The Transfer Principle for Sports TrainingThe Transfer Principle suggests that learning and performing one skill affects learning another. Positive transfer of training from practice skills to competition is critical for athletic success. This principle is a guide for selecting training activities for developing sport skills and designing strategies that have the greatest positive impact on competitive situations.
Coaching Benefits of the Transfer PrincipleThe Split Jerk and the Lunge with Dumbbells have Certain Common Qualities
Coaches can benefit from knowing how to apply the transfer principle. They can: 1. Select appropriate fitness training activities to build the necessary balance of fitness components necessary for specific sports. 2. Select training drills and activities that, collectively, possess common elements with competitive sport conditions. 3. Distinguish between what features of skills are being strengthened by certain training activities, and which features are not. 4. Train movement concepts and perceptions that apply to more than one skill, event, or sport. 5. Emphasize training activities that best develop the qualities that athletes need to excel. 6. Most closely match training activities with competition. Coaching Tips to Match Training with CompetitionCoaching tips about the transfer of motor skills are found at Transfer of Training. Coaching tips for applying this principle to match training activities with the demands of sports are presented here.1. Sport analysis. Consider the overall demands of the sport. What does it take to be an outstanding athlete? These include the physical demands as well as the mental demands. In training, emphasize building the most important qualities that all athletes should develop. 2. Skill analysis. Identify the key skills necessary for success. Perform fitness and skill tests to help key in on the areas where athletes need improvement, and select training activities to develop them. 3. Practice vs. competitive conditions. Always consider the differences between practice activities and competitive conditions. Beyond building the fundamentals, devise training activities and conditions that most closely match the emotional intensity that can affect skilled execution in competitive situations. 4. Mechanics. Know the most efficient movements underlying skilled performance. Correcting movement deviations and inefficient patterns in practice is essential, even for such basic skills as running and jumping. 5. Movement qualities. Develop the timing and rhythms of skills--not just the mechanical features. Training activities can be streamlined to better encompass mechanics as well as rhythms of skills and sequences used in competition. 6. Identify causes for effects. Coaches sometimes develop training activities to correct symptoms of movement errors that they observe when athletes compete. Training to correct the causes of mental as well as physical errors is a key to positive practice training. 7. Physical capability vs. skill learning. Athletes sometimes have limited capabilities of executing skills due to strength, power, or other fitness components or abilities, rather than to skill learning. Coaches who can identify those limitations can better create practice activities that develop the root problems can speed up learning and performance for athletes.
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