Practice conditions & type of practice

• Practice:

  The deliberate practice hypothesis:

  • ‘individualised training activities especially designed by a coach or teacher to improve specific aspects of an individual’s performance through repetition and successive refinement’
• Whole and Part Practice

  • Analyse the skill to determine its component parts
  • Whole v part decision should be based on:
  • Task complexity: the number of parts or components and the amount of information processing demands
  • Task organisation: the relationships between the components that make up the skill
  • High levels of organisation = component parts are spatially and temporally interdependent (e.g. basketball jump shot, juggling)
  • Low levels of organisation = spatial-temporal relationships are independent (e.g. dance routines)
• Deciding Upon Whole or Part Practice

  • Remember the importance of practice specificity
  • Whole and part practice should still take place in situations that match contextual factors as far as possible
• Deciding Upon Whole or Part Practice

  • Segmentation – practising parts in sequence then practising the whole
  • Simplification – reducing the complexity of part or all of the skill e.g. making the object less complex, reducing attention demands
  • Practice a whole skill but attend to a part of it – good for skills with high interdependency e.g. gait training