Skill Acquisition Perspective

"Creativity is the art of problem solving"—Stephen Batchelor ² .

There are moments in a practitioner's life when we come face to face with concepts that loosen our fixation on conventional methodologies. This concerns approaches built on principles other than those focused solely on aspects of performance. A body of theory that serves such a refreshing function is the skill acquisition perspective (SAP). I draw inspiration from it passionately and return to it regularly, as a way to “decompress” my own habitual thinking— to give myself space for learning and reflection on something “greater”.

The abilities that guarantee long–term success and mastery are not solely tied to the prevailing performance training paradigm centered around force and other variables that can be captured in the predictable laboratories of gyms and clinics within a short time frame. More often, they are linked to a broader lens of development across an entire career and athletic longevity—something that conventional training methods elevate to the level of learning, acquiring, and retaining skills necessary for effectively, and often creatively, dealing with “that” environment—being the ultimate test of various efforts and attempts.

Viewing exercises as tasks to be “solved” reflects my personal teaching style, which intuitively avoids extreme attachment to strict technique and an excessive amount of feedback. The idea of popularising this remarkable body of knowledge has been growing in me for a long time; however, the final trigger was the article by Williams and Hodges (2023) ¹ titled "Effective Practice and Instruction: A Skill Acquisition Perspective for Excellence"—it provides the background for the theses presented in this text, which offer a broader commentary and summary of the main assumptions of the skill acquisition perspective.

Rafination of Gold

I know no better metaphor for “achieving mastery” than the gold crafting ³:

Gold Ore — the athlete’s potential	Gold ore is raw material in which valuable resources are contaminated with dirty rock. It represents the athlete’s value and dormant talents, hidden beneath layers of habits, insecurities and undertraining. The first step in properly refining gold is exploration and discovery—extracting hidden abilities, not imposing a fixed form or adding something new.
The Furnace — the training environment	The full flourishing of human athleticism requires the high heat of the furnace—appropriately difficult and demanding practice that stimulates long–term learning in increasingly complex movement situations. The fire of the furnace symbolizes stress, and stress includes training load, task difficulty, and the amount of feedback. Through this, the precious metal separates from impurities, consolidates its structure, and reaches a state in which it can be skillfully shaped.
The Goldsmith — the coach’s role	The goldsmith does not produce gold but leads the process of refining and shaping it to match the realities of sport. At the end, they polish the material—a task repeated from time to time, as the surface grows dull. This means that the finished “precious object” (the athlete) no longer undergoes deep transformation, but requires constant care to preserve its shine, durability, and (sporting) excellence.

The gold metaphor suggests that a (good) coach acts more as a facilitator than a dictator and implies that the natural growth of athletic abilities is like delicate and balanced craftsmanship (art) ⁴. The gardener metaphor expresses this even more clearly—explaining that “a gardener doesn’t grow plants; they create the conditions for their natural development through the optimal amount of light, water, and soil nutrition ⁵”. Similarly, a coach ultimately teaches no one anything—they create the conditions in which the athlete learns independently.

Coaching Myths

Similar ideas can be found in the current debate among movement scientists, sports coaches and researchers seeking the best conditions for acquiring sport–specific motor skills—that allow champions to “emerge”. They confront us with myths related to coaching—that is, the style of sports instruction ¹. These myths are listed below:

Demonstrating an exercise/task is always effective in conveying information to the learner.

Specific, blocked training of a single skill is essential for learning that skill.

Feedback from the coach should be frequent, detailed, and delivered immediately after skill execution.

Instructive, command-based skill training is better than approaches based on athlete discovery.

Skills related to game intelligence cannot be trained or taught.

These so–called coaching superstitions—as proponents of the SAP theory claim—are not supported by scientific evidence and reflect outdated traditions that, in many ways, resist new and critical knowledge, as well as change arising from abandoning authoritarian pedagogy. They describe old–fashioned structures of sports federations and clubs, and the “top–down” working style of many coaches ⁶. Recent decades have brought significant development in the theory and research behind SAP and although this knowledge has not yet been fully absorbed by the broader community, its body of work points to the need for wider dissemination ⁷. While hiring specialists in performance and biomechanics has become standard practice, there is still a lack of space for methodologists focused on practice design grounded in games, discovery and constraints—who, unlike short–term performance experts, favor long-term learning ¹.

Measuring Success

Coaches should be careful not to confuse short–term success with actual progress.

Movement performance reflects current behaviour during a session, whereas learning signifies a lasting improvement that extends beyond temporary conditions. Frequent technical instructions, massed repetitions (of the same task), and constant feedback may boost short–term performance, but variable, open, surprising, shocking and random practice—especially when sparse in technical feedback—can stimulate deeper learning and transfer from training to competition ⁸.

