Most Effective Strategies to Improving Athletic Ability
There are many different styles that people use to try to improve at various things, one of which is athletic ability. Athletic ability in this situation is considered to be a replicable action in which improvement can be tracked. Examples of this could be throwing a dart, shooting a basketball, or other things like that. The purpose for these tests, were to test the most effective way of improving upon one of those the quickest. These tests were conducted between 1996-1999 by Zimmerman and his colleagues Schunk and Kitsantis.
One of these styles is to watch others and try to replicate what they do. In this study they had three groups, one that watched a dart thrower with flawless technique, one that watched a dart thrower that gradually corrected their mistakes, and one group that did not watch anyone throw darts. They then compared the results from before watching these videos to after, while using many tactics to try and eliminate other factors at the same time.
It was predicted that the group watching the model that made mistakes would improve most because they were able to not only see the mistakes that they made, but to also watch how they corrected these mistakes to hopefully be able to avoid these themselves. Then the people that watched the models that made no mistakes still improved because they were watching the correct form, whereas the other group showed very little to no improvement because they didn’t do anything to improve
The results showed that the throwers that showed the most improvement were the ones that watched the throwers that corrected their mistakes. This was then followed by the group that watched the throwers that threw with perfect form. And then the group that showed the least improvement was the group that did not watch anyone throw. This was exactly what they had predicted. To go on top of this there were also tests done to see what effect social feedback had from others watching people throw. These all showed that this as well helped to improve results for all three of the groups. It also showed that numbers for combing these two strategies were even more effective.
This study also put other measures into place to try to ensure that these results were actually caused by the strategies which they were testing. One of these ways was by running tests on different groups of dart skill, self-efficacy, self-reaction, and intrinsic interest. This was to try to make sure that any of these components wasn’t the real reason for the change in results. This was proven because although those groups had different results from one another, they all showed the exact same patters as before when it came to the social feedback and watching others throw. They tried to keep everything that wasn’t being tested the exact same as well, all of this was to improve the accuracy of the results.
The results of these tests came back very clear for dart throwing, that watching people throw and correct their mistakes and getting social feedback were both very effective ways of improvement. But it is also expected that these results would be similar for most athletic ability activities, this is because assuming you use the same tactics, then it is inferred that the same tactics would be effective. The reason that it is expected that this would carryover to other sports as well is because it is a form of training that can be replicated for any activity, and the way of training would still be the same. That being said it could only be used on repeatable motions that do not have any outside influences, for example any type of defense, or anything that you can't repeat over and over while tracking results. It should also be noted that these results are easier to see on beginner levels because as people improve more and more, it begins to get harder and harder to see results.