An introduction to the science of learning, for frisbee throwers
Learn to learn more efficiently
Intro
They say "give someone a fish and you feed them for a day, teach someone to fish and you feed them for a lifetime". But that someone might still have lots of other areas where they lack the knowledge they need to survive—you might need to teach them to build a shelter the next day, and teach them to cook the day after that, and so on.
To make someone totally independent, you have to go a level above teaching them to fish: teach them to learn, and they can figure out anything for themselves. I've been interested in the science of learning for quite a while. I use it in my own life be more efficient in improving my own skills, and I use it as a coach to try to help my players achieve success, sustainably and efficiently.
I've read a number of books that discuss the science of learning, including Range by David Epstein, Ultralearning by Scott Young, How We Learn by Benedict Carey, and The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin. I've done my best to condense some of that knowledge into an essay you can read in much less time than it takes to read 4+ books. That said, it's still a bit longer than many of my articles. Feel free to skip around and/or use this as a resource you come back to only when needed.
In this essay I'll apply these concepts to learning to throw a disc, but these ideas are relevant to any learning project in your life.
Start with research
In Ultralearning, Scott Young recommends starting a learning project by researching and planning out how you'll learn what you want to learn:
A good rule of thumb is that you should invest approximately 10 percent of your total expected learning time into research prior to starting. If you expect to spend six months learning, roughly four hours per week, that would be equal to roughly one hundred hours, which suggests that you should spend about ten hours, or two weeks, doing your research. This percentage will decrease a little bit as your project scales up, so if you plan to do five hundred or a thousand hours of learning, I don’t think it necessarily demands fifty or a hundred hours of research, but maybe closer to 5 percent of your time.
This will help you avoid learning in a suboptimal way, and save significantly on practice time by learning (for disc throwers) good throwing form from the beginning. For throwing a disc, there's lots of resources online, whether on YouTube (Rowan McDonnell for example) or blogs like mine. I think we're in a really unique moment in history, where you can learn just about anything for free. Just about any book that's ever been written can be downloaded from the internet. People who are the world's best at their craft make free YouTube videos explaining what they do. Take advantage of that!
I have slightly mixed feelings about "start with research", as a coach who teaches new players. For new players who aren't sure whether they care about frisbee or not, it's important (as a coach) to make sure they're having fun. So I generally encourage my new players to just play, have fun, and throw the disc in the way that feels right to them.
But for people who have decided for themselves that they'd like to be good at throwing frisbees, and are willing to devote the time and frustration required to get good, I highly recommend doing some research before jumping in to practicing all the time.
Learn for yourself
One of the most powerful forces in learning is when people choose for themselves what they learn. Research has shown that people who are "intrinsically motivated"—who have chosen a task or a goal for themselves—will outperform people who have tasks or goals imposed on them. I discuss this in my book review of Alfie Kohn's Punished by Rewards, and I'll add a few quick thoughts here.
Regarding the scientific evidence behind the importance of intrinsic motivation, Kohn says:
If our goal is quality, or a lasting commitment to a value or behavior, no artificial incentive can match the power of intrinsic motivation...
As one group of researchers summed up the available evidence, "Intrinsically motivated people...pursue optimal challenges, display greater innovativeness, and tend to perform better under challenging conditions."
As frisbee players, this means that we should choose for ourselves what skills we want to build. If we're working on something that we truly believe is important to us, we'll be more motivated than if goals are imposed on us by someone else. And as coaches, we should ask our players to choose for themselves which skills they want to build.
Repetition without repetition
One of the most important lessons from the science of learning is that we shouldn't do the same thing over and over again. In frisbee, we shouldn't practice by throwing the same throw 100 times in a row.
This is a lesson you may already be aware of if you've read other frisbee content online. For example, in this Ultiworld article, Melissa Witmer says:
One of the most vigorously-researched [sic?] findings in motor skills research is the superiority of randomized practice over blocked practice.
"Blocked practice" is the name researchers use for doing exactly the same thing over and over again. "Randomized practice", "interleaving", or "repetition without repetition" are some names researchers use to describe switching it up during practice.
