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Sport Science

How Should Cheating Be Defined In Sports?

When Milwaukee Brewers pitcher Chris Capuano reports for spring training in April, he will be anxious to demonstrate the effects of a performance-enhancing off-season.

His brain will benefit from a sharper focus, while his throwing arm will boast an extra boost that has been missing since 2006.

Stimulants? Steroids? Scandal?

No. Capuano just had LASIK surgery for his eyes and "Tommy John" surgery for his injured elbow. And if he chooses, he could have a few cups of coffee before the game. Of course, were he to choose amphetamines to improve his focus or steroids to increase his strength, he would be banned and berated.

Society decides

There is confusion over the means and methods athletes have available to enhance their performance. Certainly, corrective eye surgery to raise your vision level to 20/20 seems fair, but many athletes go into the procedure hoping to come out with enhanced 20/15 or 20/10 eyesight.

Replacing a damaged elbow ligament with a tendon doesn't seem like cheating, but what if it's done on a healthy elbow hoping for a few more miles per hour on a fastball that has faded over the years?

In December of last year, a commentary in the journal Nature recommended a fresh look at cognitive-enhancing drugs and where to draw the line in the sand between natural performance and enhanced performance. The authors, an esteemed group of neuroscientists and ethicists, argued that "enhanced" is only defined by the rules set by society.

Abuse of prescription drugs, such as Ritalin and Adderall, is illegal because of the potential, harmful side effects. Still, reports of the rising use of these drugs by college students and professionals show the demand for options beyond nutrition, exercise and sleep.

These drugs are just the first generation of possible brain boosting supplements, which is why the Nature commentators are calling for an organized, stigma-free approach to evaluating the risks, benefits and ethics of future products.

Even in Major League Baseball, there is mounting evidence that cognitive-enhancing drugs may be on the rise. Since MLB banned amphetamines in 2006, there has been a dramatic rise in the number of therapeutic use exemptions issued to players for attention-deficit disorder diagnoses, for which drugs like Ritalin and Adderall can be legitimately prescribed. In 2006, 28 players applied for the exemption, while a year later there were 103. There is suspicion that many of these ADD diagnoses are just excuses to get the pills.

Legal jolt

So, what if there was a cognitive-enhancing, sports supplement that increased alertness, concentration, reaction time and focus while also decreasing the perception of muscle fatigue? Even more encouraging, this supplement is sold in millions of outlets and is socially accepted worldwide. It comes in three sizes, tall, grande or venti — coffee. More specifically, caffeine has been the subject of many recent studies of its effectiveness, both cognitively and physiologically.

Earlier this year, Dr. Carrie Ruxton completed a literature survey to summarize 41 double-blind, placebo-controlled trials published over the past 15 years to establish what range of caffeine consumption would maximize benefits and minimize risk for cognitive function, mood, physical performance and hydration. The studies were divided into two categories, those that looked at the cognitive effects and those that looked at physical performance effects.

The results concluded that there was a significant improvement in cognitive functions like attention, reaction time and mental processing as well as physical benefits described as increased "time to exhaustion" and decreased "perception of fatigue" in cycling and running tests.

Given these results, how exactly does caffeine perform these wonderful tricks? Dr. Ruxton explains: "Caffeine is believed to impact on mood and performance by inhibiting the binding of both adenosine and benzodiazepine receptor ligands to brain membranes. As these neurotransmitters are known to slow down brain activity, a blockade of their receptors lessens this effect."

Bottom line, the chemicals in your brain that would cause you to feel tired are blocked, giving you a feeling of ongoing alertness. This pharmacological process is very similar to that of the ADD drugs.

Ban coffee?

If caffeine is such a clear-cut performance enhancing supplement, why did the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) first add caffeine to its banned substance list, only to remove it in 2004? At the time that it was placed on the banned list, the threshold for a positive caffeine test was set to a post-exercise urinary caffeine concentration of about three to four cups of strong coffee.

However, more recent research has shown that caffeine has ergogenic effects at levels as low as the equivalent of one to two cups of coffee. So, it was hard for WADA to know where to draw the line between athletes just having a few morning cups of coffee/tea and those that were intentionally consuming caffeine to increase their performance level.

If Chris Capuano has a double espresso before pitching, his brain, eyes and arm should enhance his performance in the game.  Is that an unfair advantage? Science will continue to offer new and improved methods for raising an athlete's game above the competition. Players, league officials and fans will have to decide where to draw the line.

Please visit my other articles on LiveScience.com and Sports Are 80 Percent Mental

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Putt With Your Brain - Part 2

From: Sports Are 80 Percent Mental

If there is a poster child sport for our favorite phrase, "Sports Are 80 Percent Mental", it must be golf. Maybe its the slow pace of play that gives us plenty of time to think between shots. Maybe its the "on stage" performance feeling we get when we step up to that first tee in front of our friends (or strangers!) Maybe its the "high" of an amazing approach shot that lands 3 feet from the cup followed by the "low" of missing the birdie putt.

From any angle, a golf course is the sport psychologist's laboratory to study the mix of emotions, confidence, skill execution and internal cognitive processes that are needed to avoid buying rounds at the 19th hole. Last time, we looked at some of the recent research on putting mechanics, but, as promised, we now turn to the mental side of putting.

Sian Beilock and her team at the University of Chicago's Human Performance Lab recently released the latest of a string of research studies on sports performance, or more specifically, how not to choke under pressure. Lucky for us, they chose putting as their sport skill of choice. This ties in with Dr. Beilock's theory of embodied cognition that we featured in Watching Sports Is Good For Your Brain.

An underlying theme to this work is the concept of automaticity, or the ability to carry out sport skills without consciously thinking about them. Performing below expectations (i.e. choking) starts when we allow our minds to step out of this automatic mode and start thinking about the steps to our putting stroke and all of those "swing thoughts" that come with it ("keep your elbows in", "head down", "straight back").

Our brain over analyzes and second-guesses the motor skills we have learned from hundreds of practice putts. Previously, we looked at automaticity in other sports. Of course, a key distinction to the definition of choking is that you are playing "well below expectations". If you normally shoot par, but now start missing easy putts, then there may be distractions that are taking you out of your normal flow. Choking implies a temporary and abnormal event. Automaticity theory would claim that it is these distractions from some perceived pressure to perform that are affecting your game.

Most research into sport skill performance divides the world into two groups, novices and experts. Most sports have their own measures of where the dividing line is between these groups. Expertise would imply performance results not just experience. So, a golfer who has been hacking away for 20 years but still can't break 100 would still be put in the "novice" category.

Sport scientists design experiments that compare performance between the groups given some variables, and then hypothesize on the reason for the observed differences. Beilock, et al have looked at golf putting from several different angles over the years. Their research builds on itself, so let's review in reverse chronological order.

Back in 2001, they began by comparing the two competing theories of choking, distraction theory vs. explicit monitoring theory, and designed a putting experiment to find the better explanation.

Distraction theory explains choking by assuming that the task of putting requires your direct attention and that high pressure situations will cause you to perform dual tasks - focus on your putting but also think about the pressure. This theory assumes there is no automaticity in skill learning and that we have to focus our attention on the skill every time.

Explicit monitoring theory claims that over time, as we practice a skill to the point of becoming an "expert", we proceduralize the task so that it becomes "automatic". Then, during a high pressure situation, our brain becomes so concerned about performance that it takes us out of automatic mode and tries to focus on each step of the task. The research supported the explicit monitoring theory as it was shown that the golf putting task was affected by distractions and pressure for the experts but not the novice putters.

So, how do we block out the pressure, so that our automaticity can kick in? Another 2001 study by Beilock looked at mental imagery during putting. Using the same explicit monitoring theory, should we try to think positive thoughts, like "this ball is going in the hole" or "I have made this putt many times"? Also, what happens if a stray negative thought, "don't miss this one!" enters our brain? Should we try to suppress it and replace it with happy self-talk?

She set up four groups, one receiving positive comments, one receiving negative comments, one receiving negative comments followed by positive comments and one receiving none as a control group. As expected, the happy people did improve their putting over the course of the trials, while the negative imagery hurt performance.

But, the negative replaced with positive thought group did not show any more improvement over the control group. So, when faced with a high pressure, stressful situation ripe with the possibilities of choking, try to repeat positive thoughts, but don't worry too much if the occasional doubt creeps in.

Our strategy towards putting should also vary depending on our current skill level. While learning the intricacies of putting, novices should use different methods than experts, according to a 2004 study by Beilock, et al. Novice golfers need to pay attention to the step by step components of their swing, and they perform better when they do focus on the declarative knowledge required.

Expert golfers, however, have practiced their swing or putt so often that it has become "second nature" to the point that if they are told to focus on the individual components of their swing, they perform poorly. The experiment asked both novices and expert golfers to first focus on their actual putting stroke by saying the word "straight" when hitting the ball and to notice the alignment of the putter face with the ball.

Next, they were asked to putt while also listening for a certain tone played in the background. When they heard the tone they were to call it out while putting. The first scenario, known as "skill-focused", caused the novices to putt more accurately but the experts to struggle. The second scenario, called "dual-task", distracted the novices enough to affect their putts, while the experts were not bothered and their putting accuracy was better.

Beilock showed that novices need the task focus to succeed while they are learning to putt, while experts have internalized the putting stroke so that even when asked to do two things, the putting stroke can be put on "auto-pilot".

Finally, in 2008, Beilock's team added one more twist to this debate. Does a stress factor even affect a golfer's performance in their mind before they putt? This time, golfers, divided into the usual novice and expert groups, were asked to first imagine or "image execute" themselves making a putt followed by an actual putt. The stress factor was to perform one trial under a normal, "take all the time you need" time scenario and then another under a speeded or time-limited scenario.

The novices performed better under the non-hurried scenario in imagining the putt first followed by the actual putt. The experts, however, actually did better in the hurried scenario and worse in the relaxed setting. Again, the automaticity factor explains the differences between the groups.

The bottom line throughout all of these studies is that if you're learning to play golf, which includes putting, you should focus on your swing/stroke but beware of the distractions which will take away your concentration. That seems pretty logical, but for those that normally putt very well, if you feel stress to sink that birdie putt, don't try to focus in on the mechanics of your stroke. Trust the years of experience that has taught your brain the combination of sensorimotor skills of putting.

