainly what we kind of have focused on for a long time you know
The the kind of gold standard way to hit a ball or swing a golf club or whatever it happens to be and that’s what you would usually go to a coach to get they would know that and they would give it to you more recently we’ve started to
Move away from that recognizing that individuals vary in their technique from athlete to athlete and also situation to situation you can’t use the same technique all the time so the idea of one kind of way to do it is in a lot of for a lot of people it’s starting to
Fall fall down so we don’t really focus on that as much now what does that Journey or pathway of skill acquisition then CU I imagine in the previous sense or traditional sense you described if my technique isn’t very good and I’m trying to acquire a good
Way of moving it kind of makes sense for me to imagine that as I get better and better and better or I practice more or as I’m coached I’ll move closer and closer to that ideal way of moving if you’re suggesting that you know we don’t necessarily know what the ideal way is
Or that might differ for different people I assume it’s not quite as straightforward as that then and there might be maybe a lot of back and forth or a lot of moving around maybe between different techniques or different ways of trying things out so how do we what does that
Journey from not very good to much better look like and how do we know that someone’s actually heading in the right direction yeah that good some good really good questions there so there’s a turn here’s a first term I’ll throwout that people sometimes use it called nonlinear pedagogy so pedagogy for
Teaching and construction nonlinear means not in a straight line so we’re moving away from that you’re going to get better and better every day you’re because you’re exploring and trying finding new things you’re going to go backwards forwards sometimes no improvement and then you’re going to
Have a big Improvement um so yeah we’re not expecting kind of this gradual move towards uh and the other kind of thing in in practice we’re kind of moving away from doing strict repetition where okay now let’s do a 100 swings of the same golf shot or 100 basketball shots we’re
Moving more kind of more uh variable conditions so we’re not going to see this kind of simple progression that’s really not what we’re looking for and then how to measure it is is a tricky thing um how to how to know whether you’re improving you know something we’re still struggling with this this
Field OB um to be honest try to come up with good metrics um but you know you you see kind of evidence of people moving toward you know you do see performance success and some you focus on some of processed measures you know can we are like in my sport baseball are
You hitting the ball harder you still might not be getting the outcomes you want but you’re hitting you’re the ball’s moving harder off your bat that’s a good thing things like that that’s much easier to imagine I guess than some of the more you know learning to walk learning to run
Learning to ride a bike kind of examples you gave because I guess if you’ve described learning to hit the ball as hard as possible or swing a bat as hard as possible I’m I like math but there’s a number there that we’re trying to make as high
As possible or as big as possible if we’re trying to learn to ride a bike or trying to learn to walk or run yeah what does that look like what are we trying to how can I be better or worse than someone else at that task if
That makes sense yeah you know I think that’s that’s a tough one you know I think you know obviously you’re after a certain goal and you’re going to you know and we another thing we recognize there’s going to be a lot mistakes like there’s some great work for example by a
Person named Karen Adolf who understands develop we know connecting development to skill acquisition you know recognizing is probably just the same process but um kind of learning to walk you know I think she argues one of the reasons we’re kind of born kind of chubby and fat as babies is for padding
Right because we’re going to fall a lot right that’s how we learn to walk um and the same with bike you have to fall off a fair amount um but just kind of no we’re looking for it depends on kind of what the skill we’re looking for you there are certain things although
There’s no one ideal Technique we recognize there certain things you have to you have to have balance you have to transfer Force so there’s certain things we can look at and see that you’re kind of progressing in those and do we get more consistent in those things as well so that’s actually
A really yeah good point actually that even if I can’t picture a number for how good I am at riding a bike my ability to balance or do other things I guess yeah you could measure um yeah whether we’re measuring my balance or my ability to
Swing a bat fast would I would that number just be going up and up and up or well obviously in a nonlinear way as we described earlier or would it also be getting more consistent as I improve yeah you do get you do get you know somewhat you you do get lower
Variability more consistency as you become an expert but there also Al there’s this kind of New View and there’s a lot of research to you get do have this kind of functional variability where you can your swing not going to be the same every time because you have to
Hit different pitches different speeds different locations so there is going to be some variability there so what I the expression I like to use is you’re not getting rid of all the variability in your movement you’re restructuring it so it becomes more functional allows you to solve different problems in different