In this Understanding Ultimate article, Benji suggests using blocked practice when you're a true beginner. But once you start to have some experience with throwing, he also suggests switching to a 'repetition without repetition' practice style. (He doesn't actually present any scientific evidence that blocked practice is better for true beginners, so I'm not sure whether that advice is actually correct.)
In the book Range, David Epstein shares some of the relevant research:
Interleaving is a desirable difficulty that frequently holds for both physical and mental skills. A simple motor-skill example is an experiment in which piano students were asked to learn to execute, in one-fifth of a second, a particular left-hand jump across fifteen keys. They were allowed 190 practice attempts. Some used all of those practicing the fifteen-key jump, while others switched between eight-, twelve-, fifteen-, and twenty-two-key jumps. When the piano students were invited back for a test, those who underwent the mixed practice were faster and more accurate at the fifteen-key jump than the students who had only practiced that exact jump.
When it comes to throwing a frisbee, there's two reasons to practice many different throws. First, and obviously, we need to practice different throws because we'll need many different throws in a real game. But perhaps just as importantly, practicing many different throws is what our body needs to calibrate our "most basic" throw to be as accurate as possible.
A similar study to the one above involved throwing beanbags at a target — the group that practiced throwing from two and four feet away were better than a group that practiced throwing from three feet away, even though the final test measured throwing the beanbag from three feet away! (See How We Learn, chapter 8)
So even if your only goal is to refine your straight flat forehand, practicing flat, outside-in, and inside-out forehands at all different angles will actually get you there more quickly than only practicing the thing you care about.
Aside from continually changing the shape and distance of my throws in practice, a final way I like to add "repetition without repetition" is to aim for a specific point on my throwing partners body, and to constantly change that point. For example, I'll throw one throw to their left shoulder, one to their right shoulder, and one aimed at their belly button. This adds just a little bit more randomness to my basic throwing practice.
Learning can feel like a struggle
There's one aspect of the interleaving vs blocked practice studies that I find so interesting I'm making a separate section for it. Researchers consistently find that, even though interleaving practice is more effective than doing the same thing over and over, it often feels like blocked practice is working better.
There's this "illusion of learning", where we feel like we've learned something when we practice it over and over. But we're really just finding a groove, so to speak, and we're liable to have lost it the next time we try to use our new skill. What our body needs for long-term learning is to calibrate to a variety of situations, not to find the perfect groove:
In a study using college math problems, students who learned in blocks—all examples of a particular type of problem at once—performed a lot worse come test time than students who studied the exact same problems but all mixed up. The blocked-practice students learned procedures for each type of problem through repetition. The mixed-practice students learned how to differentiate types of problems.
The same effect has appeared among learners studying everything from butterfly species identification to psychological-disorder diagnosis. In research on naval air defense simulations, individuals who engaged in highly mixed practice performed worse than blocked practicers during training, when they had to respond to potential threat scenarios that became familiar over the course of the training. At test time, everyone faced completely new scenarios, and the mixed-practice group destroyed the blocked-practice group.
And yet interleaving tends to fool learners about their own progress. In one of Kornell and Bjork’s interleaving studies, 80 percent of students were sure they had learned better with blocked than mixed practice, whereas 80 percent performed in a manner that proved the opposite. The feeling of learning, it turns out, is based on before-your-eyes progress, while deep learning is not. [emphasis added by me —LT]
So if you feel a little frustrated in the process of learning, or feel like you're not progressing as fast as you potentially could, you shouldn't necessarily trust those feelings. In fact, what you should be the most suspicious of is when things are going smoothly. If you're not frustrated at all, you need to really consider whether you're actually learning, or just finding a temporary groove.
Transfer is imperfect
When we practice doing a thing, we can get better at doing that thing. I mean, we get good at doing exactly that thing. If we practice throwing a frisbee back and forth with a stationary partner and no defender, we get better at...throwing frisbees to stationary, undefended partners. We don't necessarily get better at throwing frisbees in real game situations.
