Why Getting Reps Up is Important, Scientifically.

Welcome to my first sports science breakdown, where I share an interesting article/study that I read and break it down so you can apply it to your own life and training.

In this one I’m going to break down an article I found on Science For Sport , where Ian Dobbs speaks about Neuroplasticity, or put simply, how our brain builds “muscle memory”, i.e. movement patterns and motor skills.

I highly suggest that you read the full original article (and of course this one) and I’m going to try my best to break down the article to make it more understandable, practical and applicable to our own training and life. Click  HERE to read the full article.

Neuroplasticity: What is it?

Simple put; Neuroplasticity is our brains ability to adapt and learn a new motor skills and movement patterns (i.e how we move). 

These adaptions take place in two ways; over long periods of time and over short periods of time.

Inside our brain we have something called gray matter. Gray matter is essentially what allows us to learn a new motor skill. Children have this gray matter in abundance, which allows them pick up motor skills really fast. Think about it, a child can learn to crawl, walk, run, climb, jump, pick up things and much more in a matter of months. Thats pretty impressive.

The brain doesn’t fully develop until around the age of 26 and plasticity, or the brains ability to learn new movements stays past puberty. But as we age however, the amount of this gray matter we have in our brains decreases to a certain extent. Although we have the ability to learn new motor skills in our adult lives, it simply means the best ‘window of oppurtunity’ to learn new movements is during childhood.

So if your still young and have dreams of playing sport at the highest levels when your older, get out and play as many sports as possible! This will help develop all those different motor patterns and movement skills allowing you to become a well rounded and athletically competent indiviudal, setting you up to be an elite athlete when your older.

Don’t believe me?

Well, remember that one kid in your class who played every sport going when you were in school and were naturally gifted and able to do any activity at all? Every PE class has one of those kids.

A couple of years later and now that kid is on the county panel or the regional team.

Why? There exposure to so much different sports from a young age and the required skills has made them a well rounded athlete. They’ve developed so many different movement patterns and have developed such a high level athletic competency, the person who started playing the same sport a couple of years later in their teens will never catch up.

Long-term and short-term learning:

Were you ever forced to learn to dance in Primary School?

Remember when the instructor comes in and you spend an hour learning the foxtrot and by the end of the session you have every step down. So, the instructor leaves and comes back next week and asks you to do the foxtrot and lone behold you’ve forgot the whole thing. 

So, he or she, goes through it again and then it clicks back in. 

The next week she asks you to do it and you rememeber the first three steps. 

The next week you remember five.

And within a month, hey presto your able to do the whole foxtrot.

You can apply this to anything. Practising kicking a ball a certain way, shooting a basketball, anything.

And still to this day if someone asks you to do the foxtrot with them, even though you haven’t done it in years, after some gentle reminders and walkthroughs it all comes back to you ten years later.

Well, thats short term and long term learning folks.

When we initially learn something new, our brain doesn’t recognise the movement pattern so it send more fire power or scientifically speaking ‘neurons’ to help with learning and getting familiar with this new movement. This is why we can see vast improvements initially when we learn something new, like getting the hang of the foxtrot in that first session. Here your brains ‘plasticity’ is improved and your ability to adapt to the new movement is fast.

Great.

But unfortunately, once you get it down however, your brain relaxes and starts to learn it at a slower pace, queue the saying:

‘Use it or lose it.’

If you keep practising the foxtrot, your brain slowly strengthens that motor pathway or as we call it ‘muscle memory’, and you’ll start to get real good at the foxtrot. But if you decide not to practise it ever again your brain will slowly reduce that pathway causing you to lose that skill and for it to ‘fade away’. However, if you were practising it for a while and then stopped, your body kind of keeps that pathway in low power mode and if you decide to pick dancing again, you’ll pick up the foxtrot much easier second time round because your brain vaguely remembers it.

This is why players like Michael Jordan can still shoot at 56 years old. Sure he doesn’t practise as rigoursly as he used to, but he spent so much of his life developing that skill, his trademark jumper is still smoothish when he needs to.

Well, kinda smooth. You get the point.

How does Neuroplasticity apply to your training?

To proficiently perform athletic movements the brain must coordinate with the necessary muscle groups to produce the action. Whether the athlete is throwing a baseball, kicking a football, or even sprinting, these all require complex inter- and intra-muscular coordination which starts from the brains motor cortex. Therefore, repetitive practice is needed for a motor skill to be performed effectively, and thus engrained.

Basically, if you want to get better at a skill you need to practise it. A sh*tload of times. Science is great for innovation and all, but theres no cutting corners here.

If, like me, you want to become a great shooter, you have to go get up shots. If you want to be a great free taker, you have to get out and practise taking frees. 

Theres a saying ‘cells that fire together, wire together’. Anytime you repeatedly activate a pathway in your brain, it becomes more stable or in simple terms, the more reps you get the smoother your shot becomes because that skill becomes more and more hardwired into your brain.

BUT. You have to make the effort to do it right. Every. Single. Time.

 While your building a new skill, your brain is building that new motor pathway. If your practising shots with sloppy form, well your brain is going to aswell. 

Theres a reason NBA players with messed up shooting form don’t just changed their form over time. Its not that simple. For example, Lonzo Ball has shot the ball the way he has since he started playing basketball. Its so deeply engrained into his brain and that motor pathway is so developed, his shooting form will take a lot of time and effort to completely change.

Also, it has been proven that our brain develops these motor patterns when we are ‘offline’ or resting. While we sleep, the same pathways in your brain that were active while your were practising or learning a skill are reactivated. I know, cool right. Our brain deepens the engrainment of the skill we were trying to develop during our training session, progessively stabilising our memory of the skill overtime with more and more practise.

If however, your sleep deprived, you are less likely to improve on the skill because your pathways aren’t able to reactivate. So, GET YOUR SLEEP!! Work smarter, not harder.

So, whether your a coach or athlete or even if you spot a bad habit you have yourself, no matter your sport, spend the time teaching, practising and reiterating good technique and form and try to break any bad habits . Developing a skill like shooting a basketball is much easier get right once. Trying to break bad habits or movement patterns is very hard once a persons brain has developed that pathway of squatting wrong or knock knees or rounding their back during an exercise. Try put out the flame before it turns into a wild fire.

And be patient, learning a new motor pattern will take time and repitition. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Be patient and keep trying, it will come right eventually.

Summary and Take-Aways:

• Neuroplasticity is our brains ability to learn a new motor skill.
• Our ability to learn new motor skills is much higher when we’re young, but we can still learn new stuff when we’re older.
• Getting out and playing multiple sports as kids is the best way to develop well rounded motor patterns and elite athletic abilities.
• Engraining a new skill or motor pathway takes lots of repition.
• Take the time to practise proper form/technique.
• If your a parent or coach or an athlete, take the time to build proper form technique, its easier to get it right than try to fix it.
• Make sure to rest and recover properly between training sessions to get the most out of developing that muscle memory.