Ways okay are there any other examples you can think of there of I guess practical examples of why varying or not being so consistent could actually be beneficial rather than a bad thing yeah I think you know the biggest one is you know the you just the idea that you’re
Going to have to perform under a lot of different conditions a lot of different the word we use is constraints you know you’re you’re going to have you know there’s a great quote by rapael and the doll I always use where he claims he’s never hit the same tennis shot twice
Right there’re always different surfaces different spin different directions he’s tired he might have worked out the day before so there’s always these different conditions such as the same exact muscle input would not achieve the same output but he needs to vary something almost every time hit the behind the back
Between the leg shot to extreme so yeah the idea that you’re you have to be adaptive you have to adapt to these everchanging conditions you need constantly you know not a huge difference but you need some variation in how you move the successful is that just intentional variation you know
Trying trying to play different shots or having to adapt because you’re in a different scenario or yeah I’m trying to think are there any more complex examples of certain yeah sporting examples where even if you are trying to do the same thing 10 times want to vary yeah so there’s both
I think there’s the kind of the higher level one you you referring to there but there’s also kind of lower level like uh where your body is kind of working together like like example you know when you’re doing a tennis serve if you put the ball up in the air and your first
Move is with your shoulder and you you you can’t move exactly the same way every time so made you over rotate your shoulder a little more than normal then your elbow can compensate for it by rotating less like work together so you get these slight you’re if you try to
Measure it like biome mechanics like you do you’re not going to get the exact same numbers every time you’re going to get these slight variations that we look at them they seem to be functional in a lot of ways where you’re getting the same you know there’s a famous
Researcher in this area Nikolai Bernstein who’s Russian he he coined this fa phrase repetition without repetition you need to to repeat an outcome like hitting a tennis ball serving you can’t repeat the same you don’t repeat the same movement exactly so that you you do have it at that level
As well which is not a conscious thing it’s more of a kind of thing that’s happening at the level of your your muscles and kind of organizing themselves yeah does that link in with coaching practice as well then so if we say repetition without repetition is that almost gu a guideline
For how we should be designing coaching or training environment I think so I think we want to give athletes you know a lot of opportunities to experience this how to to be able to repeat adapt their movement to different constraints to be able to repeat that outcome in
Different situations so um and that’s adding variability in practice right so uh you know like a soccer goalkeeper saving shots from different angles different distances people in front you know different so giving lots of opportunity to experience this of course we want to scale it like when you first
Starting we might want to scale that back because it might be too much for you but but yeah that that’s definitely what we’re aiming for I think more more in practice now rather than let’s repeat the same move movement over and over again under the same conditions that’s
Give you kind of variable conditions so you can learn how to kind of do be adaptable what’s the role of the coach then within all of this because if there’s one simple way of moving that’s the best way of moving it’s easy to imagine a coach telling somebody how to
Move or telling them how to get closer you know you’re extending your elbow too much or you need to start moving your shoulder earlier on or whatever these minor differences might be if you’re describing something that sounds logical and makes sense but around this idea of
There’s not one best way of moving or it’s different we need to try lots and lots of different environments different things how does that fit in with the idea of a coach being the person who holds all the keys and knows the correct way of doing things that just passes
That information on to other people that pay them for that knowledge yeah yeah for sure there had that it does require kind of a big shift in how you think about you know I I the way I think of is moving from kind of the coach as the
Instructor where they have all the information it’s like a oneway passing of information to more of a designer I’m going to create environments where you’re going to learn and figure it out on your own it doesn’t mean that the coach doesn’t say anything anymore you
Know um they they can add things give a little cues know why don’t you try lifting your knee more or things like that but far less than the traditional kind of code where we tell you exactly and correct you every second every time we see something U we’re going to try to
Let the practice environment do that for us kind of what we we aim for so are there different types of coaching I don’t know if types is the correct term there but are there kind of ideas that have been researched here or you’ve described the kind of you know coach as
