Today’s show is with Rob Gray, professor at Arizona State University and Host of the Perception & Action Podcast.  Rob Gray is a professor at Arizona State University who has been conducting research on and teaching courses related to perceptual-motor skill for over 25 years.  Rob focuses heavily on the application of basic theory to address real-world challenges, having consulted with numerous professional and governmental entities, and has developed a VR baseball training system that has been used in over 25 published studies.  Rob is the author of the book “How We Learn to Move: A Revolution in the Way We Coach and Practice Sports Skills”.

When it comes to anything we do athletically: playing a sport, sprinting, lifting weights, even holding an isometric position; all of these things are learned skills.  So often, the various compartments of athletics, the sport coach, the strength coach, the rehab specialist, are relatively disconnected, and there is often no common playbook when it comes to athletics and the learning process.

The principles of the way we learn, and how this learning fits with our movement strategy and ability, are universal.  By understanding what it takes to be a better mover via the learning process, we have an understanding of the general process of athletic performance training from a broader frame of mind.

On today’s show, Rob Gray speaks about the fallacy of training a “perfect technique” via drills or repeated cues.  He talks about why using a constraints-led approach to help shore up any key movement attractors (technique) is an ideal way to facilitate skill development.  Rob will get into his take on how to approach learning the “fundamentals” in any sport skill, and also get into important concepts of variability in sport, the differences between novice and elite in variability, and then how there can be “good” or “bad” variability in sport training.  Finally, Rob covers the role of variability in injury prevention, and talks about the sport coach/strength coach relationship in light of variability and the constraints led approach to skills.

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Timestamps and Main Points

5:05 – The story of Tim Tebow, and how he was so dominant on the NCAA level, but why his NFL career was very unsuccessful from a perspective of throwing biomechanics

9:08 – Rob’s take on the idea of “perfect technique”

13:47 – Approaching the “fundamentals” in any given skill, in the learning process

23:37 – Looking at drill-work in sport and its original intended purpose

25:33 – How much variability elite versus amateur athletes exhibit in their skills

28:59 – Variability across a spectrum of skills, such as running in football versus running on a track in sprinting

32:42 – Using variability in “basic” sports such as track and field or swimming

39:17 – How variability changes as one moves from novice, to intermediate, to expert, particularly on the level of an individual sport, like track and field

45:28 – Rob’s take on variability and injury-prevention

50:57 – The idea of donor sports and how those sports can offer helpful variability to one’s eventual sport specialization

56:35 – How strength coaches might be able to use variability in the gym that might connect to skills athletes are trying to improve on the field



“There can’t be one perfect, ideal way, because the world is not staying the same around you”

“Being skillful is not about repeating the same solution to the problem, it’s about repeating coming up with solutions to problems”

“I like to think about giving athletes problems to solve instead of the solution”