The Transfer Principle
    The Transfer Principle suggests that learning and performing one skill can positive or negative effect the learning process of another.  A positive transfer of training from practice skills to competition is critical for athletic success. This principle should serve as a guide for selecting off-ice training activities for developing on-ice skills. The concept also helps in designing strategies that have a positive impact in competitive situations.

• Select appropriate fitness training activities to build the necessary balance of fitness components necessary for specific sports.

• Select training drills and activities that, collectively, possess common elements with competitive sport conditions.

• Distinguish between what features of skills are being strengthened by certain training activities, and which features are not.

• Train movement concepts and perceptions that apply to more than one skill, event, or sport.

• Emphasize training activities that best develop the qualities that athletes need to excel.

• Most closely match training activities with competition.

• Sport analysis. Consider the overall demands of the sport of figure skating. What does it take to be outstanding? Physical, emotional, and mental demands contribute to being successful. Training should emphasize supporting the most important qualities that skaters at all skill levels should develop.

• Skill analysis. Identify the key skills necessary for success. Perform fitness and agility tests to help focus on the areas where athletes need improvement, and select training activities to develop them.

• Practice vs. competitive conditions. Always consider the differences between practice activities and competitive conditions. Beyond building the fundamentals, devise training activities and conditions that most closely match the emotional intensity that the skater can expect to encounter in test and competitive situations.

• Mechanics. Understand the most efficient movements that underlay the mastery of highly skilled motor performances. Correcting movement deviations and inefficient patterns in practice is essential, even for such basic skills as stroking, skating on edges, and especially in performing jumps.

• Movement qualities. Develop the timing and rhythms of skills can greatly assist the athlete in acquiring the mechanical/motor skills. Training activities that incorporate rhythms into skills and sequences used in competition will speed the development of automatic muscle/nerve memory responses.

• Identify cause and effects. Coaches sometimes develop training activities to correct symptoms of motor skill errors that they observe when athletes compete. Training should focus on correcting the causes of mental as well as physical errors.

• Physical capability. Athletes sometimes have limited capabilities of executing skills due to a lack of strength, power, or other fitness deficiencies or abilities. Coaches who can identify those limitations can better create practice activities and exercises designed to correct or mitigate core problems.

• PDF Socalizing the Knowledge Transfer Problem  A central issue in acquiring knowledge is its appropriate transfer beyond the contexts and contents of first acquisition. In contrast to dominant "common elements" transfer theory, an inrerpretive perspective is developed, according to which "appropriate transfer" is a concept socioculturally rather than objectively defined.
  

• PDF Cognitive Skill Acquisition  Review of research conducted in the past ten years on cognitive skill acquisition. It covers the initial stages of acquiring a single principle or rule, the initial stages of acquiring a collection of interacting pieces of knowledge, and the final stages of acquiring a skill, wherein practice causes increases in speed and accuracy.

• PDF EFF Research Principle: A Contextualized Approach Research on the transfer of learning. teachers starts with real-life contexts and is weaved into all stages of every teaching and learning process. Instruction and assessment are aimed directly at the skills and knowledge adults need to perform tasks they have identified as important and meaningful to them. The focus is on the application rather than on the possession of basic skills and knowledge.

• Specificity of Training  Volume 1(2): January, 1996. SPECIFICITY OF TRAINING. This edition of Coaching Science Abstracts reviews articles concerned with the Principle of Specificity.

• How the Specificity Principle Applies to Sports Training The Specificity Principle applies both to sport fitness training and skill learning, but how to apply it is sometimes misinterpreted.


• PDF  Specificity of training adaptation Specificity of training adaptation: time for a rethink? John A. Hawley. School of Medical Sciences, RMIT University,. Bundoora, Victoria 3083, Australia.

• Specificity | Fitness and Health Nov 28, 2006 ... Specificity states that your training should move from general to highly specific training. It also dictates that in order to improve a particular skill.

• PDF Focusing on Specificity Training  Focusing on Specificity Training ·.Written by NFPT Staff Writer Friday, 03 February 2012 00:00. The personal trainer will encounter athletes of all stripes.