Motor learning: the link between technique and physical ability

1/4h LabO #246, Watch the episode on YouTube

The late 2000s, in STAPS. Romain Katchavenda learns technique on one side, physical preparation on the other, and in the middle, nothing really connects what the movement demands to what the body knows how to produce. This missing link has a name: motor learning, and it is from this precise point that the entire LabO RNP approach starts.

What is motor learning?

When Romain describes his job as a physical preparation coach, he starts with the gap he felt on leaving the STAPS Master's. A link that wasn't being made, between an athlete's technical and tactical demand on one side and their physical demand on the other. Motor learning is precisely that central element, the one that stands in the middle and makes the junction.

Go back over the pieces. An athlete needs physical qualities, strength, speed, everything that makes them perform better. They also need technical movements that are right for their discipline. As long as you work these two worlds in parallel without ever plugging one into the other, a piece is missing. Motor learning is that piece. The one that connects the movement to the physical capacity, the one that makes a quality gained in training show up for real in the movement of the discipline.

At this summit, the team talks about motor function in the broad sense, not only about athletic performance. Motor learning is its foundation. As soon as you try to understand how someone learns to move and to optimize their movements, you go through it. It is the entry point, and it opens straight onto two notions that Romain places at the heart of his thinking: the perception-action loop and the sensorimotor loop.

The perception-action loop and the sensorimotor loop

Romain says it plainly: as soon as you take an interest in motor learning and motor function, you very quickly run into the perception-action loop and the sensorimotor loop. Not a theoretical detour. The natural path when you dig into the question of movement.

The idea of a loop comes down to one thing: moving and perceiving are never two separate steps. You perceive: what you see, what you feel, where your body is in space. You act according to that perception. And the action itself sends back new information that adjusts the next movement. Movement and perception turn continuously inside each other. That is what the words "perception-action" and "sensorimotor" cover: sensory input feeding the motor side, the motor side producing sensory input.

The LabO RNP approach starts exactly there. Instead of treating technique and physical preparation as two separate worksites, the team takes the perception-action loop as its starting point, and uses it to link the athlete's technical and tactical demands to their physical demands. Placing yourself at the interface of the two means placing yourself on the loop itself. This positioning gives its full meaning to the title of athletic preparation coach as Romain uses it.

Developing physical qualities or optimizing existing potential

Romain splits his job into two sides, and the split matters. The development of physical qualities on one side. The optimization of the potential already present on the other. Two different intentions, two kinds of work.

The first side is the classic job of the physical preparation coach: developing what will make an athlete clearly better in their discipline. You build quality, you add capacity. The second side shifts the gaze. Instead of adding, you look to make better use of what the person already has. This is where motor function and the sensorimotor loop come into play, because optimizing existing potential amounts to optimizing the way perception and action are coordinated.

The athletic preparation coach, guarantor of transfer

The word "transfer" is the key to this side. A physical quality developed in the gym is only worth something if it comes out in the real movement of the discipline. Strength gained that never shows up on the field has transferred nothing at all.

That is why Romain speaks of an athletic preparation coach rather than a mere physical preparation coach. The athletic preparation coach is, in his words, the guarantor of the transfer of physical qualities into the discipline. Their role: making sure that what was built on one side actually reaches the athletic movement on the other. And to guarantee this transfer, you come back to motor learning and the perception-action loop, since it is through them that the physical quality connects to the technical movement.

Optimizing what is already there rather than rebuilding everything

The second side changes the starting point. Adrien Chartier, a posturologist and physical preparation coach for more than twenty years, says he has always been interested in the same thing: improving athletes' baseline potential, and for more than ten years, truly optimizing their movement.

Optimizing existing potential means working on the quality of the person's sensorimotor loop, the way they already move, in order to get more out of it. The two practitioners place this lever at the center of their approach. It is also what connects their work with high-level athletes to their work with very different populations, children for example.

Movement, cognition and emotion: what work with children shows

Adrien's permanent research into how we move has taken him somewhere other than the sports field. By dint of looking for ways to get athletes moving better, he noticed major movement difficulties in children. For more than ten years, this is the population that has taken up most of his work.

From this fieldwork carried out in schools, he draws a strong correlation: movement is highly linked to the emotional sphere, and also linked to the sphere of learning in children. Observe how a child moves, and you are at the same time observing something about their relationship to emotions and their ability to learn. The study he mentions will be detailed during the summit. At this stage, he states the observed correlation, not a figure.