Measuring learning requires the use of retention indicators, assessed over a longer time frame. These indicators express (theoretically) the “amount of skill” that remains after a period of rest, recovery and sleep—to test how lasting the memory is. However, quantitative thinking may limit the full picture, as in the domain of skill what also “counts” is quality: smoother movement (flow) and more efficient decision–making, which may not only lead to better outcomes but also to fewer injuries. If these positive results are observed additionally in an environment that carries the physical, emotional, and cognitive demands of competition, the transfer effect is amplified—half-jokingly called the “mythical transfer.” Beyond the attempt to mock it, the phrase signals the difficulty of calculating the long–term effect of master learning⁹.

The lack of standardized tools for measuring learning over the long term is both a challenge and an opportunity. The increasing integration of on-field data from GPS trackers, inertial measurement units (IMUs), optical camera systems and real–time video analysis creates the conditions to assess not only outcomes and performance but the process itself: how the athlete moved, what decisions they made, how they reacted to opponents, how many explosive efforts they performed, how often they changed direction and so on. Capturing the often nonlinear dynamics of such behaviours may help indicate what type of training is most appropriate—without losing sporting realism and while maintaining an optimal level of challenge.

This is exactly the kind of space where modern data science and artificial intelligence solutions can support clubs and organizations by helping practitioners make more accurate decisions. Recent studies show that machine learning, for example, can identify non–obvious indicators of skill and predictors of athlete development in team–based environments ¹⁰—patterns that traditional analytics teams might miss. Depending on the observed changes in on–field behaviors, such modelling may suggest modifications to training goals, small–sided game dimensions, reaction times, added constraints or increased intensity. This kind of approach (again, theoretically speaking) allows for a more precise shaping of the balance between challenge, repetition, and specificity for each athlete—and that is precisely the essence of effective skill acquisition.

10,000 hours

In 1993, K. Anders Ericsson and colleagues proposed the thesis that the most talented violinists had devoted around 10,000 hours to practice by the age of 20, reaching the lofty stage of so–called expertise¹¹. Suffice it to say, this rule often applies to sport as well, though it may overly simplify the complex mechanisms behind skill development. Simply grinding out practice hours won’t bring benefit if the practice isn’t based on a clear understanding of the target demands—at best, it will lead to stagnation ¹².

Sports educators often emphasize the importance of a student’s (future champion’s) strength of character, described as the golden traits of mental attitude (mindset). These include passion, perseverance (grit) and—crucial in the context of this discussion—openness to learning from mistakes ⁵. There is growing speculation about whether this last trait is innate or acquired in an environment (the furnace) that embraces mistakes as an invaluable source of reflection ¹³. In line with the saying, “a calm sea never trained a skilled sailor,” the athlete must one day leave the gym and locker room and step onto the field. The more they embody the “boat in a storm,” the better for their learning. There are studies that highlight the importance of “noble” perseverance but also caution that mastery won’t emerge without simple, consistent diligence ¹⁴. A combination of such conditions may allow someone to conquer the arena of competition much sooner than the textbook 10k hours ¹⁵. The same applies to playing an instrument or learning a foreign language ¹⁶.

However, the simplicity of the SAP perspective is deceptive. It does not help sports researchers explain with certainty the phenomenon of GOATs—the greatest of all time athletes—or more precisely, how they managed to dominate the podium for so long ¹⁷. Research is rarely about immortal champions, but rather about average athletes (though still good and essential) and the ideas, while beautiful in their attempt to describe the “art” of coaching, remain more of a useful exercise in imagination ¹⁸. Individual traits, the domain of the psyche and the “mental side”, remain an area not always within the reach of coaching competencies—which is why we should focus on what we can actually shape and control.

Deliberate practice

Deliberate or purposeful practice is high–quality sports skill training (not quantity), in which the difficulty exceeds the current capabilities of the athlete. Conditions that are too easy limit learning, while those that are too difficult lead to overload. Frequent repetitions of identical training drills may improve technique, but they lack the cognitive and emotional “flavour” of a real challenge. On the other hand, overly complex or excessively stressful scenarios can exceed the athlete’s current abilities, leading to a decline in learning quality. Effective training therefore lies in the zone where practice remains demanding, representative and aligned with the demands of competition.

Diagram 1. Practice continuum based on the SAFE model (Skill Acquisition Framework for Excellence) ¹.

Deliberate and purposeful practice should reflect the conditions of competition as closely as possible and present the athlete with appropriate challenges. When task specificity in relation to real game scenarios is low, skill transfer hardly occurs—this is a zone to be avoided; just like exercises that are overly complex and overwhelm the athlete with their level of difficulty. As “specificity” increases, so does the chance for actual transfer of acquired skills into the game, and the coach gains the ability to precisely adjust the level of difficulty depending on the training goal. Overly simple drills, in which the athlete repeats what they already know, fall into the maintenance zone—they may be useful occasionally, but should not form the foundation of the skill development process.

The Limits of Creativity

The perspective offered by SAP is an open critique of generic approaches that have limited applicability in real sport settings. Physical preparation for sports is not CrossFit, bodybuilding or even basic strength training, where %·RM values are the only proposed method for progressing exercise difficulty. The skill acquisition perspective expresses something that “doesn’t fit” into the minds of most exercise experts—not only in terms of manipulating the external environment but also in shaping the process of developing essential technical–tactical abilities.

