Sport Sciences Develop With Skill Acquisition

 

by Rebecca Lee 29.04.09

In committing to the ongoing development of sport science and medical services, the English Institute of Sport (EIS) has responded to UK Sport’s athlete survey, which highlighted Skill Acquisition as an area for development within sport science.

The EIS has been working closely with UK Sport and external partners to investigate the performance impact of the scientific discipline of Skill Acquisition, which focuses on understanding and improving how we learn perceptual, cognitive and motor skills.

Following an initial UK Sport funded project, the EIS has committed to further develop skill acquisition in an effort to indentify new ways of improving performances in elite sport as part of the multi-disciplinary services provided to sports.

“Skill Acquisition provides measurable insight into elements of performance such as visual search, tactical pattern recognition and anticipation of opponent’s actions as well as assess how coaching and feedback impacts upon athlete learning and development” says Michael Bourne, who has been appointed as Skill Acquisition Technical Lead at the EIS, alongside his Performance Analysis role.

“The discipline works closely with Sports Psychology and Performance Analysis and over this next year, we will be completing a number of projects with sports to identify where this discipline can have the biggest potential impact” he adds.

Aiming to build upon the factual information sports can gain from match and training analysis, skill acquisition will look to give coaches and athletes the opportunity to understand how they develop their learning skills; also to assist coaches in making athletes more perceptive, tactical and overall to perform better.

“This is one of the ways in which the EIS is looking to develop the services which it delivers to elite sport” says EIS Director of Sport Sciences, Dr Ken van Someren.

“Having the service under a twelve month period within core services will enable sports to see whether it could have a positive impact for them, fitting in with their other support services within their world class programmes” he adds.

Scott Drawer, Head of Research and Innovation at UK Sport said:

“Skill acquisition is a key component of the technical training process. Increasingly, novel methods and approaches from aerospace, F1 and other high performance industries are helping us take some unique steps to providing stand out solutions for athletic development.”

Photography © Getty Images