An instructor or coach as a designer mhm have those two things been compared in studies or are there kind of additional types of ways of doing this there yeah I I think you know some people come you know criticize us making dichotomies of this but yeah there there have been
Studies where they comp compared um where we’ve they traditional pres sometimes called prescriptive coaching where you given the athlete the prescription for the movement like you give them prescription for cold uh versus uh kind more that promote self-organization letting the athlete figure it out based on the practice
Environment so there has been studies that compared those two and and found them you know most of them are show uh more benefit for the self-organization focus so there is a bunch of research now across the range of sports we have a looked at it how would that be done then
So you know you mentioned constraints earlier on if we’re talking about designing an environment that enables somebody body to explore all these different things what kind of things would you be varying I don’t know what sport would be best for you to give some examples here but what kind of things
Would a coach want to vary in order to help someone learn particular things or acquire certain types of skill yeah so there’s a variety of different you know there there’s uh you know we can vary the equipment you know there’s great examples from um you know T keep teaching kids tennis uh using
Smaller rackets and lower compression balls that don’t bounce as much help seems to help kids learn the proper Strokes as as opposed to trying to just give them traditional instruction with adult equipment uh you can vary things like the number of players and the number of rules the rules like the size
Of the playing area like in something like soccer football or basketball um you know playing three on three that’s giving kids more uh touches on the ball then they get in a full game and more opportunity kind of experience spacing and and and how their movement changes
The def defense so so there’s quite a lot of different things you can do and then you know varying the conditions of speeds I like my sport the very the speeds and types of pitches you have to hit the type of weight of the bat and
The ball those kind of things um you know we we try to choose them for a particular reason um but um based on the how the person’s performing to start with rather than just doing random there there are some that just do kind of random variation which is shown to be beneficial
Too yeah at the risk of I guess downplaying the importance of my entire discipline of biomechanics I guess that’s making me think a bit about research informed coaching or what kind of research is most useful in that instead of a maybe traditional biomechanical sense of you know where measuring people’s movement and
Describing technique and saying what doing research that’s really useful for a coach because we’re telling them how technique affects different things or what technique they should be using potentially the really useful research for that type of coaching then would be things like how do the number of players on a
Pitch or the size of a pitch or the type of equipment influence different things like you know how I’m thinking out loud here but how does the number of opponents change how many passes you play versus how many dribbles you do or how many where you tend to shoot from
And those kind of things which is a very different type of research but potentially could be really useful for informing that kind of coaching design for sure I think so I think understanding how those different constraints are going to affect there’s that kind of research the biomechanic we
Also use that you know like in my main sport baseball we we have we do biomechanic analysis of our pictures and know we can identify things that we think might cause injury or or and this but what what’s kind of where they kind of fit together is what you do with that
Information right so say we want the pitcher to have a longer stride because for some biomechanical analysis we think that will help what we might do instead of trying to instruct that and get them to think about what they’re doing we’ll put like a hurdle a little hurdle on the
Mound in front of them they have to step over we’ve added a constraint when they’re throwing so it kind of changes how you use these information so I think both things but yeah understanding what these constraints are going to change and how they change them is important so what would a typical study
Look like in this area then if well if it helps if we stick with that example of a hdle on the mound for increasing stride length um would if there was a study that had looked into that are they typically I don’t know I’m imagining one
Group of players that are taught one way one group of players that are taught another way and you’re looking at kind of who improves the most by the end of the session or by the end of the month or is it that kind of training design that has been typically used in studies
Or yeah that’s what a lot of people have tried to do kind of fit it into the standard model of research you know control group you know yeah that’s where I was starting from the how do we test drugs how do we test other things right exact that’s what and see which one
Works best I have I definitely have some published studies like that and it always feels kind of UNS because it’s not really what would happen on a on the sports team right um where you’re working with an individual and they’d have their own kind of tailored but and
You do get a lot you know a lot of people in these study in those type of studies like you described they critique you know that they start saying you know you’re straw Manning the other side right um you’re you’re the way that you’re giving the one group instruction
