Motor Skills In Football

To discuss motor behavior and skills, a caucasian male, age ten was pulled aside. The child has no known disabilities, but is going to start playing quarterback for one of his little league teams. It is important to keep in mind his age and susceptibility to injury when discussing motor skills in general and possible hindrances to developing those skills and/or prevention techniques to maintain healthy. Because this child wants to play quarterback, it is crucial he understands the proper mechanics in order to throw the football. Many of the motor skills involved with throwing a football are different than daily motor skills, which is an important lesson to teach the child. In order for the motor skills in throwing the football more fine tuned …show more content…
Each of these movements can be broken down into separate components of the actual skill in throwing a football; each are classified differently according to what groups it involves and what is being targeted. The first motor skill is holding the ball; this requires stability and object manipulation. The precision of each movement involves gross motor skills rather than fine motor skills;these gross motor skills are movements that engage your whole body rather than just small movements (Wells). Most motions you make are timed based on your surroundings, throwing a football is self-paced and has its own timer for pulling back, releasing, and following through. There is a natural beginning point (pulling back) and ending point (release and follow through) causing this to be a discrete skill over serial and continuous.
In learning the movements of throwing a football, there are many different ways to assess the motor skill and the development of those skills are through models. In the Gentile's Theory of Motor Learning/Development, motor skills are organized and separated into two dimensions: the environmental context and the function of the actions. In the environmental aspects, they assess the aspects of the background of the …show more content…
It takes a lot of practice to learn how to throw a ball the right way without hurting yourself. The ten year-old boy used a very distributed and variable practice. He learned how to throw using this strategy. He went through many sessions of throwing and taking breaks and throwing again. For example, for two to three weeks, he would go for thirty minutes a session with a fifteen minute break for three hours then later coming back and repeating the action for another two hours. This trains the arm to learn how to throw but keeps refreshing the arm and making it relearn the drills until it becomes natural for the arm to throw. Then when his arm started getting use to the time and throwing action he was performing for those thirty minutes, they would change up the routine by throwing for fifteen minutes with a thirty minute break. They would then keep repeating the action and constantly change up the routine for the boy. The coaches and the parents both also used a imagery and mental practice to help the boy also. They used cameras to record him throw, edited the videos and combined them to the prototypical throwing technique of quarterbacks. They watched in slow motion and talked about how his technique could improve. Then they would go out without a football and step through the steps for learning how to throw a football everyday until he became a better