An exercise can be used as either a training tool or a learning tool. It must be clear which it is being used for, because in most cases, it cannot do both well. Exercises for training create stress which the athlete recovers from and adapts to in order to improve a physiological attribute. Exercises for learning are used short term to teach the athlete how to move his body in a way closer to ideal for a given movement or as a drill to improve accuracy and precision.

Sports performance is the combination of physiological development and skill development. Physiological attributes like strength, power, flexibility, endurance, and cardiovascular respiration are trained attributes. Their improvement is the result of accumulated adaptation. This adaptation results from recovering from an appropriate stress like lifting weights, rowing, running, etc. The adaptation is specific to the stress imposed – running 100 miles in a week doesn’t make you stronger no matter how difficult it is.

Skill development is the increase in accuracy and precision of a movement pattern. Skill development occurs during sports practice. A gymnast drills a round-off back handspring repeatedly and in isolation from other skills in his routine. His coach observes and gives him feedback between or during the reps. The gymnast modifies his movement based on the feedback and attempts to reduce rep-to-rep variability while increasing efficiency and effectiveness. It can be helpful to record video and study a performance or practice session or even a single repetition of a movement to get additional feedback.

He then lifts weights. He uses exercises that do not look like a back handspring, but instead are general and allow the use of many muscles over a long range of motion. He does a barbell squat, for example. He adds weight to the bar to impose a stress on himself that he was previously adapted to. He recovers with rest and sleep and food, and his body becomes stronger as a result. These two factors of sports performance – physiological adaptation and skill – should be developed independently.

Drilling Practice versus Using a Movement for Learning

It is critical during a training or practice session to understand what an exercise is doing – providing a training stress or developing a skill. Conflating the two will make both worse. There are many movements that tend to do better as one or the other – a squat is a phenomenal training tool but isn’t practice for much but the squat. Drawing a pistol from a holster is good practice, but does not produce a physiological stress that will improve a physiological attribute. It would be ineffective strength training to use do this exercise with a heavier and heavier gun with the intention of increasing muscle mass and force production.

However an exercise like a BJJ sweep done for fifty reps might seem less clear. Is it practice or training? It’s tiring for sure, so it feels like training, but it uses a direct movement people do in BJJ. In this example, the sweep is practice, because it is dependent on accuracy and precision and is not being done with the intention of improvement physiological attributes. This example is called drilling, where a full movement or component movement is performed repeatedly with the intention of reducing variation, converting conscious movement into automatic movement, and associating information so that the practitioner is able to think about the entire movement globally instead of attempting to think about all of the individual components at once.

This is particularly important in coordination-intensive movements. It should be done as slowly as necessary for technical proficiency, because reps performed under fatigue always suffer technically, and then bad reps are practiced. The expression “Practice makes perfect” is popular, but false. Practice does not make perfect – perfect practice makes perfect, and poor practice solidifies bad technique.

Where many coaches create problems is by not understanding the difference between using an exercise for drilling or for learning. Learning is a conceptual problem, not a habit problem. A young soccer player who kicks the ball toe-first when he intended to kick it with the side of his foot will not benefit from drilling that exact movement 100 times. He has to be stopped, taught how to do it correctly, and only then can he drill it. Drilling is done over a long period of time and for many repetitions to reinforce automatic processes. Learning is short-term – it happens quickly for a good athlete, slower for a not-so-good athlete – but then must be drilled to become automatic, and therefore useful. It may also need to be re-taught at a later practice session if the athlete gets sloppy.

An exercise can be used to help a soccer player learning to kick the ball quickly. For example, using a wall and telling the player to “slowly kick the wall with the inside flat of your foot” will produce the desired effect. Additional cueing and coaching may be necessary, but this should not take more than one practice session to understand this concept, and it might only take 30 seconds to get the idea. Then the player comes off the wall, does the movement without the wall, then adds the ball.

But he doesn’t go back to the wall once he's got the idea right unless he loses the concept. He's using the wall to understand a problem and move correctly. He would not drill this later again and again, because once he knows what the wall has taught him, he can just use a ball which better replicates the problem. Drilling is best done with exercises that closely replicate the performance movement. And he is absolutely not going to kick the wall harder and harder or weight his foot incrementally and kick the wall trying to train for strength.

Examples in Barbell Training

There are some example of exercises in the weight room that can be used for drilling as well. A lifter having trouble setting his back in the deadlift start position can do a rack pull – where the deadlift start position is elevated. It is easier to get the back in extension in this position, and he can more easily and quickly learn the sensation of setting his back in this position. Then the bar is lowered, he sets his back correctly again, and then lowered again to the ground where he can now pull correctly. The rack pull, in this case, is drilling for a difficult mechanical portion of the deadlift – not for the purpose of applying a stress to get stronger. This should all be done in a single day; not over a period of 9 training sessions.

A halting deadlift can help a lifter learn how bent over he needs to stay in the clean. He might do a set of haltings just before power cleans to drill the extended bent over position. A front squat must have a rigid thoracic spine otherwise the lifter will dump the bar forward. An experienced lifter having a problem maintaining a rigid upper back in the squat could drill heavy front squats on a light day for a few weeks until it’s heavy enough to approximate the feeling on the upper back in a heavy squat.

Athletes also learn effectively by having a task that requires the correct movement. For example, in the squat, a lifter can drill with a block of wood to give the him something to aim his knee toward so that he touches the block without knocking it over. This helps him set his knees correctly in the descent. Then, that same day, he removes the block and squats normally, hopefully with the desired changes.

Training and skill development need to happen separately, because the mechanisms driving progress are different, and often conflicting. Exercise selection, therefore, must have clear criteria – is the exercise for learning or for physiological adaptation? An exercise used for drilling should only be done for a short period of time in order to conceptually understand how to move correctly. Practice requires precise repetition of movements that reduce variation and improve efficiency and effectiveness – low energy input for high performance output. Physical training benefits from heavily weighted exercises that involve a lot of muscle mass over a long effective range of motion, producing strength that can be applied through practice. Mixing the two will produce poor results for both goals.  

---

Discuss in Forums