Skill training for athletes: time for some overload

Most of the available coaching and training information focuses on the development and improvement of various measures of physical fitness. From strength to speed to endurance to mobility - these topics and their sub-categories are covered in great detail, thereby helping to create the potential for better performances. In sport however, what really matters is how any fitness gains are used to produce better skilled movements. In this article, we’re going to explore a framework for improving skills that is not obvious at first, yet extremely intuitive once recognized. Ironically, this framework is borrowed from fitness development principles.

Training overload

One of the foundational principles of effective physical training is the concept of ‘overload’. Overload is necessary for improvements in all physical abilities, from speed, strength, endurance, to range of motion. An overload involves a greater physical challenge to continue to provoke adaptation. That could be more volume, more speed, higher rates of metabolism, more weight lifted, and so on. Without overload, there is no progress.

Yet this same principle is rarely applied to skill development interventions. In many cases, athletes are asked to perform the same task but just ‘better’. They’re provided with instruction, they perform many repetitions, and they’re given consistent feedback. But the activities to develop those skills often remain the same; there is no intentional attempt to create overload, and as a result, skills often fail to improve as much as they otherwise could. Considering the importance of skill in all athletic endeavors, this is problematic.

Skills and balance

As we’ll explore shortly, a group of researchers have recognized this fact and carried out a study applying the overload principle to the acquisition of skills through the use of balance training. While balance training may not directly apply to your sport of choice, that doesn’t mean this new research isn’t relevant to you and your goals; rather than view the study as investigating how to improve balance, view it from the perspective of overloading skills, which is important in all sport.

Beyond the larger framework of improving skills, balance is a critical ability for many athletes, particularly senior athletes who will experience a natural decline balance abilities as they age.  This decline can start in one’s 50s, becoming more pronounced after age 65. As with any skills or physical ability, that decline can be prevented or slowed with appropriate training. This speaks to the importance of identifying strategies to facilitate improved balance skills.

New research

As mentioned above, a group of Norwegian scientists has investigated the concept of overload in skill development, using balance training as their intervention ⁽¹⁾. They recruited 24 volunteers who had no history of balance training. All subjects were right-footed and performed the balance training on their dominant foot. The balance activity consisted of standing on a wobble board, which is a flat circular disc attached to a hemispherical block. The block was in contact with the ground and the subjects stood on the disc. Their goal was to prevent the edge of the board from touching the ground, and they were not permitted to use the arms to compensate for any loss of balance.

Three different types of wobble boards were used: low-, medium-, and high-difficulty boards. The circular disc the subjects stood on remained the same in all cases, but the profile of the spherical block was different (see figure 1). The low-difficulty sphere was most gently sloped while the high-difficultly sphere was most tightly curved, making it the most difficult to balance on. The subjects were tested on their ability to keep the wobble board level at all three levels of difficulty before training.

Figure 1: Wobble-board design from low- to high-difficulty