Just remember the Chevy Chase/Ty Webb philosophy; "I'm going to give you a little advice. There's a force in the universe that makes things happen. And all you have to do is get in touch with it, stop thinking, let things happen, and be the ball.... Nah-na-na-na, Ma-na-na-na...."

 

Sian L. Beilock, Thomas H. Carr (2001). On the fragility of skilled performance: What governs choking under pressure? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 130 (4), 701-725 DOI: 10.1037//0096-3445.130.4.701

Sian L. Beilock; James A. Afremow; Amy L. Rabe; Thomas H. Carr (2001). "Don't Miss!" The Debilitating Effects of Suppressive Imagery on Golf Putting Performance Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 23 (3)

Beilock S.L.; Bertenthal B.I.; McCoy A.M.; Carr T.H. (2004). Haste does not always make waste: Expertise, direction of attention, and speed versus accuracy in performing sensorimotor skills Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 11 (2), 373-379

Sian Beilock, Sara Gonso (2008). Putting in the mind versus putting on the green: Expertise, performance time, and the linking of imagery and action The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 61 (6), 920-932 DOI: 10.1080/17470210701625626

Putt With Your Brain - Part 1

From: Sports Are 80 Percent Mental

If Mark Twain thinks golf is "a good walk spoiled", then putting must be a brief pause to make you reconsider ever walking again. With about 50% of our score being determined on the green, we are constantly in search of the "secret" to getting the little white ball to disappear into the cup.

Lucky for us, there is no shortage of really smart people also looking for the answer. The first 8 months of 2008 have been no exception, with a golf cart full of research papers on just the topic of putting.

Is the secret in the mechanics of the putt stroke or maybe the cognitive set-up to the putt or even the golfer's psyche when stepping up to the ball? This first post will focus on the mechanical side and then we'll follow-up next time with a look inside the golfer's mind.

Let's start with a tip that most golf instructors would give, "Keep your head still when you putt". Jack Nicklaus said it in 1974, "the premier technical cause of missed putts is head movement" (from "Golf My Way") and Tiger Woods said it in 2001, "Every good putter keeps the head absolutely still from start to finish" (from "How I Play Golf").

Who would argue with the two greatest golfers of all time? His name is Professor Timothy Lee, from McMaster University, and he wanted to test that observation. So, he gathered two groups of golfers, amateurs with handicaps of 12-40, and professionals with scratch handicaps. Using an infrared tracking system, his team tracked the motion of the putter head and the golfer's head during sixty putts.

As predicted, the amateurs' head moved back in unison with their putter head, something Lee calls an "allocentric" movement, which agrees with the advice that novice golfers move their head. However, the expert golfers did not keep their head still, but rather moved their heads slightly in the opposite direction of the putter head.

On the backswing, the golfer's head moved slightly forward; on the forward stroke, the head moved slightly backward. This "egocentric" movement may be the more natural response to maintain a centered, balanced stance throughout the stroke. "The exact reasons for the opposite coordination patterns are not entirely clear," explains Lee. "However, we suspect that the duffers tend to just sway their body with the motions of the putter.

In contrast, the good golfers probably are trying to maintain a stable, central body position by counteracting the destabilization caused by the putter backswing with a forward motion of the head. The direction of head motion is then reversed when the putter moves forward to strike the ball." Does that mean that pro golfers like Tiger are not keeping their heads still? No, just that you may not have to keep your head perfectly still to putt effectively.

So, what if you do have the bad habit of moving your head? Just teach yourself to change your putting motion and you will be cutting strokes off of your score, right? Well, not so fast. Simon Jenkins of Leeds Metropolitan University tested 15 members of the PGA European Tour to see if they could break old physical habits during putting. His team found that players who usually use shoulder movement in their putting action were not able to change their ways even when instructed to use a different motion. Old habits die hard.

Let's say you do keep your head still (nice job!), but you still 3-putt most greens? What's the next step on the road to birdie putts? Of the three main components of a putt, (angle of the face of the putter head on contact, putting stroke path and the impact point on the putter), which has the greatest effect on success?

Back in February, Jon Karlsen of the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences in Oslo, asked 71 elite golfers (mean handicap of 1.8) to make a total of 1301 putts (why not just 1300?) from about 12 feet to find out. His results showed that face angle was the most important (80%), followed by putter path (17%) and impact point (3%).

OK, forget the moving head thing and work on your putter blade angle at contact and you will be taking honors at every tee. Wait, Jon Karlsen came back in July with an update. This time he compared green reading, putting technique and green surface inconsistencies to see which of those variables we should discuss with our golf pro. Forty-three expert golfers putted 50 times from varying distances. Results showed that green reading (60%) was the most dominant factor for success with technique (34%) and green inconsistency (6%) trailing significantly.

So, after reading all of this, all you really need is something like the BreakMaster, which will help you read the breaks and the slope to the hole! Then, keep the putter blade square to the ball and don't move your head, at least not in an allocentric way, that is if you can break your bad habit of doing it. No problem, right? Well, next time we'll talk about your brain's attitude towards putting and all the ways your putt could go wrong before you even hit it!

 

Timothy D. Lee, Tadao Ishikura, Stefan Kegel, Dave Gonzalez, Steven Passmore (2008). Head–Putter Coordination Patterns in Expert and Less Skilled Golfers Journal of Motor Behavior, 40 (4), 267-272 DOI: 10.3200/JMBR.40.4.267-272

Jenkins, Simon (2008). Can Elite Tournament Professional Golfers Prevent Habitual Actions in Their Putting Actions? International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching, 3 (1), 117-127

Jon Karlsen, Gerald Smith, Johnny Nilsson (2007). The stroke has only a minor influence on direction consistency in golf putting among elite players Journal of Sports Sciences, 26 (3), 243-250 DOI: 10.1080/02640410701530902

Video Games Move From The Family Room To The Locker Room

From: Video Games Move From The Family Room To The Locker Room

Sports Are 80 Percent Mental

It sounds like a sales job from a 12 year old; "Actually, Dad, this is not just another video game. Its a virtual, scenario-based microcosm of real world experiences that will enhance my decision-making abilities and my cognitive perceptions of the challenges of the sport's environment."  You respond with, "So, how much is Madden 09?"  With over 5 million copies of Madden 08 sold, the release of the latest version two weeks ago is rocketing up the charts.  Days and late nights are being spent all over the world creating rosters, customizing plays and playing entire seasons, all for pure entertainment purposes.  Can all of those hours spent with controller in hands actually be beneficial to young athletes?  Shouldn't they be outside in the fresh air and sunshine playing real sports?  Well, yes, to both questions.

Playing video games, (aka "gaming"), as a form of learning has been receiving increased recent attention from educational psychology researchers.  At this month's American Psychological Association annual convention, several groups of researchers presented studies of the added benefits of playing video games, from problem-solving and critical thinking to better scientific reasoning.  In one of the studies by Fordham University psychologist Fran C. Blumberg, PhD, and Sabrina S. Ismailer, MSED, 122 fifth-, sixth- and seventh-graders' problem-solving behavior was observed while playing a video game that they had never seen before.  As the children played the game, they were asked to think aloud for 20 minutes. Researchers assessed their problem-solving ability by listening to the statements they were making while playing.  The results showed that playing video games can improve cognitive and perceptual skills.  "Younger children seem more interested in setting short-term goals for their learning in the game compared to older children who are more interested in simply playing and the actions of playing," said Blumberg. "Thus, younger children may show a greater need for focusing on small aspects of a given problem than older children, even in a leisure-based situation such as playing video games."

Also, in a recent article on video game learning, David Williamson Shaffer, professor of educational psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madision and author of the book "How Computer Games Help Children Learn", argues that if a game is realistically based on real-world scenarios and rules, it can help the child learn.  “The question though is," Shaffer said, "is what they are doing a good simulation of what is happening in the real world?"  Shaffer explains the research happening on this topic at his UW lab, named Epistemic Games:

 

 

Support for this new era of learning tools is coming from other interesting people, as well.  George Lucas of Star Wars fame has an educational foundation, Edutopia, which has shown recent interest in simulation learning.  Here is their introductory overview and accompanying video:

 

 

If we accept that there is some validity to teaching/learning with video game simulations, how can we move this to the sports arena?  Obviously, there is no substitute for playing the real game with real players, opponents, pressure, etc., but more teams and coaches are turning to simulation games for greater efficiency in the learning process.  If the objective is to expose players to plays, tactics, field vision and critical thinking, then a gaming session can begin to introduce these concepts that will be validated later on the field during "real" practice.  This homework can also be done at home, not requiring teammates, fields, equipment, etc.  As mentioned in the videos above, another driving factor in the use of games is to reach this young, Web 2.0 audience through a medium that they already know, understand and enjoy.  The motivation to learn is inherent with the use of games.  The "don't tell them its good for them" secret is key to seeing progress with this type of training.

One of the best examples of video game adaptation for sports learning is from XOS Technologies and their modified version of the Madden NFL game.  In 2007, they licensed the core development engine from EA Sports and created a football simulation, called SportMotion, that can be used for individual training.  With the familiar Madden user interface, coaches can first load their playbook into the game, as well as their opponent's expected plays.  Then, the athlete can "play" the game but will now see their own team's plays being run by the virtual players.  Imagine the difference in learning style for a new quarterback.  Instead of studying static X's and O's on a two-dimensional piece of paper, they can now watch and then play a virtual simulation of the same play in motion against a variety of different defenses.  With a "first-person" view of the play unfolding, they will see the options available in a "real-time" mode which will force faster reaction and decision-making skills.  To take the simulation one step further, XOS has added a virtual reality option that takes the game controller out of the player's hands and replaces it with a VR suit and goggles allowing him to physically play the game, throw the ball, etc. through his virtual eyes.  Take a look at this promotional video from XOS:

 

 

XOS is winning some high praise for its system, including none other than Phillip Fulmer, Head Coach of the University of Tennesee football team.  “We’re leading the nation by taking advantage of this cutting-edge technology and we couldn’t be more pumped about it,” Fulmer said. “UT football has a long and storied tradition of success and because we look to pioneer groundbreaking concepts before anyone else, we’ll proudly continue that history. The XOS PlayAction Simulator begins a new chapter for UT and we’re pleased to add it to our football training regiment.” Albert Tsai, vice president of advanced research at XOS Technologies, says, “We’ve basically added functionality to popular EA video games such as customizable playbooks, diagrams and testing sequences to better prepare athletes for specific opponents.  Additionally, the software includes built-in teaching and reporting tools so that coaches Fulmer, Cutcliffe and Cooter can analyze and track the tactical-skill development of the team. At the same time, the Volunteers can experience immediate benefits because the familiarity with the EA SPORTS brand requires little to no learning curve for their players.”