Is very kind of a phony and not how it really happens you kind of you know so there have been a lot of criticisms like that but so I think it’s a challenge trying to to balance it but that yeah that’s typically what we do put a group
Of that you know group that might be Co coach telling the athlete I want you to stride longer specific instruction versus one that they don’t get any instructions except step over the hurdle when they throw and and then you know in my in my uh studies I try to do both
Kind of performance outcome measures are they throwing the ball harder and kind of process measures are they actually increasing the stride length um and you know so that that’s kind of the best we can do but I recognize you know there are some shortcomings with that does that make it easier or harder
To work with a group of players I’m thinking if there’s this idea that everyone has their own way of moving and there’s different solutions for everybody does that way of coaching mean it’s really difficult to actually coach a group of players or actually does it mean that
Instead of trying to give 10 different sets of instructions about to 10 different players about how they need to change you do just need to create one environment where they can all learn in different ways within that same environment yeah you know I think it it’s both I think there there are ways
You can make it work and you can create the environments but I think you know this kind of dirty secret I I call it now that we is that Co good coaching is individualization right you got to individualize for the athlete you they all have their own issues things they
Need to work on you have to tailor it to them and you can’t it’s hard to do that and also to other people at the same practice right you’re you’re um you know in a lot of like sports the defense is just kind of there as part of they’re
Not really proving so but I think if you you can there’s some things you can do in group you can take advantage of you know athletes getting opportunities to play at different skill level play against people at different skill levels um observe other players so there are
Things you can take advantage of but it is a big challenge right um definitely we want we need to kind of uh focus on what each individual athlete needs to get better at and focus on that I think and something we haven’t mentioned yet is virtual reality so I bring that
Up because I know that I don’t know whether you’d call it virtual reality or augmented reality or something entirely different but I know some of your research has used a batting simulator in baseball so I guess yeah we can maybe talk about that or come to that in a bit
But just I’m interested in how virtual reality and maybe the future of how things are going fits into this whole idea of creating environments for people to explore skills in because if you talk about creating an environment in some ways it would seem like that’s the whole
Point of virtual reality is to create an environment so I assume work has been done in this area but how does that all fit in with what we’ve discussed so far for sure that the term I prefer is virtual environment instead of so I
Agree with you 100% um I have kind of a different view of this and a lot of people like so the most VR that is spent U focused on the issue of fidelity right how can we make the VR as realistic as possible how can we make it feel like
You have the wind on your face and the graphics that represented things perfectly um with the goal of trying to replace or replicate the real world I I personally think that’s the wrong approach I think you never replace real practice it’s always way better um but
What can do is add on to it and take advantage of the VR to do things that are practically difficult to like so giving like if you wanted to train a soccer goalkeeper giving them shots from lots of different angles and distan and speeds is practically difficult right
You can have have a lot of Shooters in VR that’s easy right we could easily have the ball coming from different and change and also so giving them lots more variability Lots range of conditions um also VR is nice to what I did in my bat
One batting St is making it adaptive so uh we could make give you a certain speed of shots and if you’re saving all of them we can make them come at you faster and then faster and and so my is I think uh vrr can be a great add-on to
Real practice especially if you can use it to do things give more variability more exposure to environments like you said um that you are difficult to do in real practice practically that adaptive I think you call it adaptive that adaptive idea is really interesting so yeah how maybe you
Could tell us a bit more but how has it been used because I really like that idea that we could both take part in the same kind of software or the same training session and if you’re a lot better than me it’s going to provide you
With a much greater challenge than it is to me but yeah maybe even if it’s taking a step back a bit how has virtual reality or virtual environment being applied in research or coaching or maybe there’s an example of some of your research you could talk about this done
Some of that yeah there’s been a few State you I haven’t really honestly follow the most recent training ones but yeah my St my study what we did was you know we had the ball people were trying to hit a virtual ball bat by the motion
