500 Words a Week - Movement Mastery or Movement Variety?

“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times” – Bruce Lee

Do we dedicate time with our athletes on nailing certain movements or time with our athletes exploring as many different movement variations as possible?

Bruce Lee makes a good point on mastery, and with this mastery and rehearsal of one movement leads to further benefits. When certain movements are perfected, we can easily call upon these and replicate them in many different situations. Dr Pat Davidson in his recent book has a great example on this; as you are sitting in your seat, write your signature on a piece of paper beside you. Now pretend your index finger is a pen and with it write your signature in the air as you would on paper. Now pretend your big toe is a pen and write your signature in the air. Now use your elbow, now use your knee. Each time we write our signature with a different body part, it follows a similar path as if we are using our hand. Why is this? We have practiced the motor pattern of writing our signature with our hand so many times it is stored in our memory and therefore the pattern can be replicated using other parts of our body.

Now let’s take broader view on this and look at basketball. If someone has mastered and spent time rehearsing their jump shot so it’s as easy as writing their signature on a piece of paper, come game day when the pressure is on they can still execute this motor pattern in various different contexts, such as being off balance due to an opponent. With weight room exercises this is even easier to vision as if our athlete’s master a split squat we can bet that they could perform most other split squat/ lunge variations.

However, we also don’t want our athletes to be rigid and limited in their movements. We want them to be able to explore wide varieties of movement options and let them figure out the best path forward rather than us coaching them through it. We want our athletes to have as many different movement capabilities as possible so that come game day, they have a large amount of options at their disposal.

Here we come to the flaw in the title of this article and with a lot of debates in strength and conditioning, we are led to believe it is an either/or situation rather than taking from both fields. With our strength work, we may want to encourage mastery of our main lifts so that in-season they are less taxing and also by establishing technical mastery we have a greater potential for true physiological adaptations in our athletes. With our accessory work, we may want to encourage variety and challenge athletes in many different positions to build a large bandwidth of movement and keep things interesting. In our on-field work, we may strive towards mastery of sprinting technique and certain change of direction movements but encourage variety in our agility drills and certain context specific sprint work.