So, the next time your son (or daughter!) is begging for 10 more minutes on the Xbox to make sure the Packers destroy the Vikings once again (sorry, a little Wisconsin bias), you may want to reconsider pulling the plug.  Then, send them outside for that fresh air.

Inside An Olympian's Brain

From: Inside An Olympian's Brain

Sports Are 80 Percent Mental

Michael Phelps, Nastia Liukin, Misty May-Treanor and Lin Dan are four Olympic athletes who have each spent most of their life learning the skills needed to reach the top of their respective sports, swimming, gymnastics, beach volleyball and badminton (you were wondering about Lin, weren't you...)  Their physical skills are obvious and amazing to watch.  For just a few minutes, instead of being a spectator, try to step inside the heads of each of them and try to imagine what their brains must accomplish when they are competing and how different the mental tasks are for each of their sports.

On a continuum from repetitive motion to reactive motion, these four sports each require a different level of brain signal to muscle movement.  Think of Phelps finishing off one more gold medal race in the last 50 meters.  His brain has one goal; repeat the same stroke cycle as quickly and as efficiently as possible until he touches the wall.  There isn't alot of strategy or novel movement based on his opponent's movements.  Its simply to be the first one to finish.  What is he consciously thinking about during a race?  In his post-race interviews, he says he notices the relative positions of other swimmers, his energy level and the overall effort required to win (and in at least one race, the level of water in his goggles.)  At his level, the concept of automaticity (as discussed in a previous post) has certainly been reached, where he doesn't have to consciously "think" about the components of his stroke.  In fact, research has shown that those who do start analyzing their body movements during competition are prone to errors as they take themselves out of their mental flow.

Moving up the continuum, think about gymnastics.  Certainly, the skills to perform a balance beam routine are practiced to the point of fluency, but the skills themselves are not as strictly repetitive as swimming.  There are finer points of each movement being judged so gymnasts keep several mental "notes" about the current performance so that they can "remember" to keep their head up or their toes pointed or to gather speed on the dismount.  There also is an order of skills or routine that needs to be remembered and activated.

While swimming and gymnastics are battles against yourself and previously rehearsed movements, sports like beach volleyball and badminton require reactionary moves directly based on your opponents' movements.  Rather than being "locked-in" to a stroke or practised routine, athletes in direct competition with their opponents must either anticipate or react to be successful.

So, what is the brain's role in learning each of these varied sets of skills and what commands do our individual neurons control?  Whether we are doing a strictly repetitive movement like a swim stroke or a unique, "on the fly" move like a return of a serve, what instructions are sent from our brain to our muscles?  Do the neurons of the primary motor cortex (where movement is controlled in the brain) send out signals of both what to do and how to do it?

Researchers at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT led by Robert Ajemian designed an experiment to solve this "muscles or movement" question.  They trained adult monkeys to move a video game joystick so that a cursor on a screen would move towards a target.  While the monkeys learned the task, they measured brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to compare the actual movements of the joystick with the firing patterns of neurons.  The researchers then developed a model that allowed them to test hypotheses about the relationship between neuronal activity that they measured in the monkey's motor cortex and the resulting actions.  They concluded that neurons do send both the specific signals to the muscles to make the movement and a goal-oriented instruction set to monitor the success of the movement towards the goal.  Here is a video synopsis of a very similar experiment by Miguel Nicolelis, Professor of Neurobiology at Duke University:

 

 

To back this up, Andrew Schwartz, professor of neurobiology at the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, and his team of researchers wanted to isolate the brain signals from the actual muscles and see if the neuron impulses on their own could produce both intent to move and the movement itself.  They taught adult monkeys to feed themselves using a robotic arm while the monkey's own arms were restrained.  Instead, tiny probes the width of a human hair were placed in the monkey's motor cortex to pick up the electrical impulses created by the monkey's neurons.  These signals were then evaluated by software controlling the robotic arm and the resulting movement instructions were carried out.  The monkeys were able to control the arm with their "thoughts" and feed themselves food.  Here's a video of this experiment in action:

 

 

"In our research, we've demonstrated a higher level of precision, skill and learning," explained Dr. Schwartz. "The monkey learns by first observing the movement, which activates his brain cells as if he were doing it. It's a lot like sports training, where trainers have athletes first imagine that they are performing the movements they desire."

It seems these "mental maps" of neurons in the motor cortex are the end goal for athletes to achieve the automaticity required to either repeat the same rehearsed motions (like Phelps and Liukin) or to react instantly to a new situation (like May-Treanor and Dan).  Luckily, we can just practice our own automaticity of sitting on the couch and watching in a mesemerized state.

AJEMIAN, R., GREEN, A., BULLOCK, D., SERGIO, L., KALASKA, J., GROSSBERG, S. (2008). Assessing the Function of Motor Cortex: Single-Neuron Models of How Neural Response Is Modulated by Limb Biomechanics. Neuron, 58(3), 414-428. DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2008.02.033

Velliste, M., Perel, S., Spalding, M.C., Whitford, A.S., Schwartz, A.B. (2008). Cortical control of a prosthetic arm for self-feeding. Nature, 453(7198), 1098-1101. DOI: 10.1038/nature06996

HGH - Human Growth Hoax?

Athletes, both professional and amateur, as well as the general public are convinced that human growth hormone (HGH), Erythropoietin (EPO) and anabolic-androgenic steroids (AAS) are all artificial and controversial paths to improved performance in sports.  The recent headlines that have included Barry Bonds, Marion Jones, Floyd Landis, Dwayne Chambers, Jose Canseco, Jason Giambi, Roger Clemens and many lesser known names (see the amazingly long list of doping cases in sport) have referred to these three substances interchangeably leaving the public confused about who took what from whom.  With so many athletes willing to gamble with their futures, they must be confident that they will see significant short-term results.  So, is it worth the risk?  Two very interesting recent studies provide some answers on at least one of the substances, HGH.

A team at the Stanford University School of Medicine, led by Hau Liu MD, recently reviewed 27 historical studies on the effects of HGH on athletic performance, dating back to 1966 (see reference below).  They wanted to see if there were any definitive links between HGH use and improved results.  In some of the studies, test volunteers who received HGH did develop more lean body mass, but also developed more lactate during aerobic testing which inhibited rather than helped performance.  While their muscle mass increased, other markers of athletic fitness, such as VO2max remained unchanged.  “The key takeaway is that we don’t have any good scientific evidence that growth hormone improves athletic performance,” said senior author Andrew Hoffman, MD, professor of endocrinology, gerontology and metabolism.

Both Liu and Hoffman cautioned that the amounts of HGH given to these test subjects may be much lower than the the purported levels claimed to be taken by professional athletes.  They also pointed out that at a professional level, a very slight improvement might be all that is necessary to get an edge of your opponent.  Hoffman also added an insightful comment, “So much of athletic performance at the professional level is psychological.”  If an athlete takes HGH, sees some muscle mass growth and isn't 100% sure of its performance capabilities, might he assume he now has other "Superman" powers?

That is exactly the premise that a research team from Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney, Australia used to find out if HGH users simply relied on a placebo effect.  Sixty-four participants, young adult recreational athletes, were divided into two groups of 32 and tested for a baseline of athletic ability in endurance, strength, power and sprinting.  One group received growth hormone and the other group received a simple placebo.  It was a "double-blind" study in that neither the participants nor the researchers knew during the testing which substance each group received.

At the end of the 8 week treatment, the athletes were asked if they thought they were in the HGH group or the placebo group.  Half of the group that had received the placebo incorrectly guessed that they were on HGH.  Not too surprisingly, the majority of the "incorrect guessers" were men.  Here's where it gets interesting.  The incorrect guessers also thought that their athletic abilities had improved over the 8 week period.  The team retested all of the placebo group and actually did find improvement across all of the tests, but only significantly in the high-jump test.

Jennifer Hansen, a nurse researcher and Dr. Ken Ho, head of the pituitary research unit at Garvan have not released the data on the group that did receive the HGH, but they will in their final report coming soon.

So, let's recap.  On the one hand, we have a research review that claims there is not yet any scientific evidence that HGH actually improves sports performance.  Yet, we have hundreds, if not thousands, of athletes illegally using HGH for performance gain.  Showing the effect of the "if its good enough for them, its good enough for me" beliefs of the public regarding professional athlete use of HGH, we now have research that shows even those who received a placebo, but believed they were taking HGH not only thought they were improving but actually did improve a little.  Once again, we see the power of our own natural, non-supplemented brain to convince (or fool) ourselves to perform at higher levels than we thought possible.

Liu, H., Bravata, D.M., Olkin, I., Friedlander, A., Liu, V., Roberts, B., Bendavid, E., Saynina, O., Salpeter, S.R., Garber, A.M. (2008). Systematic review: the effects of growth hormone on athletic performance.. Annals of Internal Medicine, 148(10), 747-758.

Play Better Golf By Playing Bigger Holes

From:  Play Better Golf By Playing Bigger Holes

Sports Are 80 Percent Mental



Here are some quotes we have all heard (or said ourselves) on the golf course or at the ball diamond.

On a good day:

"It was like putting into the Grand Canyon"

"The baseball looked like a beach ball up there today"

On a bad day:

"The hole was as small as a thimble"

"I don't know, it looked like he was throwing marbles"

The baseball and the golf hole are the same size every day, so are these comments meaningless or do we really perceive these objects differently depending on the day's performance?  And, does our performance influence our perception or does our perception help our performance?

