ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the stages athletes proceed through when learning skills. It issues that coaches might find helpful when structuring skills training sessions. The chapter explains the role of feedback in performance improvement. This chapter focuses on how psychologists assist coaches with physical skill development. Coaches and athletes believe more is better with skill-learning, and evidence reveals that overlearning is effective for retention. Individuals engage in a large amount of cognitive activity as they attempt to develop mental maps or an understanding of the movement. Continuous reinforcement leads to quicker learning over its partial counterpart, perhaps because it is easier to perceive the behaviour-consequence connection. An antecedent or discriminative stimulus is an event, object, person or situation that signals that a specific behaviour results in certain consequences. The watchful gaze of a referee may be enough for some rugby league players to avoid engaging in foul play, illustrating operant generalisation.