Tracker and you know and and um the speed at which the ball came and the range over which it the locations was kind of uh adapted to the performance so if they started to hit really well those things got bigger so CH so the ideas were you know this brings in the
Important idea of Challen challenging the athlete at the right level right um a lot of practice we do is too easy to be honest like if athlete is successful every time in practice they’re not learning they’re not learning anything right they’re performing not learning That’s a classic thing in motor so we
Want to push it a little bit we don’t want to make it too impossible so you never succeed so with a VR you know we could calculate things and we can find this kind of optimal level where we’re you’re having enough success to keep you motivated and and going but enough
Failure to kind of push you and challenge you so that’s what I did in my St so there’s kind of an algorithm behind all the conditions that is calculating this and so a few Studies have done that um I also seen it kind of Applied in kind of real setting as well
In terms of when you um the in terms of there’s a good kind of real uh when you use kind of the win move lose stay so you yeah you have to practice three throws if you miss them you have to stay and keep doing it if you’re success ESS
F you move on to the next exercise so that’s kind of an a real life AV verion of that it’s not quite as fine grain but you get kind of the same effect I’m I’m wondering whether nonvert I don’t know just real environments if that’s the alternative virtual environment never
Knew whether there are learnings there from the virtual stuff you’ve spoken about that can actually be really useful in kind of traditional or real world coaching in the sense of that challenge of how difficult do you make things if you say that there are algorithms within some of the
Virtual stuff that determines how hard do I need to make this to optimize kind of the rate at which someone learns or to optimize their improvement over the training session or something like that can that help us in realistic environments or are there any kind of
Rules of thumb of you know I assume if you’re successful every time time it’s too easy if you miss every time it’s too difficult is there any kind of rule of thumb that we can get from this work it can be useful for people to hold on to
Yeah so they they’ve kind of come to the same answer you know the one number I always give is 80% success rate it seems to be optimal 75 to 80% um that seems to be both kind of when you do the algorithm that’s what gives you the best
Kind of measure of their level uh but also on a on a real world setting it seems to be the right back bance between success and failure to to kind of keep them motivated but challenged yeah so is that I might be over complicating this here with my thoughts running away with
Me but is this when you say 80% success rate in the traditional sense of doing the same thing over and over and over again that’s really easy to imagine that you stand in one what I’m picturing say shooting in basketball or something like that you stand in one Place shoot 10
Times if you get eight out of 10 in then that’s the appropriate kind of level of difficulty once we then apply some of the things you spoke about earlier with the varied practice design there are maybe different ways you can get that 80% there is it you
Know you’ve kind of got eight out of 10 of those attempts are actually from somewhere that’s too close and I can do it easily but two of them are from too far away and I was never going to get it in anyway or it kind of gets harder for me to
Imagine once you’re moving around and trying everything from different places how you get that 80% right where actually you don’t just have a 100% of shots that are either too easy or too hard but you’re trying you’re almost aiming for 100% of shots that are at
About an 80% difficulty or yeah you know no I I know what you’re asking yeah for sure it’s I’ve actually doubt this exact that’s a good example actually see work with a couple of NBA teams last year and the first thing you notice when you go to NBA practice when they’re just P
Practicing three-point shots they hit about 80 to 90% which is and then the game it goes down to 30 so something happened right on the way um so what yeah you could do that what we try to do is you know instead of doing from the same spot even just varying having to
Switch between two different shots is going to make your percentage go down because you can’t just make a simple adjust when you miss having a coach or a Defender put their hand up in your face making you receive the pass different ways all those things are going to lower
Your percentage a bit so it’s kind of playing around with that to find the level that level you want um and if you notice they getting too hard maybe scale back on that so it’s in in real practice not exact you can’t get exact science just kind of want to get roughly right
Yeah if we so we can be a bit more exact in the virtual world then the bit I didn’t I was thinking about but didn’t ask when you were talking about both the football or soccer goalkeeper and the batting example was the feel of the
Thing or any I don’t know what kind of feedback you’d call it but it’s difficult to imagine doing a training session as a goalkeeper where you don’t actually touch a ball or you kind of something flashes up on a screen or in the headset saying that you saved it but
You didn’t actually feel the ball between your hands or you know that that feel of swinging a bat and making a good impact with the ball has there been any way of trying to replicate those things or that kind of feedback within the virtual environment yeah there’s been
