al. 2019). The former using specificity, progression, overload, reversibility and tedium to consider how challenge point can be manipulated. The latter suggesting a staged approach to skill learning, based on a progression from coordination, skill adaptability to performance training. Both frameworks use stability of skill and therefore error, as a progressive guide for the coach. Importantly, this doesn’ t mean that errors are always good for learning. There is instead a need for error detection and subsequent adaptation by the athlete( Metcalfe 2017). A key task for the coach is therefore to consider how to manipulate and monitor the extent of error during activities, or the relative stability and instability of movement activity( Otte et al. 2019). This reconstitutes the role of the coach as not eradicating but directing athletes’ attention towards errors aligned to the intentions of a session.
Explore-Execute Taxonomy
There are distinct differences with how athletes interact with activities based on their error detection. A common crosstheoretical framework for human behaviour is the explore-exploit trade-off( Hills et al. 2015), something used to classify differences in movement activity( for example, Otte et al. 2019;
Renshaw et al. 2019). Under this framework, actions may may be more exploratory, involving experimentation and trying new approaches, to being exploitative, utilising well-established capabilities for goal-oriented activities( Friston et al. 2015). For the coach, it should be recognised that nearly all action will have exploratory and exploitative elements. A common dilemma being that skill learning involves more exploratory behaviour but often needs to be balanced against the pragmatic need to perform effectively. Our experience suggesting that a binary distinction between explore and exploit lacks sufficient nuance to frame athlete-activity interaction. Returning to the work of Lövdén et al.( 2020), who suggested that expansion involved generating a large pool of neural circuits from which to select; exploration, the probing of different motor patterns through the development of neural structures; selection, of movement patterns within certain parameters; and subsequent refinement or remodelling over time. Under a different theoretical lens, Ecological Dynamics would suggest that exploring, exploiting or executing can be framed by variable interaction with affordances formed through individual constraints( Renshaw et al. 2019). Affordances being the perception of opportunities for
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