Training The Brain For Expertise

First off, most research shows the extraordinary power of practice. The key to developing expertise in sports is a specific type of practice – according to Ericsson, a Swedish professor of Psychology. It is the so called ‘deliberate practice’, which aims at purposeful and single-minded practice to improve skills, ideally under the guidance of specialist instruction. Ericsson explains that most people practice that what is already effortless to them, but the very best type of practice instead is to make sustained efforts to learn something we can’t do well or not (yet) at all.

An area of such deliberate, single-minded practice is demonstrated in the training of top athletes - especially in tennis and cricket - who have to learn to ’see’ the ball played at them at a speed that physically can’t be seen by the eye. It takes about 100 milliseconds for a neural impulse to travel from the eye to the brain and then another 100 milliseconds to send a neural motor impulse from the brain to the muscle. For ball sports such as tennis and cricket where balls travel at ultra-high speed, the players can’t actually ‘see’ the balls directed at them due to this 200-millisecond delay in noticing/seeing it, so how do top players (learn to) bypass these limits of human information processing?

Research by Sean Muller, Professor at the University of Queensland, showed that an important aspect of ‘expertise’ in athletes is that they – thanks to endless hours of training - are able to gain knowledge – anticipation – enabling them to read early signals or advance cues from their opponents, such as minute limb movements and body position that anticipate the delivery and trajectory of the ball coming at them. This way the delayed visual delivery can be circumvented as the athlete becomes an expert in already knowing in advance where a 65-85mph (tennis) ball will land or a 100mph cricket ball is being bowled.