There’s been some and I I I did some in my batting simulator I had a little kind of things on the bat that would make it vibrate when you hit in different spots which work fairly well because that’s the single biggest complaint anyone came that used mine they said it did it was
Very realistic except I was missing that you know haptic feedback um so yeah there’s been some attempts but it is not nearly accurate or good enough so so I think like a soccer goalkeeper to me like practicing the general save where you kind of just get
Your position to save it and move your arms that that is about be fine but I never want to practice like having them control the shot or punch a shot something that requires accurate feedback and get well timed feedback we don’t have the resolution to do that so
I think you just avoid certain things that you can’t simulate well but yeah that’s that’s the biggest missing piece for a lot of this kind of thing I guess it’s that common thing as well of almost rather than trying to replace the thing you already had it’s well what can the
Virtual environment do that we can’t do in the traditional environment focus on that maybe and the benefits of it which I guess we’ve spoken about the ability to V quickly vary the conditions or vary what kind of task people are being given as well as the ability to kind of adapt
How difficult it is in an automated or individualized way are there any other examples of things you can do in a virtual training environment that you can’t do in a traditional environment I’m thinking of you know yes you can change the position or change the difficulty but you can change absolutely
Anything about that environment from as simple as putting a board up and telling them they’re winning or they’re losing or there’s one minute left or 20 minutes left or but is there anything about the rest of the visual information available to them that could be useful to change yeah there’s so there’s a
Couple few things that come to mind so one is kind of creating the pressure of a big stage Olympic you know go entering a big Stadium trying to recreate that um some some I’ve seen that been used with some of the VR displays that use film footage foot AG right instead of it’s
Not interactive but we can recreate you walking onto the field of the Olympics right pretty realistically um to kind of set that get used to experiencing that um in in sports other sports like like baseball we get you there’s some very good simulations of really particular athletes so you can experience what it’s
Like to face this particular picture know where the ball comes out what kind of um so so those kind of things people have done the other thing is I didn’t me you know you can there’s work for people like Kathy Craig who has a they’ve been
Doing work on developing a soccer VR you can you can recreate this condition of saving a curved penalty kick you can practice that 50 times right whereas in a game how many times you going to get to so you can do re recreate really unique scenarios over and over and got
Lots of reps so so there are some kind of things you can do like that well what about trying to kind of I don’t know if this would be useful but trying to make certain bits of information either easier or harder to pick up on so I’m picturing you know I’ve done researching
Cricket batting but I guess it’d be the similar for your baseball batting work if you’re trying to pick up cues that will tell you what kind of ball the pitch is going to throw um I don’t know whether you’re looking at the seam on the ball or something about the way they move
Can it be can it be useful for that where the simple example in my mind is like if it’s really useful to look at the arm there’s just an arm not attached to a body in front of you so that you have to look at the arm you’ve got no
Other option or if something you know you keep looking at the foot and that’s distracting and not useful there just all right let’s remove the feet so that they stop looking at the feet kind of are there any examples of that kind of thing working or is that a bit abstract
Yeah for sure the um work by you know some great work by mostly Bruce abery from Australia you know looking at you methal occlusion so his his was mostly on video but you could do the same thing in VR so you know he’d have people watched the a tennis ser and try to
Predict where it was going and he block out the bottom half of the server so you couldn’t look at their legs or or part of their body or highlight certain part of the body so uh I think it’s called you call that spatial and um blck out
And there yeah there’s for sure getting you to focus on certain parts of the that are most informative um I think that that’s interesting and you could easily do that in VR as well could um and we’ve recreated kind of the occlusion where you just see part of the
Ball flight and you have to predict what pitch it was or where it was going um that’s more that’s called temporal occlusion we just we we created that so yeah there are some studies of that okay what about negatives of virtual environments then other than the
Lack of haptic feedback or feeling a bat or a ball in your hands are there any other negatives to be aware um I don’t know if it was so there’s obviously you know people some people make it motion it makes them nauseous and things like eye strain and things like that some general
Things like that but um you have to you know well all these advices you know I always worry a little bit about kind of negative transfer of training if you create a scenario where you people can use something that’s not going to be there in the game um that doesn’t happen