Jessica Witt, an assistant professor of psychological science at the University of Virginia has made two attempts at the answer.  First, in a 2005 study, "See the Ball, Hit the Ball", her team studied softball players by designing an experiment that tried to correlate perceived softball size to performance.  She interviewed players immediately after a game and asked them to estimate the size of the softball by picking a circle off of a board that contained several different sizes.  She then found out how that player had done at the plate that day.  As expected, the players that were hitting well chose the larger sized circles to represent the ball size, while the underperforming hitters chose the smaller circles.  The team was not able to answer the question of causality, so they expanded the research to other sports.

Fast forward to July, 2008 and Witt and her team have just released a very similar study focused on golf, "Putting to a bigger hole: Golf performance relates to perceived size".  Using the same experiment format, players who had just finished a round of golf were asked to pick out the perceived size of the hole from a collection of holes that varied in diameter by a few centimeters.  Once again, the players who had scored well that day picked the larger holes and vice versa for that day's hackers.  So, the team came to the same conclusion that there is some relationship between perception and performance, but could not figure out the direction of the effect.  Ideally, a player could "imagine" a larger hole and then play better because of that visual cue.

Researchers at Vanderbilt University may have the answer.  In a study, "The Functional Impact of Mental Imagery on Conscious Perception", the team led by Joel Pearson, wanted to see what influence our "Mind's Eye" has on our actual perception.  In their experiment, they asked volunteers to imagine simple patterns of vertical or horizontal stripes.  Then, they showed each person a pattern of green horizontal stripes in one eye and red vertical stripes in the other eye.  This would induce what is known as the "binocular rivalry" condition where each image would fight for control of perception and would appear to alternate from one to the other.  In this experiment, however, the subjects reported seeing the image they had first imagined more often.  So, if they had imagined vertical stripes originally, they would report seeing the red vertical stripes predominantly.

The team concluded that mental imagery does have an influence over what is later seen.  They also believe that the brain actually processes imagined mental images the same way it handles actual scenes.  "More recently, with advances in human brain imaging, we now know that when you imagine something parts of the visual brain do light up and you see activity there," Pearson says. "So there's more and more evidence suggesting that there is a huge overlap between mental imagery and seeing the same thing. Our work shows that not only are imagery and vision related, but imagery directly influences what we see."

So, back to our sports example, if we were able to imagine a large golf hole or a huge baseball, this might affect our actual perception of the real thing and increase our performance.  This link has not been tested, but its a step in the right direction.  Another open question is the effect that our emotions and confidence have on our perceived task.  That hole may look like the Grand Canyon, but the sand trap might look like the Sahara Desert!

Witt, J.K. (2008). Putting to a bigger hole: golf performance relates to perceived size. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 15(3), 581-585.

Brains Over Brawn In Sports

From: Brains Over Brawn In Sports

Sports Are 80 Percent Mental

Sometimes, during my daily browsing of the Web for news and interesting angles on the sport science world, I get lucky and hit a home run. I stumbled on this great May 2007 Wired article by Jennifer Kahn, Wayne Gretzky-Style 'Field Sense' May Be Teachable. It ties together the people and themes of my last three posts, focusing on the concept of perception in sports.

Wayne Gretzky is often held up as the ultimate example of an athlete with average physical stature, who used his cognitive and perceptual skills to beat opponents. Joining Gretzky in the "brains over brawn" Hall of Fame would be pitcher Greg Maddux, NBA guard Steve Nash and quarterback Joe Montana. They were all told as teenagers that they didn't have the size to succeed in college or the pros, but they countered this by becoming master students of the game, constantly searching for visual cues that would give them the advantage of a fraction of second or the element of surprise.

Kahn's story focuses on two sport scientists that we have met before. Peter Vint, sport technologist with the US Olympic team, who I highlighted in the post, Winning Olympic Gold With Sport Science, comments on this, "In any sport, you come across these players. They're not always the most physically talented, but they're by far the best. The way they see things that nobody else sees — it can seem almost supernatural. But I'm a scientist, so I want to know how the magic works." So, Vint and his team continue to search not only for the secret to the magic, but how it can be taught.

Vint acknowledges the work of one of his fellow sport scientists, Damian Farrow, of the Australian Institute for Sport, who was part of the discussion roundtable mentioned in my post, Getting Sport Science Out Of The Lab And Onto The Field.

He is also fascinated with the perceptual abilities of elite athletes. In his own sport, tennis, he wanted to know how expert players could return serves much better than novice players. Similar to the research we looked at in an earlier post about tennis, Federer and Nadal Can See the Difference, Farrow designed an experiment that would try to identify the cues that players might need to instinctively estimate the speed and direction of a serve. He had three groups of players, expert, non-expert but coached, and non-expert/non-coaced novices, wear ear plugs to block out the sound of the ball hitting the racquet as well as occlusion glasses that could block vision with the touch of an assistant's button. By changing the point of the serve at which the glasses would go black, and the players would be "blind", he could try to isolate the action of the server that the expert players might be tuned into that the novices were not. The decisive point was immediately before impact between the racquet and the ball. Arm and racquet position at that point seemed to let the expert players estimate the direction of the serve more accurately than the novices.

But Vint and Farrow are not satisfied just knowing what an expert knows. They want to understand how to teach this skill to novices. From his own competitive tennis playing days, Farrow remembers that if he consciously focused his mind on things like arm position, racquet angle, etc., he would be miss the serve as his reaction time would drop. He understood that players need to not only learn the cues, but learn them to the point of "automaticity" through implicit learning. You may remember our discussion of implicit learning from the post, Teaching Tactics and Techniques in Sports. Malcolm Gladwell, in his best-selling book, Blink, calls this implicit decision-making ability "thin slicing" and gives examples of how we can often make better decisions in the "blink" of an eye, rather than through long analysis. Obviously, in sports, when only seconds or sub-seconds are allowed for decisions, this blink must be so well-trained that it is at the sub-conscious level.

For Vint and Farrow, the experiments continue, looking at each sport, but beyond the raw physical and technical skills that need to be taught but often times are the only skills that are taught. Understanding the cognitive side of the game will provide the edge when all else is equal.

Getting Sport Science Out Of The Lab And Onto The Field

From:Getting Sport Science Out Of The Lab And Onto The Field

Sports Are 80 Percent Mental



You are a coach, trying to juggle practice plans, meetings, game prep and player issues while trying to stay focused on the season's goals. At the end of another long day, you see this in your inbox:

MEMO
To: All Head Coaches
From: Athletic Director
Subject: Monthly Reading List to Keep Up with Current Sport Science Research
- Neuromuscular Activation of Triceps Surae Using Muscle Functional MRI and EMG
- Positive effects of intermittent hypoxia (live high:train low) on exercise performance are not mediated primarily by augmented red cell volume
- Physiologic Left Ventricular Cavity Dilatation in Elite Athletes
- The Relationships of Perceived Motivational Climate to Cohesion and Collective Efficacy in Elite Female Teams

Just some light reading before bedtime... This is an obvious exaggeration (and weak attempt at humor) of the gap between sport science researchers and practitioners. While those are actual research paper titles from the last few years under the heading of "sport science", the intended audience was most likely not coaches or athletes, but rather fellow academic peers. The real question is whether the important conclusions and knowledge captured in all of this research is ever actually used to improve athletic performance? How can a coach or athlete understand, combine and transfer this information into their game?

David Bishop of the Faculty of Exercise and Sport Science at the University of Verona has been looking at this issue for several years. It started with a roundtable discussion he had at the 2006 Congress of the Australian Association for Exercise and Sports Science with several academic sport scientists (see: Sports-Science Roundtable: Does Sports-Science Research Influence Practice? ) He asked very direct questions regarding the definition of sport science and whether the research always needs to be "applied" versus establishing a "basic" foundation. The most intriguing question was whether there already is ample research that could be applied that needs a good translator/professional to interpret for and communicate to the potential users - coaches and athletes. The panel agreed that was the missing piece, as most academic researchers just don't have the time to deliver all of their findings directly to the field.

In a follow-up to this discussion, Bishop recently published his proposed solution titled, "An Applied Research Model for the Sport Sciences" in Sports Medicine (see citation below). In it, he calls for a new framework for researchers to follow when designing their studies so that there is always a focus on how the results will directly improve athletic performance. He calls for a greater partnership role between researchers and coaches to map out a useful agenda of real world problems to examine. He admits that this model, if implemented, will only help increase the potential for applied sport science. The "middleman" practitioner role is still needed to bring this information to the front lines of sports.

The solution for this "gathering place" community seems perfect for Web 2.0 technology. One specific example is this online community, iStadia.com. Keith Irving and Rob Robson, two practicing sport science consultants, created this site two years ago to fill this gap. Today, with over 600 members, iStadia is approaching the type of critical mass that will be necessary to bring all of the stakeholders together. Of course, as with any online community, the conversations there are only as good as the participants want to make it. But, with the pressure on coaches to win and the desire of sport scientists to produce relevant knowledge, there is motivation to make the connection.

Another trend favoring more public awareness of sport science is the recent surge in media attention, especially related to the upcoming Beijing Olympics. In an earlier post, Winning Olympic Gold With Sport Science, I highlighted a feature article from USA Today. This month's Fast Company also picks up on this theme with their cover article, Innovation of Olympic Proportions, describing several high-tech equipment innovations that will be used at the Games. Each article mentions the evolving trust and acceptance of sport science research by coaches and athletes. When they see actual products, techniques and, most importantly, results come from the research, they cannot deny its value.



Bishop, D. (2008). An Applied Research Model for the Sport Sciences. Sports Medicine, 38(3), 253-263.

Teaching Tactics and Techniques in Sports

From: Teaching Tactics and Techniques In Sports

Sports Are 80 Percent Mental

You have probably seen both types of teams. Team A: players who are evenly spaced, calling out plays, staying in their positions only to watch them dribble the ball out of bounds, lose the pass, or shoot wildly at the goal. Team B: amazing ball control, skillful shooting and superior quickness, speed and agility but each player is a "do-it-yourselfer" since no one can remember a formation, strategy or position responsibility. Team A knows WHAT to do, but can't execute. Team B knows HOW to do it, but struggles with making good team play decisions. This is part of the ongoing balancing act of a coach. At the youth level, teaching technique first has been the tradition, followed by tactical training later and separately. More recently, there has been research on the efficiency of learning in sports and whether there is a third "mixed" option that yields better performance.

