Motor skills in sport are the "life blood" of the games. At a young age, most likely in elementary physical education classes, Physical Education (PE) teachers introduced skills, showed skill cues, allowed practice and then slowly "ramped up" the exposure to a higher pressure version of that skill through either faster speeds or time restrictions. Depending on the skill, these movements can be discrete (simple and brief) or serial (more complex and "chains" of discrete movements) (Schmidt & Wrisberg, 2008). A discrete skill example would be throwing a ball, while a serial skill would be a golf swing with a number of small discrete movements all tying together to make one fluid movement (Schmidt & Wrisberg, 2008). Once mastered, these skill patterns can be moved from any short-term memory spaces to long-term memory as a habit (good or bad). Its why, after a long winter of not being able to use your bike, you can just hop on in the spring and start pedaling away as the skill is in your long-term memory because it has been mastered.
As competition is introduced into the mix of your skill set, your brain organizes the actions and demands of the skills to fit the specific situations of the game action (Schmidt & Wrisberg, 2008). Your brain will "lean" on your long-term skill development to remain competent (or at least competitive), under the game pressures. These naturally produced movements are characterized as being "automated movements" (Schmidt & Wrisberg, 2008, p. 14). The highly functioning athletes can detect and correct performance values with little or no thought. The amateur athletes (novice, beginner, intermediate) who haven't yet had as many skill experiences or repetitions will find game pressures to be more difficult to find successful outcomes. The two detrimental stages that can be seen and negatively affect performance are as follows:
First, the athlete could experience "perceptual narrowing" (Schmidt & Wrisberg, 2008, p. 42) which is simply a shrinking of attentional focus as arousal increases throughout the competition. In this condition, the athlete could miss many relevant cues or advantages presented in the game action and instead, go unnoticed and cause further stress and anxiety. This stress buildup and "in-game" failures are often called, choking. The second thing athletes could experience under this pressure is to think about and re-think about skills that he or she has already learned. and have become embedded into their long-term memory storage as a mastered and competent skill. This is called, reinvesting in already learned skills and is one of the worst things that an athlete can do. Here is why this is so harmful to performance values.
The brain has three memory stores - short-term sensory store (lasts literally only hundredths of seconds), short-term memory which can hold up to 7 independent items or "chunks" at once, and long-term memory which is what we as humans accumulate over the course of our entire lives (Schmidt & Wrisberg, 2008). The key to this is the short-term memory. By rehearsing or repeating actions and information over and over, these short-term memory elements can be moved to long-term memory, thereby freeing up new short-term memory "slots" for things like strategy and adjustments (Schmidt & Wrisberg, 2008). If an athlete "reinvests" in the simple components of a movement skill that he or she already knows, those elements take up valued space and capacity which takes away space for strategy and any reactive measures. Imagine a PGA or LPGA golfer using their 7 short-term memory "slots" for REINVESTING THEIR ALREADY MASTERED SKILL SET, IN: 1) grip, 2) stance, 3) direction, 4) low back tilt, 5) take away and forearm twist, 6) wrist bending, 7) shoulder turn to perpendicular....That means that the ACTUAL DOWNSWING AND WEIGHT SHIFT FORWARD AND HITTING THE BALL have all been neglected and could cause a major failed serial skill result as the chain of movements for the entire skill is incomplete.
This is why physical education teachers, sport coaches, personal trainers, etc., all push their students and players and clients to practice perfectly with game or activity movements and (when possible) in game scenarios and at game speeds so when the pressures of live competitions are present, the athlete can thrive in an otherwise hostile and unforgiving environment. By practicing this perfection under pressure, the athlete can leave many of those 7 short-term memory slots open for strategies and countermeasures. Please watch the youtube video below on WHY ATHLETES CHOKE UNDER PRESSURE for further information on this subject.
Schmidt, R. A., & Wrisberg, C. A. (2008). Motor learning and performance. A situation-based learning approach. (4th ed.). Human Kinetics.
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