So much in VR as as other things but you could I think you could could you could create that situation um and so you have to kind of worry about that as well so do you mean then if I’ve understood you correctly that say in this game or probably
Insulting some people to call it a game but in this um virtual environment if every time a certain type of shot comes towards me there’s something about the environment or something about the way that player moves that gives it away but then that thing isn’t actually present in real pictures or Bowers or
That so it’s almost like I know that whenever it’s a curved ball their elbow does this certain thing but then actually and that 100% of the time that happens but then in the real world it’s possible to kind of do that delivery without doing that thing with your elbow
And that kind of scenario where you’re learning to focus in on things that might not be there yeah for sure and that I think that’s equally big problem in the for real a lot of things we use in the real world like like for example a batting machine like in we use in
Cricket and baseball like they make when the ball comes out you can hear you can hear it spinning so you can use that sound to kind of time your swing obviously see that’s not there when a real person throws a ball so you if you’re using that strategy then it’s not
Going to work in real baseball so you have to kind of unlearn what you just you’re using so but yeah that example you gave is a good one okay so then I guess another question I really like but what excites you at the moment in this kind of skill acquisition training environment space
Or what where do you think research or coaching practice might be going in the next half many years that you know you’re looking forward to seeing or something you think is really cool just around the corner yeah I guess a couple are one the first is I’m just really excited where
How the areas this approach is starting to move into this kind of um some the general term fancy term ecological Dynamics it’s kind of the theoretical Arch Arc that oversee this um one of the couple areas I’ve been working with a lot like in martial arts and MMA which
Has a very old school you know everyone thinks of martial arts training is Bruce Lee picture doing the same punch 100 times so it’s very repetitive focused on technique Tradition now people are moving towards more kind of U you know giving more variation give more opportunities to learn so that that’s
Another area where I’ve seen that is training police right to um so there’s a big kind of problem with police officers they have very trained in very limited scenarios how to take this person down in in how to restrain a a person uh in this one set of conditions and they get
In the real world and that person’s naked and wet right and so they have to be adaptable so they’re trying to move that so so that’s one thing that’s kind of got me excited um the other I think it’s pushing the uh methodology like we were talking about before the the
Classic experimental design we learned with the control group and the the measuring an NOA where you measure groups is not really the best right um like in real Sports we don’t care that we make overall if we were training a bunch of athletes we don’t care that on
Average we make them better right we want each individual so kind of pushing the measures how we assess variability on individual level movement um so some I think there’s some really exciting things that this approach is kind of pushing as well is that limited then that study design aspect by the thing
You said right back at the start about your journey where you mentioned the fact that you can get funding and research money for looking at driving and you know working with the police or whatever else but not necessarily in sport as easily and it’s a bit of a
Hobby research area for a lot of people do you think that’s related to that issue of study design and that that’s something that can be done relatively cheaply or do you think that’s not really a limiting factor I think so I think there’s a you
Know I think there’s a bit of a you know bias maybe too strong a word towards you know people we’re going to understand how you learn a skill and move and it and we people there’s kind of the funding agencies would much B you study moving through a robot force field or
Pointing or key pressing tasks because there method you it’s ways are to measure and control versus the hitting a tennis ball there’s so many variables and very there’s the idea you’re not going to have the control and uh all the things we need we think about for good
Science when you study a real Sports skill with a real athletes and they’re going to vary in the experience they bring to the court when they start and lot there’s lots of messiness with that so I think they’re definitely is we kind of got to come to grips with that
Somehow if we could remove all of that then and Mone Was No Object or if and before you get excited this isn’t the case but if I had you know millions or billions of dollars that I could hand over in research funding of is there any study in mind that you think you’d
Absolutely love to do or that you know is the thing that would be a game Cher that yeah you think would really move the field forwards um that’s a good you know I’d like to you know it’ be great to see kind of uh across a bunch of labs like
Using similar tasks and getting things more comparable getting some of the replications that we don’t have in sports science at all really um I would love I think that would be a really great initiative so if we we could come up we we had a t came up with a task we