Earlier, we took an initial look at Dr. Joan Vickers' Decision Training model as an introduction to this discussion. In addition, Dr. Markus Raab of the Institute for Movement Sciences and Sport, University of Flensburg, Germany, (now of the Institute of Psychology, German Sport University in Cologne), summarized the four major models of teaching sports skills that agree that technical and tactical skills need to be combined for more effective long-term learning.  Each of the four models vary in their treatment of learning along two different dimensions; implicit vs. explicit learning and domain-specific vs. domain-general environments. 

Types of Learning
Imagine two groups of boys playing baseball. The first group has gathered at the local ball diamond at the park with their bats, balls and gloves. No coaches, no parents, no umpires; just a group of friends playing an informal "pick-up" game of baseball. They may play by strict baseball rules, or they may improvise and make their own "home" rules, (no called strikes, no stealing, etc.). In the past, they may have had more formal coaching, but today is unstructured.

The second group is what we see much more often today. A team of players, wearing their practice uniforms are driven by their parents to team practice at a specific location and time to be handed off to the team coaches. The coaches have planned a 90 minute session that includes structured infield practice, then fly ball practice, then batting practice and finally some situational scrimmages. Rules are followed and coaching feedback is high. Both groups learn technical and tactical skills during their afternoon of baseball. They differ in the type of learning they experience. The first group uses "implicit" learning while the second group uses "explicit" learning. Implicit learning is simply the lack of explicit teaching. It is "accidental" or "incidental" learning that soaks in during the course of our play. There is no coach teaching the first group, but they learn by their own trial and error and internalize the many if-then rules of technical and tactical skills. Explicit learning, on the other hand, is directed instruction from an expert who demonstrates proper technique or explains the tactic and the logic behind it.

An interesting test of whether a specific skill or piece of knowledge has been learned with implicit or explicit methods is to ask the athlete to describe or verbalize the details of the skill or sub-skill. If they cannot verbalize how they know what they know, it was most likely learned through implicit learning. However, if they can explain the team's attacking strategy for this game, for example, that most likely came from an explicit learning session with their coach.

Types of Domains
The other dimension that coaches could use in choosing the best teaching method is along the domain continuum. Some teaching methods work best to teach a skill that is specific to that sport's domain and the level of transferability to another sport is low. These methods are known as domain-specific. For more general skills that can be useful in several related sports, a method can be used known as domain-general. Why would any coach choose a method that is not specific to their sport? There has been evidence that teaching at a more abstract level, using both implicit and explicit "play" can enhance future, more specific coaching. Also, remember our discussion about kids playing multiple sports.Based on these two dimensions, Dr. Raab looked at and summarized these four teaching models:

• Teaching Games for Understanding (TGFU)
• Decision Training (DT)
• Ball School (Ball)
• Situation Model of Anticipated Response consequences of Tactical training (SMART)

TGFU
The TGFU approach, (best described by Bunker, D.; Thorpe, R. (1982) A model for the teaching of games in the secondary school, Bulletin of Physical Education, 10, 9–16), is known for involving the athlete early in the "cognition" part of the game and combining it with the technical aspect of the game. Rather than learn "how-to" skills in a vacuum, TGFU argues that an athlete can tie the technical skill with the appropriate time and place to use it and in the context of a real game or a portion of the game. This method falls into the explicit category of learning, as the purpose of the exercise is explained. However, the exercises themselves stress a more domain-general approach of more generic skills that can be transferred between related sports such as "invasion games" (soccer, football, rugby), "net games" (tennis, volleyball), "striking/fielding games" (baseball, cricket) and "target games" (golf, target shooting). 

Decision Training
The DT method, (best described by Vickers, J. N., Livingston, L. F., Umeris-Bohnert, S. & Holden, D. (1999) Decision training: the effects of complex instruction, variable practice and reduced delayed feedback on the acquisition and transfer of a motor skill, Journal of Sports Sciences, 17, 357–367), uses an explicit learning style but with a domain-specific approach. Please see my earlier post on Decision Training for details of the approach. 

Ball School
The Ball School approach, (best described by Kroger, C. & Roth, K. (1999) Ballschule: ein ABC fur Spielanfanger [Ball school: an ABC for game beginners] (Schorndorf, Hofmann), starts on the other end of both spectrums, in that it teaches generic domain-general skills using implicit learning. It emphasizes that training must be based on ability, playfullness, and skill-based. Matching the games to the group's abilities, while maintaining an unstructured "play" atmosphere will help teach generic skills like "hitting a target" or "avoiding defenders". 

SMART
Dr. Raab's own SMART model, (best described in Raab, M. (2003) Decision making in sports: implicit and explicit learning is affected by complexity of situation, International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 1, 406–433), blends implicit and explicit learning within a domain-specific environment. The idea is that different sports' environmental complexity may demand either an implicit or explicit learning method. Raab had previously shown that skills learned implicitly work best in sport enviroments with low complexity. Skills learned explicitly will work best in highly complex environments. Complexity is measured by the number of variables in the sport. So, a soccer field has many moving parts, each with its own variables. So, the bottom line is to use the learning strategy that fits the sport's inherent difficulty. So, learning how to choose from many different skill and tactical options would work best if matched with the right domain-specific environment.  

Bottom-Line for Coaches
What does all of this mean for the coach? That there are several different models of instruction and that one size does not fit all situations. Coaches need an arsenal of tools to use based on the specific goals of the training session. In reality, most sports demand both implicit and explicit learning, as well as skills that are specific to one domain, and some that can transfer across several sport domains. Flexibility in the approach taken goes back to the evidence based coaching example we gave last time. Keeping an open mind about coaching methods and options will produce better prepared athletes.

Of course, we are always interested in your thoughts and opinions!  Please add your comments.



(2007). Discussion. Physical Education & Sport Pedagogy, 12(1), 1-22. DOI: 10.1080/17408980601060184

Winning Olympic Gold With Sport Science

From: Winning Olympic Gold With Sport Science

Sports Are 80 Percent Mental

Its something that every coach and every athlete of every sport is searching for... the EDGE. That one training tip, equipment improvement, mental preparation or tactical insight that will tip the game towards them. The body of knowledge that exists today in each sport is assumed, with each competitor expected to at least be aware of the history, beliefs and traditions of their individual sport. But, if each team is starting with the same set of information then the team that takes the next step by applying new research and ideas will capture the edge.

To me, that is what sport science is all about. The goal is to improve sports performance by imagining, analyzing, experimenting, testing, documenting and training new methods to coaches and athletes.

You might have seen a great article in the 6/23 edition of USA Today; "In hunt for Olympic gold, techies are major players" by Jodi Upton. We meet Peter Vint, a "sport technologist" in the Performance Technology Division of the US Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, CO, whose job it is to find ways to win more gold medals. From the article; "The next revolution, Vint says, is breaking down the last secrets of elite athletes: response time, how they read the field and other players — everything that goes into the vision, perception and split-second decision-making of an athlete. 'We've always looked at that as mysterious, something that's unmeasurable and innate,' Vint says. 'But we think it can be taught.'"

Interestingly, Vint cites another pioneer in evidence-based sports coaching, Oakland A's general manager, Billy Beane. "We're becoming progressively more data-driven," Vint says of the center's training efforts. "We are trying to pursue what Sabermetrics and Billy Beane did for baseball, identifying factors that can truly influence performance." The radical concept that Beane created, as documented in the bestseller, "Moneyball" by Michael Lewis, is to stop searching for "the edge" in all the same places that everyone else is looking. Instead, he started from scratch with new logic about the objectives of the game of baseball itself and built metrics that gave new insight into the types of players and skill sets that he should acquire for his team.

If sport science is going to thrive and be accepted, it faces the challenge of inertia. The ideas and techniques that are the product of sport science can also be captured in the phrase, "evidence based coaching". Just as evidence based medicine has slowly found its place in the physician's exam room, the coaching profession is just beginning to trust the research. Traditionally, "belief based coaching" has been the philosophy favored in the clubhouse. Training drills, tactical plans, player selection and player development has been guided by ideas and concepts that have been handed down from one generation of coaches to the next. Most of these beliefs are valid and have been proven on the field through many years of trial and error. Subjecting these beliefs to scientific research may not produce conclusions any different than what coaching lore tells us. But, today's coaches and athletes see the competition creeping closer to them in all aspects, so they are now willing to at least listen to the scientists. Beane likens it to financial analysis and the stock market. The assumption is that all information is known by all. But, if someone can find a ratio or a statistic or make an industry insight that no one has considered, then they own the competitive advantage; at least until this new information is made public.

It takes time, though, to amass enough data to convince a head coach to change years of habits for the unknown. Reputations and championships are on the line, so the changes sometimes need to be implemented slowly. Vint describes the gradual process of converting U.S. hurdler Terrence Trammell and his coach to some of his ideas. "The relationship between the athletes and sports scientist is critical," Vint says. "But (for some), biomechanics has not yet provided useful enough suggestions."

There still is debate on evidence based coaching vs. belief based coaching. Here are two opposing opinions; evidence-based: "The Second Law of Thermodynamics" by Brent S. Rushall of San Diego State University
and belief-based: "Evidence Based vs. Belief Based Coaching" by Richard Todd of Webball.com. If you have a few minutes, please read each opinion and offer your take on this. After considering these opinions, Robert Robson, sport psychologist and management consultant, stated, "Sports coaching should absolutely be evidence-based, but any argument that places the sole source of evidence in the realm of the scientific method is, I would argue, naive and lacking in an understanding of the philosophical underpinnings of science."

Looking forward, I will dig a little deeper into this topic in the next week, so please check back or subscribe to Sports Are 80 Percent Mental.

