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The essay below is a partnering between academic and practical experience.
SportsEdTV Volleyball Executive Director and Leandro Dultra, Ph.D candidate answer questions about building sports skills in practice and will be especially helpful to coaches to team sports in determining the HOW & WHEN of sports skill development.
We suggest a thoughtful read.
The purpose of this essay is to define two basic concepts that have been used in the area of Motor Learning (i.e., distribution of practice and practice schedule). The aim is to apply this knowledge in the organization of drills for different sports. I would like to share my experience in the development of volleyball athletes in Brazil through the use of background in Motor Learning and its application in the process of acquiring motor skills. The first basic concept that has been used is about the distribution of practice, which is related to the proportion of the interval between the work done and the rest time in each attempt (Panckuk et al., 2013; Magill & Anderson, 2017). The distribution of the practice has been represented by two practice conditions according to the length of its interval. Distributed practice is when the practice time is less than the rest time. On the other hand, massed practice can be defined when the practice time is longer than the rest. The emphasis in this argument is on the inter-trial interval (i.e., the time interval between trials of practice). Therefore, short inter-trials intervals are considered massed practice and longer inter-trials intervals are considered distributed practice.
| NAME | PACING | DEFINITION |
| Distributed Practice | Practice time is less than rest time | Longer between-trials intervals |
| Massed Practice | Practice time is longer than rest time | Short between-trials intervals |
There was a gap in the motor learning literature on this issue. Based on this, Dutra and Da Matta (2020) demonstrated that massed practice led to better learning than distributed practice for a sporting motor skill. This finding was counter-intuitive than the literature. A practical implication based on these findings would be to organize drills with short inter-trials intervals.
For example, a maximum of three subjects in each line for a better learning of this motor skill, during the execution of the drill. Specifically with the purpose to maximize practice. On the other hand, the longest inter-trial interval indicated that it was not as effective for learning. In such a way that, the planning of drills with a greater number of participants would promote a distributed practice becoming not so effective for learning. A reference for this type of practice would be from four subjects in the same line of the drill could consider as distributed practice. Therefore, a suggestion for the process of acquiring sports skills would be to use massed practice instead of distributed practice. Likewise, short inter-trials intervals should be used when planning drills. My experience as a coach also reinforces this claim of elaborating drills through massed practice.
