Month: June 2017

A Baseball Batter’s Perception of Spin & How it Relates to Hitting Performance

[shadowbox] A Baseball Batter’s Perception of Spin & How it Relates to Hitting Performance One of the most interesting measurements that has come from the “Pitch f/x – Statcast Era” in baseball is pitch spin rate.  While there has been a lot of discussion of how spin influences the flight of the ball, how it…

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66 – Interview with Gerard Jones, Bristol Rovers FC, Coaching to Develop Decision Making

66 A discussion with Gerard Jones, Head of Coaching at Bristol Rovers Football Club. We discuss topics including developing decision making skills in players through improved communication, how to handle regional differences in sports vocabulary, encouraging different levels of knowledge in players, and how to balance player and coach development. Download link More information about…

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Pitch Tunneling & Perceptually Equivalent Pitches

[shadowbox] Pitch Tunneling & Perceptually Equivalent Pitches Recently I have become fascinated with the topic of pitch tunneling, not only because I am a big baseball fan but because it bears a striking resemble to some of the psychophysical experiments I did during my PhD (and since).  Specifically, one’s designed to measure discrimination thresholds for…

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65 – Body Awareness, Kinaesthetic Sensitivity & Proprioceptive Training

65 How important is feel or body awareness in sports? How can we assess kinaesthetic sensitivity and proprioceptive acuity in athletes and can these be improved through training? How does it influence an athlete’s ability to implement technical changes? Download link Articles: Level of competitive success achieved by elite athletes and multi-joint proprioceptive ability Exploring…

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64 – Intermittent Vision: How Much Do We Need to Be Able to See To Act?

64 How well can we integrate samples from a visual scene (e.g. when an outfielder is trying to catch a fly ball and has to look from the ball to the wall and back)? How long of a view do we need and what interval between samples can we tolerate? Does training to perform under…

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63 – Innovative Video Feedback, Affordances for Movement & Team Coordination

63 News: A look at a few recent articles in the area of motor learning and performance. Can skill execution be improved by combining self and expert models in video feedback? How do combat athletes using affordance to control interpersonal distance? How can we determine the degree to which the decisions made by teammates are…

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