Why The Offsides Flag Has Been "Ruud" to Italy

From: Why The Offsides Flag Has Been "Ruud" to Italy

Sports Are 80 Percent Mental

Two Euro 2008 games and two questionable offsides calls against Italy, one on defense, the other on offense, are still being talked about this weekend. First, in the Netherlands opener, van Nistelrooy scores from an obvious offsides position... except for Panucci, who is lying on the ground next to the goal. In fact, UEFA had to defend their referee for a correct interpretation. The call that did not get an explanation was Luca Toni's offsides on a cross from Zambrotta in the Romania match, which disallowed a first half goal. The first call was deemed correct, the second one was a blatant error.

Calling offsides correctly is one of the most difficult officiating duties in sports. In fact, some have argued that it is nearly impossible given the limitations of the human eye and the number of objects that need to be tracked by one assistant referee. Back in 2004, Francisco Belda Maruenda, M.D. of Centro de Salud de Alquerías in Murcia, Spain, took a look at the eye movements necessary along with their associated durations to determine if it was a humanly possible task. Let's look at his logic.

First, some eye physiology definitions are needed:

Saccadic movements - when we shift our eyes' focus from one object to another, we are making a saccadic movement. As an assistant referee (AR) looks from the ball carrier to the last defender to the offensive players, he needs to make several saccadic movements to take in the whole scene.

Vergence movements - there are two types, convergence (changing gaze from objects far away to objects closer to you), and divergence (just the opposite, near to far).

Accomodation - to change the focus of the eye from far to near or near to far, the convexity of the retina lens needs to change.

All of these eye movements, saccadic, vergence and accomodations take time to accomplish. Let's see how Maruenda added these up for an offsides call:
- the AR needs to keep track of at least four objects, the ball, the last two defenders and the offensive receiver of the pass. There may also be more offensive players to track as well.
- to make saccadic movements from the first object to each of the remaining objects will take about 130ms for the first object and then another 10ms per object after that. With four objects to track, that would be a total of about 160ms.
- if some of the players are on the far side of the field and some on the near side, then a vergence movement and an accomodation would be required, taking an additional 360ms for the accomodation and 640ms for the far to near vergence movement.
- of course, the players are constantly moving during the play, so their position is changing rapidly. If the speed of an offensive player is assumed to be 7.14 m/s, then in 100ms, they will have moved 71cm. This movement could be the difference between an onside position and an offside position. See the diagrams below (taken directly from the article)

Top: No offside, players in correct position.




Bottom: 100 ms later (players' velocity 7.14 m/s), offsides







The conclusion then, is that the total time needed for the AR to focus on at least four different objects in sequential order and process their positions cognitively is beyond the 100ms that would be needed for an offensive player to move from an onside position when the ball is played to a perceived offsides position when the AR finally focuses on him.

There have been some responses to Maruenda's logic, mainly centered on the fact that ARs have long known they can't watch the ball and the last defender, so they instead listen for the sound of the ball being struck while staying focused on the line of defense. This method may be used, but the sound of the crowd, the muted sound of the boot on the ball and the slower speed of sound may also have an effect on this judgement.

There is technology being developed to make offsides calls with multiple cameras, etc., but FIFA is not in favor of taking the flag away from the AR yet, just as they are against obvious goal line technology to watch for goals. It appears the debates and arguments will live on for the near future.



Source: Belda Maruenda, F. (2004). Can the human eye detect an offside position during a football match?. BMJ, 329(7480), 1470-1472. DOI: 10.1136/bmj.329.7480.1470

Federer and Nadal Can See the Difference

From: Federer and Nadal Can See the Difference

Sports Are 80 Percent Mental

Watching Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal battle it out in the French Open final last month, and now the epic Wimbledon final,  I started thinking more about the interceptive timing task requirements of each of their visuomotor systems... yeah, right. C'mon, I just needed a good opening line for this post.

However, other than a 120 mph tennis serve, take a second to think about all of the different sports that send an object flying at you at very high speeds that you not only have to see, but also estimate the speed of the object, the movement of the object and what you want to do with the object once it gets to you.

Some examples are:
- a hockey puck at a goalie (70-100 mph)
- a baseball pitch at a batter (70-100 mph)
- a soccer ball kicked at a keeper (60-90 mph)

Previously, we took a look at this in baseball and in soccer and also discussed the different types of visual skills in sports. There, we broke it down into three categories:
- Targeting tasks
- Interceptive timing tasks
- Tactical decision making tasks

The second category, interceptive timing tasks, deals with the examples above; stuff coming at you fast and you need to react. There are three levels of response that take an increasing level of brainpower. First, there is a basic reaction, also known as optometric reaction. In other words, "see it and get out of the way". Next, there is a perceptual reaction, meaning you actually can identify the object coming at you and can put it in some context (i.e. that is a tennis ball coming at you and not a bird swooping out of the sky). Finally, there is a cognitive reaction, meaning you know what is coming at you and you have a plan of what to do with it (i.e. return the ball with top-spin down the right line). This cognitive skill is usually sport-specific and learned over years of tactical training. Obviously, for professional tennis players, they are at the expert cognitive stage and have a plan for most shots. Federer's problem was that Nadal had better plans. But, in order to reach that cognitive stage, they first need to have excellent optometric and perceptual skills. Can those skills be trained? Or are the best tennis players born with naturally better abilities? Did their training make them better tennis players or are they better players because of some natural skills?

Leila Overney and her team at the Brain Mind Institute of Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) recently studied whether expert tennis players have better visual perception abilities than other athletes and non-tennis players. Typically, motor skill research compares experts to non-experts and tries to deduce what the experts are doing differently to excel. In this study, an additional category was added. Overney wanted to see if the perceptual skills of the tennis players were significantly more advanced than athletes of a similar fitness level, (in this case triathletes), to eliminate the variable of "fitness", and also more advanced than novice tennis players (the typical comparison). To eliminate the cognitive knowledge difference between the groups, she used seven non-sport specific visual tests. Please see the actual study for details of all the tests. The bottom line of the results was that certain motion detection and speed discrimination skills were better in the tennis players (in other words, being able to track a ball coming at you and its movement side to side).

So, the expert tennis players were better at tracking balls coming at them than triathletes and non-tennis players.... seems pretty obvious(!) But, these results are a first step to answering the question of "can these skills be trained"? We see that there is, indeed, a difference in ability level between expert players and athletes that are in similar shape and competitive spirit. Now, the question becomes, "how did these tennis players acquire a higher level of perception skill"? Was it "nature or nurture", "genetically gifted or trained through practice"?

What do you think?

Source: Overney, L.S., Blanke, O., Herzog, M.H., Burr, D.C. (2008). Enhanced Temporal but Not Attentional Processing in Expert Tennis Players. PLoS ONE, 3(6), e2380. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0002380

See The Ball, Be The Ball - Vision and Sports

From: See The Ball, Be The Ball - Vision and Sports

Sports Are 80 Percent Mental

The whistle blows and Shaq goes to the line again after being fouled on purpose for the fourth time. And, again, we watch as he takes that awkward stance, looks at the basket and then clanks one of the back of the rim. We wonder how hard this can be... just aim and shoot! Isn't it that simple? Well, not exactly. In our introduction to this series I mentioned the research of Dr. Joan Vickers and her concept of the "Quiet Eye". In her book, Perception, Cognition and Decision Training, she describes this visual targeting pathway:

"...the visual pathway begins when information is registered on the eye's retina by the focal and ambient systems, then travels to the back of the head along the optic nerve and radiates to the occipital cortex, where visual information is registered as billions of features. These then race in parallel fashion both to the top of the head to the parietal cortex (dorsal) and along the sides of the head to the temporal (ventral) areas. There is an integration of information in the somatosensory cortex as the information goes to the frontal cortex, where the goals and intentions reside and plans are formulated for the specific event that is occurring. The flow of information then goes to the premotor and motor cortex at the top of the head before going down the spinal cord to the effectors." P.26

This same process repeats constantly during any athletic event and it is the most critical determinant of the outcome of the game. Just think about the types of visual work that needs to be done by an athlete (as defined by Dr. Vickers):
1. Targeting Tasks - being able to fixate on a target, fixed or moving, to be able to throw, kick or send an object towards it. (i.e. Shooting or passing a baseball, football, basketball, soccer ball, hockey puck, etc.)
2. Interceptive Timing Tasks - being able to recognize, track and finally control an object as it comes at you (aka "catching")
3. Tactical Decision Making Tasks - being able to take in an environmental scan of the field/court and recognize patterns of all the moving objects (i.e. a quarterback scanning his receivers and choosing the best option for a pass).


All of these scenarios require the athlete to focus or "gaze" on the right points in the environment and ignore the rest of the scene. Dr. Vickers' work has been to observe athletes of different skill levels, expert and non-expert, and define the "best practices" of visual control so that the non-expert athletes can be coached to better performance. Her research lab uses "eye-trackers" (see photo) to monitor the focus and gaze of the athlete's pupils as they perform their skills. For example, she has found that expert baseball hitters focus on the release point of the ball exclusively, rather than random fixations on the pitcher's arm, head, jersey, etc. She found that expert golf putters focus on a specific point on the cup, then a specific point on the back of the ball and remain fixated on the point on the ball after the ball has left the putter blade. Novices allow their gaze to wander from the ball to the hole, without a very specific focal point on either the cup or the ball. The term "Quiet Eye" comes from these observations that expert performers have consciously chosen points in their space to focus on rather than allowing their eyes to wander and fixate on multiple points (i.e. a "noisy" eye).

So, why does the Quiet Eye work? When we fixate on key points in our field of vision, how does this help our neuromuscular systems perform better? The subconscious part of our brain may be recognizing a pattern that we have seen and experienced before and directing our movements based on this information. Some have called this "muscle memory", meaning our brain has learned through repetition and practice how to throw a ball to a moving receiver at that distance and speed, and so, when presented with a similar scenario, knows what to do. Think about when you shoot a jump shot and sometimes you get that sensation, as soon as it leaves your hand, that the ball is going in. Your brain may be telling you that, based on past experience, when you've executed the same aim and same muscle movement then the ball has gone in.