The reasoning holds well beyond childhood. The brain that lets us create movement is also the one that creates our learning and our emotions. Treat posture, the mind and emotion as watertight domains, and you miss the essential. The postural sphere, the mental sphere and the emotional sphere cannot be separated. They share the same neurobiological foundation, and that is exactly why you cannot work on one while ignoring the others.

The limits of classic tools

Adrien is frank about his own path. He went through several phases in the world of movement, phases that many pros know: functional training, mobility, self-massage. Tools everywhere, often presented as must-haves.

His conclusion, after more than fifteen years, is blunt: these tools work very little. They did not keep the promise of durably improving athletes. That is what pushed him to look elsewhere, toward a finer understanding of how we move and how the brain produces movement. The criticism is not gratuitous: it comes from a practitioner who used these tools before measuring their limits in the field.

The other series of criticisms, the team took head-on when trying to unite people. At the start of LabO RNP, their first reflex was to call their former trainers to build a large community around movement. They admit they went about it a bit naively. Very quickly came the petty turf wars and the criticism, everyone's reflex to defend their own patch instead of working together. Only now, after carving out a place in the field, do they judge the time right to relaunch this unifying movement.

Neuro-Postural Reprogramming and the shared language between professions

LabO RNP stands for Neuro-Postural Reprogramming. It is the training organization the team has kept running for five to six years. It trains a wide range of professions: sports coaches, physiotherapists, osteopaths, psychomotor therapists, occupational therapists, movement educators, special educators, psychologists, mental coaches. All concerned with motor function, all rarely brought around the same table.

The problem spotted from the start is very concrete. A coach advises an athlete to see an osteopath, a physiotherapist or a psychomotor therapist, and the athlete often doesn't know what each of these professionals does. Worse: by talking with these professionals themselves, the team discovered that they too did not always grasp the scope of the others' skills. Everyone works well, in ignorance of what their neighbor does.

Hence the idea of a framework and a shared language. The observation sheds light on everything: a physiotherapist, an osteopath and a physical preparation coach often talk about the same thing, but each with their own vocabulary and their own spectrum. Put end to end, their discourses often turn out to be different descriptions of a single reality. Harmonizing this vocabulary again does two things at once: talking about the same thing with the same words, and adopting a truly multidisciplinary vision of care.

The team has been measuring the benefit for six years at its seminars. In the off moments, around meals, all the professions exchange horizontally. Hard cores form city by city, where pros from different backgrounds begin to understand how the others work and to really work together. Feedback converges: when everyone understands what the other does and can refer a person to them, support accelerates. That is the purpose of the profession at bottom, helping the person in front of you, and it is that person who moves forward faster.

A unifying movement around motor function

The Motor Function Professionals Summit extends this logic. The team wanted it to be unifying and multidisciplinary, open to all the professions that revolve around movement. The speakers, professionals the team knows and chooses for their quality, are all volunteers. No one was paid for this summit.

The money question was set aside deliberately. The fee asked is used only to cover the organizational costs of the in-person event, the hire of the room in Paris for the weekend. The stated goal remains simple: bring everyone together, get diverse professions speaking the same language, and sustain a collective rather than individual effort beyond the event.

FAQ

What is motor learning?

It is the central element that links an athlete's technical and tactical demand to their physical demand. Romain Katchavenda describes it as the link that was missing in his STAPS training, where technique and physical preparation were taught separately. As soon as you take an interest in it, you arrive at the perception-action loop and the sensorimotor loop, these continuous back-and-forths between what we perceive and what we do. Motor learning is the foundation of motor function in the broad sense, and the entry point for optimizing a person's movement.

What are the criticisms of the approach?

There are two to distinguish. First, the criticism of classic tools: after more than fifteen years of practice, Adrien Chartier observes that functional training, mobility and self-massage are tools that work very little, which pushed him to look toward understanding movement and the brain. Second, the criticisms LabO RNP faced when trying to unite the professions: when launching their community, the team ran into petty turf wars, everyone's reflex to defend their territory rather than collaborate. It is after carving out a place in the field that they are now relaunching this unifying movement.

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• Variability and motor learning: why repeating the same movement caps your progress

• Motor function and athletic performance: my path to Neuro-Postural Reprogramming

• Motor learning transfer in sport: making RNP exercises effective in the field

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