skills acquisition – Coach Hansen

Many still believe that “perfecting” the same movement through endless drill repetitions will help athletes replicate these skills under competitive pressure. This often backfires because competition is anything but predictable. Athletes face constantly changing variables—opponents’ strategies, weather, playing surfaces, and their own fluctuating mental and physical states. Therefore, when the game doesn’t match what they’ve rehearsed, they’re often unprepared to adapt since their training has not equipped them to handle such variability.

It may seem counterintuitive, but the key to achieving consistent performance in sports lies in embracing inconsistency during practice. However, the idea of training with variability often faces resistance, as many argue that it undermines the development of “muscle memory”, leads to poor fundamentals, and risks creating inconsistency in skill execution (especially for closed-skill dominant sports such as bowling, wushu and golf).