Learning pyramid and training: performing on a fragile base

Learning pyramid in sport: when technique gives out before the legs

In sport, the learning pyramid (Taylor and Trott, 1991; Williams and Shellenberger, 1996) serves as a reading grid: when a movement breaks down under fatigue, it makes you look at the levels that support it before repeating the instruction. This work is built into the session and checked with a retest.

Hello to you, the movement professional,

Tuesday, in the gym. The athlete breaks his squat record, then his best ten-meter time. You note the numbers with the satisfaction of a coach who sees his work paying off.

Saturday, late in the match, he arrives at a ball that bounces badly. His feet cross and the pass goes astray. Two actions later the positioning error you thought was fixed a month ago comes back, even though his legs still have plenty left.

The gain in the gym is real. What gave way on Saturday may be hiding lower down in the Williams and Shellenberger pyramid, in the levels that hold the movement when nothing is comfortable anymore. If so, you need to understand how he performed on a fragile base, and where to place the work on that base without stealing his session.

Performing on a fragile base: motor variability and degeneracy

In the book that gathered his work in 1967, Nikolai Bernstein set out the problem: for a given task, the body has far more degrees of freedom than it needs. Sending a ball to the same spot can be done by a multitude of joint combinations and timings, and the nervous system picks one among others.

Roger Bartlett and his colleagues (2007) point out that even elite athletes, after years of training, never reproduce exactly the same movement twice, and that different athletes reach the same goal through different movements. Where many biomechanists saw noise, they see a variability that can be put to use.

In 2001, Gerald Edelman and Joseph Gally argued that this property runs through all of biology, from gene to population. It is called degeneracy: the capacity of structurally different elements to produce the same result. The word sounds bad in English; yet it designates a resource. Ludovic Seifert and his colleagues (2016) transposed it to the sports movement: several motor organizations serve the same goal, and the experienced athlete uses them to adapt when constraints change. Seifert, Chris Button and Keith Davids (2013) had already concluded that no ideal movement model holds for all learners.

Reread the pyramid with these glasses. An athlete whose gaze stabilizes less well can compensate through his supports and through anticipation. Another, whose body map stays blurry on one side, routes the movement through his strong side. Talent provides the backup roads and training volume finishes paving them. The nervous system then defends this adaptive postural strategy as long as it works.

This is our reading, consistent with the notion of degeneracy; nobody has measured this mechanism level by level, nor what these backup roads cost the athlete.

What compensation costs when fatigue arrives

Kylie Royal and her colleagues (2006) fatigued fourteen high-level junior water polo players with a sport-specific exercise at maximal intensity, repeated in sets whose recovery shortened each time. At peak fatigue, the accuracy and speed of the shots had not moved. Technique, assessed by qualitative analysis of the movement, had dropped by 43% compared with the baseline test. The result holds while the way of obtaining it degrades, and the stat sheet shows none of it.

Nicolas Forestier and Vincent Nougier (1998) had looked at this phenomenon more closely, in a ball throw toward a target. Without fatigue, hand speed arose from a summation of speeds, from the elbow to the hand, with a lag between their peaks. Fatigued, the subjects succeeded less often; and when they hit the target, the lag had disappeared, the arm worked as a rigid block.

You have already seen that arm late in a match. Fatigue also affects the sensors, as detailed in the article on the effects of muscle fatigue. And visual information pickup pays its share, the subject of the letter a clean movement, a dirty perception.

Neither of these two studies speaks of a pyramid. Our field hypothesis, presented as such: a fragile base forces the system to run more often on a backup road, and that road costs more. It demands attention for a movement that should run on its own, and often stiffness to hold a posture that the sensors do not secure enough. In the gym, when the athlete is fresh and calm, the bill goes unnoticed. Late in the match, it falls due all at once, and over a season you find it again in the form of a technical ceiling.

Performance and motor learning: what the match comes to test

Nicholas Soderstrom and Robert Bjork (2015) reviewed decades of work on motor and verbal learning. According to their conclusion, performance during training often predicts learning poorly, and practitioners themselves are mistaken about what they have really learned. A session judged by what you see in it therefore sometimes fools the coach himself.