This takes us back to the discussion we had in our previous post on baseball fielding regarding theories of perception-action combinations. The Information Processing model claims that we perceive the environment first through our senses, primarily our vision. Then, we access our memory to find the rules, suggestions and knowledge that we have gained from past experiences and these memories guide our action in the moment. The Ecological Psychology model removes the memory access step and claims that our perception of the environment leads directly to our actions, as there is not enough time to access our lessons. If that is true, then how does the Quiet Eye help us? It seems the Quiet Eye is what we need to connect the current scenario (standing on the free throw line looking at the basket) with our lessons learned from the past (how we made this shot hundreds of times before). Research continues on this question and I'm sure we'll come back to this in future posts.

Next time, I will take a look at Dr. Vickers' "Decision Training Model", which builds on the Quiet Eye theory to train athletes to improve their tactical in-game decision making. We will look at the athletes who are known as having good "vision of the field" and how to raise everyone's game to that level.

So Why Can't Shaq Make Free Throws?

From: So Why Can't Shaq Make Free Throws?

Sports Are 80 Percent Mental

The NBA league average for free throw shooting is about 75%. Shaquille O'Neal's career average is 52.4%. Even worse, Ben Wallace's career average is 41.9%. The average for the NCAA Division 1 teams is 69%. The obvious question is why can't Shaq or Ben or Memphis do any better, but the bigger question is why do most of the best basketball players in the world miss 2 or 3 free throws out of 10? Maybe they just haven't heard about Joan Vickers and the "Quiet Eye".

For me, the best science is applied science. The same goes for sports science. Theories, physics, psychology, etc. are only useful in sports if they can be used to improve in-game performance. That's why I have always been a fan of academic work that leads to useful techniques in the field. Professor Joan Vickers of the University of Calgary has been applying her research into the human visual system and its effects on sports performance for over 25 years. She is the discoverer of the "Quiet Eye" skill that has been shown to significantly improve accuracy in targeting and decision-making skills in many sports. In addition to this "gaze control" technique, she also has developed a 7-step teaching process to improve the in-game decision-making of athletes, based partly on their visual perception skills.

She has a new book out that condenses all of these ideas, called Perception, Cognition and Decision Training. Over the next few days, I will do my best to paraphrase and explain the most useful information and techniques, but of course the best source is this book.
For an opening primer on the Quiet Eye, please take a look at this episode and this online video of PBS' Scientific American with Hawkeye himself, Alan Alda, shooting free throws. Please check back for two upcoming posts on these useful techniques. Better yet, just subscribe to Sports Are 80 Percent Mental. Thanks!

Cristiano Roboto - The Soccer Playing Robot

From: Cristiano Roboto - The Soccer Playing Robot

Sports Are 80 Percent Mental

A Keeper's Nightmare - Beckham, Ronaldo or Juninho

From: A Keeper's Nightmare - Beckham, Ronaldo or Juninho

Sports Are 80 Percent Mental

Whether you bend it like Beckham or Ronaldo or Juninho or even Nakamura; the curving free kick is one of the most exciting plays in soccer/football. Starting with Rivelino in the 1970 World Cup and on to the specialists of today, more players know how to do it and understand the basic physics behind it, but very few can perfect it. But, when it does happen, by chance or skill, it is the highlight of the game.

But let's take a look at this from the other side, through the eyes of the goalkeeper. Obviously, its their job to anticipate where the free kick is going and get to the spot before the ball crosses the line. He sets up his wall to, hopefully, narrow the width of the target, but he knows some players are capable of bending the ball around or over the wall towards the near post. If you watch highlights of free kick goals, you often see keepers flat-footed, just watching the ball go into the top corner. Did they guess wrong and then were not able to react? Did they guess right but misjudged the flight trajectory of the ball. How much did the sidespin or "bend" affect their perception of the exact spot where the ball will cross the line?

Researchers at Queen's University Belfast and the University of the Mediterranean in France tried to figure this out in this paper. They wanted to compare the abilities of expert field players and expert goalkeepers to accurately predict if a free kick would result in an on-target goal or off-target non-goal. First, a bit about why the ball "bends". We can thank what's called the "Magnus Force" named after the 19th-century German physicist Gustav Magnus. As seen in the diagram below, as the ball spins counter clockwise (for a right-footed player using his instep and kicking the ball on the right side), the air pressure on the left side of the ball is lower as the spin is in the same direction as the oncoming air flow. On the right side of the ball, the spin is in the opposite direction of the air flow, building higher pressure. The ball will follow the path of least resistance, or pressure, and "bend" or curve from right to left. The speed of the spin and the velocity of the shot will determine the amount of bend. For a clockwise spin, the ball bends from left to right.



The researchers showed the players three different types of simulated kicks, a kick bent to the right, a kick bent to the left and a kick with no spin at all. They showed the players these simulations with virtual reality headsets and computer controlled "kicks" and "balls" which they could vary in flight with different programming. The balls would disappear from view at distances of 10 and 12.5 meters from the goal. The reasoning is that this cutoff would correspond with the deadline for reaction time to make a save on the ball. In other words, if the keeper does not correctly guess the final trajectory and position of the ball by this point, he most likely will not be able to physically get to the ball and make the save.

The results showed that both the players and the keepers, (all 20 were expert players from elite clubs like AC Milan, Marseille, Bayer LeverkusenSchalke 04), were able to correctly predict the result of the kicks with no spin added. However, as 600 RPM spin, either clockwise or counter-clockwise, was added to the ball, the players success declined significantly. Interestingly, the keepers did no better, statistically, then the field players. The researchers conclusion was that the players used the "current heading direction" of the ball to predict the final result, rather than factoring the future affect of the acceleration and change in trajectory caused by the spin.

Game Highlights
Just as we saw in the Baseball Hitting post, our human perception skill in tracking flying objects, especially those that are spinning and changing direction, are not perfect. If we understand the physics of the spinning ball and we can better guess at its path, but the pitcher or the free kick taker doesn't usually offer this information beforehand! In the next few posts, I'll be looking at a related topic in perception; a concept known as "Quiet Eye", developed by Prof. Joan Vickers. Check back as this is one of the best applications of cognitive science in sports that I have seen.

Baseball and the Brain - Fielding

From: Baseball and the Brain - Fielding

Sports Are 80 Percent Mental

With the crack of the bat, the ball sails deep into the outfield. The left-fielder starts his run back and to the right, keeping his eyes on the ball through its flight path. His pace quickens initially, then slows down as the ball approaches. He arrives just in time to make the catch. What just happened? How did this fielder know where to run and at what speed so that he and the ball intersected at the same exact spot on the field. Why didn't he sprint to the landing spot and then wait for the ball to drop, instead of his controlled speed to arrive just when the ball did? What visual cues did he use to track the ball's flight (just the ball? the ball's movement against its background? other fielder's reaction to the ball?)

Just like we learned in pitching and hitting, fielding requires extensive mental abilities involving eyes, brain, and body movements to accomplish the task. Some physical skills, such as speed, do play a part in catching, but its the calculations and estimating that our brain has to compute that we often take for granted. The fact that fielders are not perfect in this skill, (there are dropped fly balls, or bad judgments of ball flight), begs the question of how to improve? As we saw with pitching and hitting (and most sports skills), practice does improve performance. But, if we understand what our brains are trying to accomplish, we can hopefully design more productive training routines to use in practice.

(Mike Stadler, associate professor of psychology at University of Missouri, provides a great overview of current research in his book, "The Psychology of Baseball". I highly recommend it for the complete look at this topic. I'll summarize the major points here.)

One organization that does not take this skill for granted is NASA. The interception of a ballistic object in mid-flight can describe a left fielder's job or an anti-missile defense system or how a pilot maneuvers a spacecraft through a three dimensional space. In fact, a postdoctoral fellow at the NASA Ames Research Center, Michael McBeath , has been studying fly ball catching since 1995. His team has developed a rocket-science like theory named Linear Optical Trajectory to describe the process that a fielder uses to follow the path of a batted ball. LOT says the fielder will adjust his movement towards the ball so that its trajectory follows a straight line through his field of vision. Rather than compute the landing point of the ball, racing to that spot and waiting, the fielder uses the information provided by the path of the ball to constantly adjust his path so that they intersect at the right time and place. The LOT theory is an evolution from an earlier theory called Optical Acceleration Cancellation (OAC) that had the same idea but only explained the fielder's tracking behavior in the vertical dimension. In other words, as the ball leaves the bat the fielder watches the ball rise in his field of vision. If he were to stand still and the ball was hit hard enough to land behind him, his eyes would track the ball up and over his head, or at a 90 degree angle. If the ball landed in front of him, he would see the ball rise and fall but his viewing angle may not rise above 45 degrees. LOT and OAC argue that the fielder repositions himself throughout the flight of the ball to keep this viewing angle between 0 and 90 degrees. If its rising too fast, he needs to turn and run backwards. If the viewing angle is low, then the fielder needs to move forward so that the ball doesn't land in front of him. He can't always make to the landing spot in time, but keeping the ball at about a 45 degree angle by moving will help ensure that he gets there in time. While OAC explained balls hit directly at a fielder, LOT helps add the side-to-side dimension, as in our example of above of a ball hit to the right of the fielder.

The OAC and LOT theories do agree on a fundamental cognitive science debate. There are two theories of how we perceive the world and then react to it. First, the Information Processing (IP) theory likens our brain to a computer in that we have inputs, our senses that gather information about the world, a memory system that stores all of our past experiences and lessons learned, and a "CPU" or main processor that combines our input with our memory and computes the best answer for the given problem. So,IP would say that the fielder sees the fly ball and offers it to the brain as input, the brain then pulls from memory all of the hundreds or thousands of fly ball flight paths that have been experienced, and then computes the best path to the ball's landing point based on what it has "learned" through practice. McBeath's research and observations of fielders has shown that the processing time to accomplish this task would be too great for the player to react. OAC and LOT subscribe to the alternate theory of human perception, Ecological Psychology (EP). EP eliminates the call to memory from the processing and argues that the fielder observes the flight path of the ball and can react using the angle monitoring system. This is still up for debate as the IPers would argue "learned facts" like what pitch was thrown, how a certain batter hits those pitches, how the prevailing wind will affect the ball, etc. And, with EP, how can the skill differences between a young ballplayer and an experienced major leaguer be accounted for? What is the point of practice, if the trials and errors are not stored/accessed in memory?

