Last Updated on Sunday, 27 May 2012 18:31
By Jack Blatherwick
Let’s Play Hockey Columnist
The bottom line in developing highly skilled athletes is to start with young kids and teach “sound technique” by quality repetition — hour after hour after hour.
This is the Russian system: simple and repetitive. There are no secrets.
Russian coaches believe that fundamental skills must be rehearsed perfectly over and over again — just like learning to play a violin or hitting a golf ball. They eliminate poor technique before it becomes a habit.
Even if they’ve never heard the word “neuro-physiology,” Russian coaches are adamant that skill practice is a pre-requisite to competition for at least three years. Poor technique is likely to occur during games, and sloppy habits will never lead to improved skills.
It’s a simple formula, but this is how they develop an abnormally high number of world-class violin players in Novosibirsk, tennis players at Spartak, and hockey stars at Dynamo. This is probably why the South Korean women golfers are becoming such a force on the LPGA tour; they have so few golf courses, they have to practice fundamentals at the driving range when they’re young.
In the United States, we might say, “Repetition after repetition is boring, and I want kids to have fun.”
The Russians would answer, “Our kids have fun. They can’t wait to do repetitions on-ice and off, feel the improvement, and have success in competition.”
No one can deny that it would be a lot of fun to have skills like Ovechkin, Kovalchuk, or Tiger Woods — or for that matter, Itzhak Perlman, or any great musician in the world. Their childhoods were not boring. Passion wasn’t lost because of their early specialization. If a youngster is bored with hockey and wants to quit, it’s probably from lack of skills to compete successfully — not from over-emphasis on correct technique.
So my suggestion is not about building elite hockey players. It’s about having fun.
Time out for some neuro-science of “plasticity,” ie. “learning.”
How does our brain learn new tricks? Exactly what is memory? What happens at the cellular level when an athlete refines a new skill? Physiologists are recently discovering many answers to these questions.
The Central Nervous System (CNS, which is the brain and spinal cord) is composed of two types of cells: neurons and glial cells. The neurons conduct electrical impulse signals (action potentials) and communicate with other neurons at junctions called synapses.
A young adult has approximately 100 billion neurons, each one with an average of 1000 synapses. There are many more glial cells, however.
Learning was previously thought to be an exclusive function of the neurons and their inter-communication — the way they were hard-wired. It was assumed that glial cells were just along for support.
However, using creative new technology, scientists have shown that glial cells play a major role in the learning process. By “observing” activity in their neighboring neurons, and communicating what is happening with other glial cells, they can then modify the neurons and synapses so that future neuron activity is more effective — that is more knowledgeable, for cognitive thinking — more coordinated, in the case of physical skills.
One type of glial cell (the olygodendrocyte) builds up insulation, called myelin, the “white matter” which wraps around the long thin extension (axon) of the neuron — the greater the myelin buildup, the faster the electrical impulse travels along the axon.
That’s an important starting point, because the speed of the electrical conduction determines the precise timing of the signal to another neuron. If, for example the neuron receiving the signal has the function of activating muscle fibers for skating, it probably receives signals from a hundred other neurons at nearly the same time.
If some of the signals arrive a little late or early by only 4 milliseconds (.004 seconds) the motor neuron may not activate. In other words, the extremely precise timing determines the coordination of your skating motion or any other skill. Throughout all repetitions of a skill, the neurons are sending signals to surrounding oligodendrocytes which add myelin to that particular neuron, making it faster (or better) in the future.
We might have gained a clue that glia are important in the learning process, when portions of Albert Einstein’s brain were seen (during autopsy) to have an abnormally high content of glia. For an exciting internet trip, start by googling “Einstein’s brain,” and move on to “glial cells.”
World-class pianists have much more myelin in the areas of the brain that control movement of the fingers — and the more they practice, the more myelin they have.
Neuro-scientists believe that world-class skills like those of Alexander Ovechkin or Tiger Woods are expressions of well-placed myelin. The next time your teammate makes a move that leaves the opposing goalie tied in knots, tell him, “Wow, your myelin really looked great on that goal.”
Another type of glial cell (the astrocyte) adds an element of learning to the actual synapse by modifying the chemical communication between two neurons and by “building” more synapses if there is a lot of activity. How do astrocytes learn what the neurons are doing, and make “intelligent modifications?”
In somewhat the same way as the oligodencrocytes, by “sampling” the molecules exchanged at the synapse.
There’s much more to this neuro-science story, of course, but I see some yawns (reminds me of teaching math) and I’ll let you dig deeper into this on your own. Dr. Douglas Fields, at the National Institute of Health, wrote two summary articles (a little technical, but very interesting), and they are posted here:
For an excellent related article titled How to Grow a Super-Athlete, by Daniel Coyle in the New York Times Play Magazine,March 4, 2007, go to
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/sports/playmagazine/04play-talent.html
Jack Blatherwick, Ph.D., is a physiologist for the Washington Capitals, and has held the same post for other NHL and Olympic teams. Check out his website at overspeed.info.