Tuesday's record is a performance, obtained with no opponent and no ball bouncing badly. Saturday raises the question of transfer to the field. Between the two, your session trade-offs depend on the tension between learning and immediate performance. The pyramid adds a search order when the movement gives out out of context. The weak signals of poor learning, rigidity or collapse as soon as you leave the frame, can betray a backup road working underneath.

In-session reading table: from signal to level

Each level has its article: the sensory systems of the pyramid, the six skills of sensorimotor development and the perceptual-motor development level.

LabO RNP field grid built on the pyramid, with no value as a validated assessment tool: it serves to formulate a hypothesis, which the retest will confirm or not.

Physical preparation and motor development: where to place the work on the lower levels

The principle comes from research on motor learning. In children with coordination difficulties, the meta-analysis by Bouwien Smits-Engelsman and her colleagues (2013) finds a strong effect for task-oriented approaches (effect size 0.89). Those that only train the supposedly underlying functions obtain just a weak effect (effect size 0.12). Your population differs; the logic nonetheless joins that of ecological approaches in sport. Ross Pinder and his colleagues (2011) speak of representative learning design. Training must keep the links between information and movement that the athlete will find in competition, by playing on the three families of motor constraints, those of the organism, the task and the environment.

The warm-up is the simplest place. A few targeted minutes on the identified level, a gaze stabilization with the head moving for example, then straight away the movement that depends on it, in its specific form. The link between the stimulation and the task is made within the same minute.

The most profitable, in our view, remains integrating the constraint into the task. You keep the technical exercise and you modify a single condition that calls on the fragile level: visual information to pick up during the support, a surface that changes, a start from the weak side, a sound signal in the middle of noise. The athlete works on his base without leaving his movement, in the spirit of the directed constraints approach.

As for frequency, short doses spread over several sessions are better, in our experience, than an isolated block once a week; no study has tested this benchmark on the levels of the pyramid. Over a cycle, the fragile level takes up more room in the preparation period, then shrinks to the warm-up and a constraint slipped into the task as competitions approach. The dose is set by the retest.

The trap would be to take the base out of the session and make it a separate workshop, on an unstable platform or with gaze exercises unrelated to the sport. The athlete then progresses on the workshop, and the transfer to the field remains to be demonstrated.

Test, stimulation, retest: the safeguard for every adjustment

The table gives you hypotheses, and the test, stimulation, retest cycle tells you which ones hold. Choose a test that resembles the observed signal: the movement filmed in situation, strong side versus weak side, fixed gaze then gaze following a target. Apply the stimulation to the level you suspect, then redo the same test within the minute. If nothing moves, change hypothesis rather than increasing the dose.

This immediate retest informs about the day's performance, with the limits recalled by Soderstrom and Bjork. So redo the test a few sessions later, then watch the movement under opposition, where it had given out. A test that progresses under a movement that stayed frozen in situation leaves two leads: the fragile level was elsewhere, or the bridge to the task remains to be built.

In Neuro-Postural Reprogramming, this cycle is what decides: a level enters the session when a retest has pointed to it.

What is established, what remains a coach's reading

The Soderstrom and Bjork review rests on a large body of work. Degeneracy applied to the sports movement remains a theoretical framework, argued by reviews more than measured in the field. Two studies show that fatigue reorganizes technique, sometimes before affecting the result, but they remain small: fourteen players in Royal, a single laboratory throwing task in Forestier and Nougier. They show a mechanism without saying how much it weighs in your sport.

The pyramid was designed for children by practitioners, and the strict hierarchy between its levels has never been demonstrated. Its use in the adult athlete remains a transposition. The cost of compensation, the search order of the table and the place given to short doses are our field hypotheses, which the retest puts to the test at every session.

If you coach young people and a level seems to give out to the point of weighing on schooling or daily life, the assessment goes back to the physician, the occupational therapist or the psychomotor therapist.

Monday, your next session read with the pyramid

Start from the last match. Choose a single movement that gave out late in the game and note in what situation: moving gaze, weak side, contact or noise. The table gives you a level to suspect.

In the warm-up, slip in a short stimulation of that level, followed straight away by the movement in question. During the technical session, add a constraint that calls on it within the task. At the end of the session, when fatigue rises, film the movement again and compare it with the one at the start. A few weeks later, look at it again under opposition.

