Reference

Myszka, S. H. A. W. N. (2018). Movement Skill Acquisition for American Football—Using “Repetition without Repetition” to Enhance Movement Skill. SPECIAL FOOTBALL ISSUE, 5(4), 76.

🚀 Article in 3 Sentences

1. Starts by discussing some key ideas from skill acquisition and how they can shape the way coaches should design practice tasks to develop masterful movers
2. Discusses the ideas behind rep w/o rep and some of the key concepts that underpin it
3. Talks through how to implement rep w/o rep to improve ‘offensive agility’

🤝Impressions

Practical article that’s filled with some practice design nuggets. Shawn did a great job as usual in discussing repetition without repetition and it’s practical implications. There are some really nice descriptions of sometimes complex ideas.

👨‍🏫Who should read this?

Every American Football coach could take so much from engaging with this article. While it’s aimed at American Football the content could be applied by coaches of an sport. It’s great seeing ideas from other sports and trying to apply the principles then in your own sport.

🎾How Article will influence my coaching

• Think more about how I could make sure that the each individual is being sufficiently challenged during a session.
• More purposeful use of repetition without repetition in practices.

📃Takeaways for coaches

• Process of enhancing movement skill should not consist of rote-repetition but instead should be a problem solving process where the players are challenged to solve the same problem in different ways under varying conditions.
• Repetition without repetition can promote a search process where the athlete is constantly exploring and discovering more functional coordination solutions.
• Similar situations will offer different affordances to individuals depending on their own unique action capabilities. The ‘masterful’ mover will understand how they can exploit the strengths of their own ‘movement toolbox’.
• Rote repetitions of a task in a non-changing environment will significantly slow and hinder the acquisition of movement skill expertise.
• Failing to replicate the movement demands in practice will cause players to struggle to adapt under the host of constraints they will interact with during the game.
• By designing practice using constraint manipulation players will have chances to explore more activities that contain specifying information that they must learn to attune to and adapt their movements in conjunction with