Those who know, know: you have to be immersed in a given sport to truly understand which adaptations are specific and which remain general. If, in addition, we trust solid research and practitioners who argue that it’s worth giving athletes agency—encouraging them to self–regulate and learn from mistakes, injuries and failures—then we begin to think about sport in a truly modern way.

However, the skill perspective can be easily misinterpreted. It can also be applied dogmatically—for example, to dismiss methods that are simple, general, easy to measure, and low in specificity. Spontaneous movement skills make little sense in bodybuilding. Pure strength training benefits precisely from accumulated fatigue—monotonous, repetitive strength efforts. Patients needing to improve fitness and metabolism should simply move as much as possible, without aiming to reach a 'flow' state in already limited movement patterns. In sports rehabilitation, patients are not granted autonomy for trial–and–error, especially in the early phases of recovery.

Even games designed to introduce first contact with the ball are still just games, and the refined cognitive drills from the movement culture—in which the practitioner avoids a ball on a string—are more of a novelty or form of expression, which usually teaches nothing in particular (in the context of sport or life). Moreover, not all compensations and movement errors are a source of learning. Some are simply the result of injuries—often chronically unresolved—that must be corrected with reductionist appriach and traditional rehab solutions.

Non-specific training can also be thoughtful and “deliberate”. Isolated strength training—for example, targeting an overloaded area—will strengthen the region, reduce pain and allow the person to do more “out there,” on the field. The limits of creativity are a boundary not worth crossing, lest we fall into anarchy. It is also a call to recognise the importance of integral thinking, based on the dialectics of the opposites, in which the skill acquisition perspective becomes (only or precisely) a worldview that expands conventional methodologies.

That’s why “deliberate” should always also mean “rational”—so it doesn’t become a myth of its own¹⁹.

Przeczytaj więcej

1. Williams AM, Hodges NJ. Effective Practice and Instruction: A Skill Acquisition Perspective for Excellence. Journal of Sports Sciences (2023). OPEN ACCESS—this article serves as the main point of reference for the content presented in this essay; my commentary is an open, yet also critical, addition to its assumptions.
   

2. Batchelor S. Buddha, Socrates, and Us: Ethical Living in Uncertain Times. Yale University Press (2025).

3. Przenośnia złota jest moim, autorskim pomysłem, który odnosi się do konceptów spotykanych w literaturze SAP.

4. Otte FW et al. When and How to Provide Feedback and Instructions to Athletes?—How Sport Psychology and Pedagogy Insights Can Improve Coaching Interventions to Enhance Self–Regulation in Training. Frontiers in Psychology (2020). OPEN ACCESS.

5. Liebenson C. Functional Training Handbook. Wolters Kluwer Health (2014)—rozdział o perspektywie SAP.

6. Stone J. et al. Exploring Sport Coaches’ Experiences of Using a Contemporary Pedagogical Approach to Coaching: An International Perspective. Qualitiative Research in Sport (2020). OPEN ACCESS.

7. Choo L et al. Skill Acquisition Interventions for the Learning of Sports–Related Skills: A Scoping Review of Randomised Controlled Trials. Psychology of Sport and Exercise (2024). OPEN ACCESS.

8. Soderstrom NC. Learning Versus Performance: An Integrative Review. Perspectives on Psychological Science (2025).

9. Czyż SH et al. High Contextual Interference Improves Retention in Motor Learning: Systematic Review and Meta–Analysis. Nature (2024). OPEN ACCESS.

10. Davis J et al. Methodology and Evaluation in Sports Analytics: Challenges, Approaches and Lessons Learned. Machine Learning (2024). OPEN ACCESS.

11. Ericsson KA et al. The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance. Psychological Review (1993).

12. Davids K et al. Expert Performance in Sport: An Ecological Dynamics Perspective. Handbook of Sport Expertise (2015).

13. McNeil D et al. Examining the Importance of Athletic Mindset Profiles for Level of Sport Performance and Coping. International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology (2023). OPEN ACCESS.

14. Credé M et al. Much Ado About Grit: A Meta-Analytic Synthesis of the Grit Literature. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2016). OPEN ACCESS.

15. Macnamara BN et al. Deliberate Practice and Performance in Music, Games, Sports, Education and Professions: A Meta–Analysis. Psychological Science (2014).

16. Ericsson KA et al. The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance. 2nd Edition. Cambridge University Press (2018).

17. Baker J et al. Innate Talent in Sport: Separating Myth From Reality. Current Issues in Sport Science (2018).

18. Williams AM et al. Skill Acquisition in Sport. Research, Theory and Practice. 3rd Edition. Routledge Tylor & Francis Group (2020).

19. Whitehead A. Myths of Sport Coaching. Sequoia Books (2021)—fragment o 'deliberate practice'.

Enrich the discussion:

Respond to the ideas presented in the text above by writing to: me@pawelkrotki.com.