You may not have found the right level on the first try. You will at least know which one to rule out, which is already better than an instruction repeated louder. To put this work back in context, go back to the five levels of the pyramid.

When technique gives out before the legs, start by questioning the base.

👉 I want to be among the professionals who read the loop upstream.

Frequently asked questions about the learning pyramid in sport

What does the learning pyramid change in physical preparation?

It shifts the gaze. When a movement degrades, it invites the physical trainer to check the levels that support it, from gaze stability to motor planning, before repeating the movement or strengthening the muscles that produce it. The work on these levels is then built into the session, as close as possible to the task, and checked with a retest.

How can an athlete perform with a fragile level?

The nervous system has several ways of reaching the same goal, a property called degeneracy (Edelman and Gally, 2001) and described in the sports movement by Seifert and his colleagues (2016). Talent and training volume install backup roads. The result holds, at the price of an organization that, according to our field hypothesis, resists fatigue less well.

Why does technique degrade with fatigue?

Fatigue forces the system to reorganize the movement. In junior water polo players, Royal and her colleagues (2006) measured a shooting technique down 43% at peak fatigue, while shot accuracy and speed stayed stable. Forestier and Nougier (1998) describe a fatigued arm that loses the summation of speeds and works as a rigid block.

Should you work the lower levels separately, before technique?

It is better to avoid separating them from the task. In children with coordination difficulties, task-oriented approaches produce a much stronger effect than isolated training of the underlying functions (Smits-Engelsman et al., 2013). In the session, a short stimulus on the identified level can open the warm-up, provided the specific movement follows straight away, then a constraint extends it into the task.

Does the Williams and Shellenberger pyramid apply to adult training?

Designed for children in 1991, it has not been validated in the adult athlete, and its use in training remains a transposition. It keeps its value as a reading grid: when a movement gives out under fatigue or novelty, it proposes an order for looking for what supports it, from the gaze to postural security. The retest then decides whether the hypothesis holds.

When should you hand over to a healthcare professional?

As soon as a signal falls outside the framework of training: balance that goes off for no apparent reason, unexplained falls, discomfort that persists, or in a young person a difficulty that weighs on schooling. Refer then to the physician, and for a child to the occupational therapist or the psychomotor therapist. LabO RNP is neither medical nor paramedical, and is a complement to a care pathway, never a replacement for it.

Sources

Taylor K., Trott M. (1991). Pyramid of Learning, diagram reproduced in Williams M.S., Shellenberger S. (1996). How Does Your Engine Run? Albuquerque: TherapyWorks.

Bernstein N.A. (1967). The Co-ordination and Regulation of Movements. Oxford: Pergamon Press.

Edelman G.M., Gally J.A. (2001). Degeneracy and complexity in biological systems. PNAS, 98(24), 13763-13768.

Bartlett R., Wheat J., Robins M. (2007). Is movement variability important for sports biomechanists? Sports Biomechanics, 6(2), 224-243.

Seifert L., Button C., Davids K. (2013). Key properties of expert movement systems in sport: an ecological dynamics perspective. Sports Medicine, 43(3), 167-178.

Seifert L., Komar J., Araújo D., Davids K. (2016). Neurobiological degeneracy: a key property for functional adaptations of perception and action to constraints. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 69, 159-165.

Royal K.A., Farrow D., Mujika I., Halson S.L., Pyne D., Abernethy B. (2006). The effects of fatigue on decision making and shooting skill performance in water polo players. Journal of Sports Sciences, 24(8), 807-815.

Forestier N., Nougier V. (1998). The effects of muscular fatigue on the coordination of a multijoint movement in human. Neuroscience Letters, 252(3), 187-190.

Soderstrom N.C., Bjork R.A. (2015). Learning versus performance: an integrative review. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(2), 176-199.

Smits-Engelsman B.C.M. et al. (2013). Efficacy of interventions to improve motor performance in children with developmental coordination disorder: a combined systematic review and meta-analysis. Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology, 55(3), 229-237.

Pinder R.A., Davids K., Renshaw I., Araújo D. (2011). Representative learning design and functionality of research and practice in sport. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 33(1), 146-155.

By the LabO RNP team