Expert Performance In Sports

Grade level: 10, 11, 12, i, s, t.

Excellence and the highest levels of performance in the arts and sciences, sports, and games have always been an object of fascination to both scientists and lay people. Only during the last 20 years have scientists studied these levels of performance in the laboratory in order to identify their mediating mechanisms. Contrary to the common belief that innate talents are the critical factors for exceptional performance, investigators have found that acquired skills, knowledge, and physiological adaptations in response to intense practice are the primary mechanisms, mediating the highest levels of performance. This is the first and only book to examine how elite performers effect their exceptional accomplishments. The world's leading researchers on expert performance and creative achievement review theories and recent findings from many different domains of expertise on how experts optimize improvement in their performance and eventually attain excellence. Elite performers are shown to have engaged in deliberate-practice activities specifically designed to improve their performance from an early age. By age 20 they have often accumulated over 10,000 hours of practice! The essential elements of deliberate practice, such as specific goals to improve performance, successive refinement through repetition, feedback and instruction, are explicated for different domains. Although the content of practice tasks will necessarily differ from domain to domain, investigators have found invariant characteristics for the optimal duration of practice sessions, maximal amounts of daily practice, the length of intense preparation (around 10 years), and ages of peak performance. Some of the book's chapters extend the review to the acquisition of everyday-life skills such as reading, to the performance of teams of experts, and to the development of creative achievement, geniuses, and artistic child prodigies. The book concludes with commentaries by several outstanding scientists in psychology, education, and history of science who discuss the generalizability of presented ideas and raise issues for future issues. EXTRA COPY...It could be said that striving for excellence is what characterizes humanity, or perhaps what characterizes humanity at its best. Why do so few individuals ever reach the highest levels when so many start out on the Road to Excellence? In this book, the world's foremost researchers of expert performance in domains as diverse as sports, medicine, chess, and the arts explore the similarities and differences in the extended and strenuous Road to Excellence taken by the successful individuals in each domain. Their findings will intrigue and inspire readers who are themselves driven to achieve or who simply want to better understand the processes involved.

Expert Performance in Sports: Advances in Research on Sport Expertise presents an overview of the critical issues facing researchers who study how athletes reach--and stay at--the pinnacle of their sports. The text will allow you to update your knowledge of sport expertise with the most current research and practical applications for the development of sport expertise in athletes, referees, and judges. This comprehensive reference reflects both theoretical underpinnings and future directions in the understanding of sport expertise research and is the first book to look specifically at how elite athletes are developed. Editors Janet L. Starkes and K. Anders Ericsson identify the questions typically asked in the study of sport expertise; they provide a stimulating, scientific debate that addresses the question of whether a general theory of expert performance is achievable; and they conclude with a glimpse of future directions for research on sport expertise. This new reference answers controversial questions that arise with regard to the training of high-level performers: How can you potentially speed up the acquisition process? How easy or difficult is it for experts to retain high performance levels as they age? How can coaches structure practices to maximize active time and preparation for the next competition? What is the role of coaches and mentors who work with elite performers? What aspects of performance best reflect expert behaviors in a particular sport--anticipation, perceptual accuracy, decision speed, attention focus, response selection, response consistency, strategy, or others? With Expert Performance in Sports, you not only can read about sport expertise research but also find out how athletes and coaches benefit the most. "Experts' Comments" at the end of each chapter present the opinions of two world-class experts, Therese Brisson and Nick Cipriano. These experts' opinions bridge the gap between the research presented and its practical applications. Dr. Therese Brisson's academic training is in motor behavior; she also is an Olympic gold medalist, silver medalist, and six-time world champion in ice hockey. Professor Nick Cipriano is both an academic and an international-level wrestling coach. He is a former international-level wrestler and world-renowned coach in freestyle and Greco-Roman wrestling, and he has coached both male and female athletes from the high school level to the Olympic team. This is a must-have reference that will challenge researchers to identify both their theoretical underpinnings and future directions in their study of how the best excel at sports.

The ability to anticipate and make accurate decisions in a timely manner is fundamental to high-level performance in sport. This is the first book to identify the underlying science behind anticipation and decision making in sport, enhancing our scientific understanding of these phenomena and helping practitioners to develop interventions to facilitate the more rapid acquisition of the perceptual-cognitive skills that underpin these judgements. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach — encompassing research from psychology, biomechanics, neuroscience, physiology, computing science, and performance analysis — the book is divided into three sections. The first section provides a comprehensive analysis of the processes and mechanisms underpinning anticipation and skilled perception in sport. In the second section, the focus shifts towards exploring the science of decision making in sport. The final section is more applied, outlining how the key skills that impact on anticipation and decision making may be facilitated through various training interventions. With chapters written by leading experts from a vast range of countries and continents, no other book offers such a synthesis of the historical development of the field, contemporary research, and future areas for investigation in anticipation and decision making in sport. This is a fascinating and important text for students and researchers in sport psychology, skill acquisition, expert performance, motor learning, motor behaviour, and coaching science, as well as practicing coaches from any sport.

In this book, some of the world's foremost 'experts on expertise' provide scientific knowledge on expertise and expert performance.

This book was the first handbook where the world's foremost 'experts on expertise' reviewed our scientific knowledge on expertise and expert performance and how experts may differ from non-experts in terms of their development, training, reasoning, knowledge, social support, and innate talent. Methods are described for the study of experts' knowledge and their performance of representative tasks from their domain of expertise. The development of expertise is also studied by retrospective interviews and the daily lives of experts are studied with diaries. In 15 major domains of expertise, the leading researchers summarize our knowledge on the structure and acquisition of expert skill and knowledge and discuss future prospects. General issues that cut across most domains are reviewed in chapters on various aspects of expertise such as general and practical intelligence, differences in brain activity, self-regulated learning, deliberate practice, aging, knowledge management, and creativity.

Fifteen of the most distinguished practitioners in the field of sport psychology are featured in Expert Approaches to Sport Psychology: Applied Theories of Performance Excellence. The book includes biographical and autobiographical perspectives on the ways in which these pre-eminent experts developed their authentic and distinctive approaches to the practice of sport psychology. Edited by Mark W. Aoyagi and Artur Poczwardowski, this collection provides some of the giants of the field an opportunity to reflect on their distinguished careers. The contributors reveal how their life experiences have shaped their philosophies and provide an in-depth look into their theory of performance excellence, theory of performance breakdowns, and consulting process. Expert Approaches to Sport Psychology serves as a "master class" by those who have helped advance the field, preserving the legacies of some of the most influential minds in sport psychology. The wisdom passed on within this book will be immensely beneficial to both those practising and studying sport psychology.

High-Performance Training for Sports changes the landscape of athletic conditioning and sports performance. This groundbreaking work presents the latest and most effective philosophies, protocols and programmes for developing today’s athletes. High-Performance Training for Sports features contributions from global leaders in athletic performance training, coaching and rehabilitation. Experts share the cutting-edge knowledge and techniques they’ve used with Olympians as well as top athletes and teams from the NBA, NFL, MLB, English Premier League, Tour de France and International Rugby. Combining the latest science and research with proven training protocols, High-Performance Training for Sports will guide you in these areas: • Optimise the effectiveness of cross-training. • Translate strength into speed. • Increase aerobic capacity and generate anaerobic power. • Maintain peak conditioning throughout the season. • Minimise the interference effect. • Design energy-specific performance programmes. Whether you are working with high-performance athletes of all ages or with those recovering from injury, High-Performance Training for Sports is the definitive guide for developing all aspects of athletic performance. It is a must-own guide for any serious strength and conditioning coach, trainer, rehabilitator or athlete.