Ok so according to what I read, you can’t really work on your muscle memory for a sport after your childhood (before puberty)
There are two types of motor skills involved in muscle memory: fine and gross. Fine motor skills are very minute and small skills we perform with our hands such as brushing teeth, combing hair, using a pencil or pen to write, touch typing or even playing video games. Gross motor skills are those actions that require large body parts and large body movements as in the throwing sports such as bowling, American football, and baseball, sports such as archery, basketball, golfing, judo, swimming, and tennis, and activities such as driving a car (especially one with a manual transmission), playing a musical instrument, and marksmanship.
gross motor skills refers to the abilities usually acquired during infancy and early childhood as part of a child’s motor development. By the time they reach two years of age, almost all children are able to stand up, walk and run, walk up stairs, etc. These skills are built upon, improved and better controlled throughout early childhood. These movements come from large muscle groups and whole body movement.
So does that mean if someone during/after puberty got into basketball, he will never be good as someone who has been playing/practicing before puberty?
You will never maximize potential if you start learning a very specialized skill (ie basketball) late in life. Look at Michael Jordan and baseball. Not to say you cannot improve that skill or hone it, but you will not maximize potential.
Probably depends on the individual as some hit puberty later than others and depends on the activity. If you played a lot of sports and ran around a lot, you can probably start sprinting later in life and do fine (ie Donovan Bailey), but something like hitting a fast pitch is going to be a lot more specialized. I’m not sure exact ages–maybe some other people have more experience with exact numbers and activities.
You can learn faster when you are young, but it’s still possible to learn once your get older, I might even say it’s easier to learn complex movements once your older and your CNS is fully developed.
Shouldn’t be hard to find some research on the topic though.
You typed “You can learn faster when you are young, but it’s still possible to learn once your get older, I might even say it’s easier to learn complex movements once your older and your CNS is fully developed.”
Respectfully, I disagree with this statement.
A person’s adaptational (is that even a word?) window for mastering new skills is closing as that person matures - I’m talking about early to mid teens…
In other words, if you want to become a better athlete, don’t specialize in sports too soon…
There is quite a lot of work on this…I’d recommend reading Steve Plisk’s work, as well as anything Tom Mylinski has published. (There’s countless other stuff as well…)
You bring up an interesting point; but at the risk of offending any jugglers or drivers out there, in my opinion these are not the complex athletic moves like the starting, stopping, and changing direction of one’s body…
Do I have a catchy definition of what a skill is? Not off the top of my head.
Driving is hardly a complex motor task. There is a Juggler (or former juggler at least) on this forum and I think he may have a differing opinion on the easiness of learning it past a certain age. Plus, you can learn how to do something, but it is how well. I can shoot a basketball and hit some balls in the batting cages, but I can’t hit a fast pitch over the fence or shoot consistently from the 3pt line.
Koprivica, Drabik, and many others have stated that the CNS is largely matured through adolescence. As a result, prior to this biological stage the organism is very sensitive to the development of speed strength and facets of coordination.
If these elemental motor forms are not ‘practiced’ in some way prior to adolescence, ideally through games, then, as Davan has stated, the motor potential becomes highly truncated.
Can improvements in speed and so on occur in the untrained late teenager/young adult? Of course; however, the apex of performance that is reached beyond that stage is most probably well beneath what would have been possible had the ‘training’ occurred many years the former.
In regards to how one might qualitatively/quantitatively measure skill, we know that motor skills are generally fine or gross. As to what motor skill regime possesses a higher level of trainability later in life, I could only speculate.
I knew you had mentioned Koprivica and Drabik on some of the other forums, but I drew a blank!
I’m going to go out on a huge limb here and say that you are against early specialization for the majority of US athletes, as we potentially limit what they can do later on past puberty…
Regarding specialization, the stage at which the aspiring master of sport must begin to specialize has everything to do with the biodynamic/bioenergetic characteristics of the sport.
Certain sports, inherently, demand that the organism reach a certain stage of biological development, certainly post-adolescent, in order that the attainment of sport mastery is even physiologically possible (e.g. most T&F events). while others render the athlete capable of high sport mastery at very early stages of biological maturation, pre-adolescence, (e.g. womens gymnastics)
Correspondingly, the age of specialization must differ according to the biodynamic/bioenergetic characteristics of sport.
I don’t recall the page number off hand, however, there is a chart in Supertraining that lists quite a few Olympic disciplines and the different stages/optimal windows for the commencement of training, specialization, high results, etc