Could all studies so a lot of the motor learning skill acquisition studies you can compare there apples and oranges in terms of the skills people are learning um so I think that would be great to see and have like a someone organize all that and coordinate all that that’d be
Really cool but that’s probably not in my but my rest of research lifetime but hopefully some I know some people are thinking about that yeah it would be it would be good to see it would be very useful actually that replicate I think we’ve seen the replication crisis in
Psychology that probably sounds bad for psychology but it’s just the fact they’re more aware of it than other disciplines like Sport Science but I think yeah definitely efforts to address that would be good but even similar to your idea of the multicenter study or I or replication studies I also really
Like this idea that I can’t remember what discipline I’ve seen it in but of the same data set being analyzed in multiple different Labs or universities around the world so you know collecting data if it’s did they or did they not improve you’d probably get the same
Answer but where we are looking more specifically at the biomechanics or motor control I quite like the idea of send collecting the data telling people nothing else about it but just sending that data to however many people around the world and paying them to analyze it and just seeing does everybody find the
Same answer from their study or actually do two different Labs on other sides of the world get completely different answers to the same study using the same data and then what can we learn from that for sure I know exactly you’re talking about I think I think I think
That would be really really useful I I even the example you gave like uh whether they improved you know there’s like argument do you put do you calculate a change score kind of pre- to post that takes out differences where they started versus there’s different
Ways you can kind of do things and uh you can play with the you know researcher degrees of freedom in how you analyze things and um so I think it would be interesting to see I would be really interesting to see the way that different people approach the same data
I think that would be really interesting and that mentioning research or degrees of freedom or choices we can make that yeah definitely going off on a tangent now but that gets into the whole world of pre-registration and registered reports and all the steps that can be done to kind of yeah register what
You’re going to do before you do it to stop you actually being able to oh actually that didn’t get the result I want I’ve changed my mind I’m actually going to do it this way instead yeah but I guess moving on from that if anyone listening to this has been kind of
Inspired or interested to learn a bit more about skill acquisition or virtual environment or anything else that we’ve mentioned are there any good ways that people can either find out more about you and your work or just learn more about mot control skill acquisition perception and action
Etc yeah so I have that kind of I have a website perception action.com that has all my kind of material so I on there I have a my podcast perception action podcast which I’ve been doing for a few years now I have a three-part series on
VR if you’re really interested on in how it’s been used as a tool the other thing we didn’t talk about is you can use VR as an interesting tool to study interesting research questions like uh so one of the people things in VR people one of the things in skill people have
Been really interested in how what strategy out outfielder and baseball uses to catch a fly ball there’s been arguments what people have used this v v to create impossible trajectories and things to to kind of address them so people have been using them in interesting ways um so yeah so so my
Podcast has some of that um uh stuff as well and and I have a couple books I’ve written on kind of this new view of skill um that I’ve tried in introduction so that’s that’s kind of where it’s in perception action.com is the One-Stop shopping yeah brilant thanks Rob and
Yeah I could to fa i’ suddenly got about 10 follow-up questions in my mind to that idea of how you catch um the ball and how virtual reality can be used to kind of investigate that but I guess yeah I won’t give too many spoilers away I’ll let people go perception action.com
And yeah have a look around if they want to find out a bit more I know we a a lot of your podcast episodes are replacing reading on my um in my teaching at the end of the lecture it’s oh thank you you know rather than reading there are some
Brilliant ones I think the one one of them I like the most is on that aspect of High versus low variability I think there are a few others where it’s done as a mock court case and oh yes you know instead of a instead of go away students
And read 15 Journal articles it’s actually here’s a court case where we’re going to call different authors or different studies to the stand both for and against whatever’s on trial here and yeah I really like it and it’s a really kind of engaging way of evence I was a
Bit more creative in the the formats and trying to get things out and it’s nice I appreciate when people notice those things been through the back catalog and dug out the creative ones yeah oh brilliant thanks Rob and yeah just thank you again for joining us and yeah
Sharing your Insight my pleasure thanks D thanks for listening to the experts in sport podcast if you’d like to get in touch then please contact me Martin Foster at m. Foster Al . ac.uk thanks for listening see you next time