Of course, we haven't mentioned ground balls and their behavior, due to the lack of research out there. The reaction time for a third baseman to snare a hot one-hopper down the line is much shorter. This would also argue in favor of EP, but what other systems are involved?

Game Highlights
Again, I have just touched on this subject, see Prof. Stadler's book for a much better discussion. Arguing about which theory explains a fielder's actions is only productive if we can apply the research to create better drills and practices for our players. My own layman's view is that the LOT theory is getting there as an explanation, but I'm still undecided about EP vs. IP . So many sport skills rely on some of these foundations, hence my "search for the truth" continues! As with pitching and hitting, fielding seems to improve with practice. As we move forward, we'll look at the theories behind practice and what structure they should take.

Baseball and the Brain - Hitting

 

From: Baseball and the Brain - Hitting

Sports Are 80 Percent Mental

Ted Williams, arguably the greatest baseball hitter of all-time, once said, "I think without question the hardest single thing to do in sport is to hit a baseball". Certainly, at the major league level, where pitches can reach 100 miles per hour, this is believable, but even at Little League, High School and College/Minor leagues, the odds are against the hitter. Looking at batting averages, 3 hits out of 10 at-bats will earn a player millions of dollars in the bigs, while averaging 4 or 5 hits out of 10 at the lower leagues will earn you some attention at the next level. As most of you know, Williams was the last major league player to hit .400 for an entire season and that was back in 1941, almost 67 years ago! In my second of three posts of the Baseball and the Brain series, we'll take a quick look at some of the theory behind this complicated skill.

Again, my main reference for these ideas is "The Psychology of Baseball" by Mike Stadler.


Some questions that come to mind regarding hitting a pitched baseball:
- What makes this task so hard? Why can't players, who practice for years and have every training technique, coach and accumulated knowledge at their disposal, perform at a consistenly higher level?
- What can be improved? Hand-eye reaction time? Knowledge of situational tendencies (what pitch is likely to be thrown in a given game situation)?

A key concept of pitching and hitting in baseball was summed up long ago by Hall of Fame pitcher Warren Spahn, when he said, “Hitting is timing. Pitching is upsetting timing.” To sync up the swing of the bat with the exact time and location of the ball's arrival is the challenge that each hitter faces. If the intersection is off by even tenths of a second, the ball will be missed. As was discussed in the Pitching post, the hitter must master the same two dimensions, horizontal and vertical. The aim of the pitch will affect the horizontal dimension while the speed of the pitch will affect the vertical dimension. The hitter's job is to time the arrival of the pitch based on the estimated speed of the ball while determining where, horizontally, it will cross the plate. The shape of the bat helps the batter in the horizontal space as its length compensates for more error, right to left. However, the narrow 3-4" barrel does not cover alot of vertical ground. So, a hitter must be more accurate judging the vertical height of a pitch than the horizontal location. So, if a pitcher can vary the speed of his pitches, the hitter will have a harder time judging the vertical distance that the ball will drop as it arrives, and swing either over the top or under the ball.

A common coach's tip to hitters is to "keep your eye on the ball" or "watch the ball hit the bat". As Stadler points out in his book, doing both of these things is impossible due to the concept known as "angular velocity". Imagine you are standing on the side of freeway with cars coming towards you. Off in the distance, you are able to watch the cars approaching your position with relative ease, as they seem to be moving at a slower speed. As the cars come closer and pass about a 45 degree angle and then zoom past your position, they seem to "speed up" and you have to turn your eyes/head quickly to watch them. This perception is known as angular velocity. The car is going a constant speed, but appears to be "speeding up" as it passes you, because your eyes need to move more quickly to keep up. This same concept applies to the hitter. The first few feet that a baseball travels when it leaves a pitcher's hand is the most important to the hitter, as the ball can be tracked by the hitter's eyes. As the ball approaches past a 45 degree angle, it is more difficult to "keep your eye on the ball" as your eyes need to shift through many more degrees of movement. Research reported by Stadler shows that hitters cannot watch the entire flight of the ball, so they employ two tactics. First, they might follow the path of the ball for 70-80% of its flight, but then their eyes can't keep up and they estimate or extrapolate the remaining path and make a guess as to where they need to swing to have the bat meet the ball. In this case, they don't actually "see" the bat hit the ball. Second, they might follow the initial flight of the ball, estimate its path, then shift their eyes to the anticipated point where the ball crosses the plate to, hopefully, see their bat hit the ball. This inability to see the entire flight of the ball to contact point is what gives the pitcher the opportunity to fool the batter with the speed of the pitch. If a hitter is thinking "fast ball", their brain will be biased towards completing the estimated path across the plate at a higher elevation and they will aim their swing there. If the pitcher actually throws a curve or change-up, the speed will be slower and the path of the ball will result in a lower elevation when it crosses the plate, thus fooling the hitter.

Game Summary
As in pitching, our eyes and brain determine much of the success we have as hitters. We took a quick look as it relates to hitting a baseball, but the same concepts apply to hitting any moving object; tennis, hockey, soccer, etc. In future posts, we'll look at practical ways to improve this tracking skill and the hand/eye/brain connection. As usual, practice will improve performance, but we want to identify the unique practice techniques which will be most effective. Tracking a moving object also applies to catching, which we'll look at next.

Baseball and the Brain - Pitching

From: Baseball and the Brain - Pitching

Sports Are 80 Percent Mental

As promised, we begin our look at the three most important technical skills of baseball: Pitching, Hitting and Catching. Each of these skills apply to other sports as well, but I thought we'd stick with the current season of baseball as the sport du jour. Again, my focus for "80 Percent Mental" is to look at sports cognition in a generic sense across all sports, occasionally digging deeper into individual sport specialties. The practical side of this is to understand how our brains and nervous system perform these skills that we often take for granted, so that we can brainstorm (yuk-yuk) on new ways to teach, practice and perfect these skills.

Pitching/Throwing
Pitching a 3" diameter baseball 46 feet (for Little League) or 60 feet, 6 inches over a target that is 8 inches wide requires an accuracy of 1/2 to 1 degree. Throwing it fast, with the pressure of a game situation makes this task one of the hardest in sports. In addition, a fielder throwing to another fielder from 40, 60 or 150 feet away, sometimes off balance or on the run, tests the brain-body connection for accuracy. So, how do we do it? And how can we learn to do it more consistently?

Questions that come to my mind regarding pitching/throwing skills and baseball include:
- Why can't a pitcher control ALL of his/her pitches? Why do some not only miss the strike zone, but are wild?
- Is the breakdown physical in the muscle sequence of the throw or is it in the connection between eyes, brain and body?

Again, one the best references I have found on this is "The Psychology of Baseball" by Mike Stadler, published by Gotham Books. Prof. Stadler digs into many of these topics and I will paraphrase from his findings. I won't do it justice here, so please put it on your reading list.

There are two dimensions to think about when throwing an object at a target: vertical and horizontal. The vertical dimension is a function of the distance of the throw and the effect of gravity on the object. So the thrower's estimate of distance between himself and the target will determine the accuracy of the throw vertically. Basically, if the distance is underestimated, the required strength of the throw will be underestimated and will lose the battle with gravity, resulting in a throw that will be either too low or will bounce before reaching the target. An example of this is a fast ball which is thrown with more velocity, so will reach its target before gravity has a path-changing effect on it. On the other hand, a curve ball or change-up may seem to curve downward, partly because of the spin put on the ball affecting its aerodynamics, but also because these pitches are thrown with less force, allowing gravity to pull the ball down. In the horizontal dimension, the "right-left" accuracy is related to more to the "aim" of the throw and the ability of the thrower to adjust hand-eye coordination along with finger, arm, shoulder angles and the release of the ball to send the ball in the intended direction.

So, looking at our first question, how do we improve accuracy in both dimensions? Prof. Stadler points out that research shows that skill in the vertical/distance estimating dimension is more genetically determined, while skill horizontally can be better improved with practice. Remember those spatial organization tests that we took that show a set of connected blocks in a certain shape and then show you four more sets of conected blocks? The question is which of the four sets could result from rotating the first set of blocks. Research has shown that athletes that are good at these spatial relations tests are also accurate throwers in the vertical dimension. Why? The thought is that those athletes are better able to judge the movement of objects through space and can better estimate distance in 3D space. Pitchers are able to improve this to an extent as the distance to the target is fixed. A fielder, however, starts his throw from many different positions on the field and has more targets (bases and cut-off men) to choose from, making his learning curve a bit longer.

If a throw or pitch is off-target, then what went wrong? Prof. Stadler collects many different studies that review the possible physiological/mechanical reasons for "bad throws". Despite all of the combinations of fingers, hand, arm, shoulder and body movements, it seems to all boil down to the timing of the finger release of the ball. In other words, when the pitcher's hand comes forward and the fingers start opening to allow the ball to leave. The timing of this release can vary by hundredths of a second but has significant impact on the accuracy of the throw. But, its also been shown that the throwing action happens so fast, that the brain could not consciously adjust or control that release in real-time. This points to the throwing action being controlled by what psychologists call an automated "motor program" that is created through many repeated practice throws. But, if a "release point" is incorrect, how does a pitcher correct that if they can't do so in real-time? It seems they need to change the embedded program by more practice.

Another component of "off-target" pitching or throwing is the psychological side of a player's mental state/attitude. Stadler identifies research that these motor programs can be called up by the brain by current thoughts. There seems to be "good" programs and "bad" programs, meaning the brain has learned how to throw a strike and learned many programs that will not throw a strike. By "seeding" the recall with positive or negative thoughts, the "strike" program may be run, but so to can the "ball" program. So, if a pitcher thinks to himself, "don't walk this guy", he may be subconsciously calling up the "ball" program and it will result in a pitch called as a ball. So, this is why sports pscyhologists stress the need to "think positively", not just for warm and fuzzy feelings, but the brain may be listening and will instruct your body what to do.

Game Summary
I've only touched the surface for this topic. We'll see some of these themes in the hitting and catching posts that are coming up. One useful takeaway here for youth coaches is that some players will have a genetic advantage in throwing and may be your "natural" pitchers. As we dig deeper into these topics, we will be able pull out more practical tips for players and coaches.

Read more first

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