Usually there will be some amount of imperfect transfer between similar skills in different contexts. Practicing throwing outside of a game context isn't exactly the same as practicing throwing in a game context, but it's usually similar enough that we'll notice some skill transfer.
When it comes to education in general, transfer is a BIG problem. In Ultralearning, Scott Young says:
...transfer really embodies something we expect of almost all learning efforts—that we’ll be able to use something we study in one situation and apply it to a new situation. Anything less than this is hard to describe as learning at all.
Unfortunately, transfer is also something that, despite more than a century of intense work and research, has largely failed to occur in formal education. The psychologist Robert Haskell has said in his excellent coverage of the vast literature on transfer in learning, “Despite the importance of transfer of learning, research findings over the past nine decades clearly show that as individuals, and as educational institutions, we have failed to achieve transfer of learning on any significant level.” He later added, “Without exaggeration, it’s an education scandal.”
I want to repeat a bit of that for emphasis: at least in education, it's an open question whether we know how to reliably achieve any transfer at all. In sports (throwing a disc, shooting a ball) it seems obvious to me that there's some transfer. Perhaps this is because "throwing a disc with no defender" and "throwing a disc in a real game" are more closely related skills than "watching a PowerPoint" and "doing engineering work" (for example) are.
By far the best way of getting good at something is to do exactly that thing as much as possible. If you want to be good at throwing a frisbee in a game of ultimate, play games of ultimate where you throw as many passes as possible. I'd be willing to guess that every pass in a real game is worth 5 to 25 practice passes (in other words, throwing practice transfers at about 4% to 20%).
But, doing exactly the thing can be a challenge. In sports, we often want to keep building our skills without getting our body completely worn out from all the running around we do in real games. So the next best way to practice is to make our practice situations as game-like as possible. For a long time, coaches have said "practice how you play". What we know about the science of skill transfer proves this saying true.
Here's a few ways to make your throwing practice more game-like:
Use repetition without repetition—one reason switching things up in practice (described above) is so effective is that we never throw the same pass ten times in a row in a real game.
Pay attention to exactly what throws you use in a game, and then practice those. To give a few examples:
a (right-handed) backhand dump throw often starts with the thrower looking upfield, and then pivoting and throwing to a point that was originally behind them and to the left. But how often do we see people actually imitating this in their two-person throwing practice? Instead they often are looking at their target the entire time when throwing practice backhands.
I often see players who will step out in games to throw around the mark defender, but when practicing only take small steps and throw passes close to their body.
There are infinite ways to make your throwing practice more game like. Never stop thinking of ways to include in practice the movement, chaos, and quick decision making necessary in real games.
Give yourself feedback
Feedback is another vital part of a learning journey. When we engage in practice, we have to think about ways we could be better, then attempt to actually do those things. That's the learning feedback loop—trying to do something, thinking about how well we did (and/or getting input from others), and then trying again with those thoughts in mind. Feedback can come in a number of different forms: asking someone else for input, videotaping ourselves so we can see what our throws look like from another angle, or just thinking about our throws and continually making small adjustments as we throw them.
Scott Young says:
Feedback features prominently in the research on deliberate practice, a scientific theory of the acquisition of expertise initiated by K. Anders Ericsson and other psychologists. In his studies, Ericsson has found that the ability to gain immediate feedback on one’s performance is an essential ingredient in reaching expert levels of performance. No feedback, and the result is often stagnation—long periods of time when you continue to use a skill but don’t get any better at it.
He also points out that feedback works best when we have the appropriate mindset, and we engage with the right type of feedback.
If feedback tells you what you’re doing wrong or how to fix it, it can be a potent tool. But feedback often backfires when it is aimed at a person’s ego. Praise, a common type of feedback that teachers often use (and students enjoy), is usually harmful to further learning. When feedback steers into evaluations of you as an individual (e.g., “You’re so smart!” or “You’re lazy”), it usually has a negative impact on learning...The researchers note that who is giving the feedback can matter, as feedback coming from a peer or teacher has important social dynamics beyond mere information on how to improve one’s abilities.
So, learn to be comfortable with your imperfections (perhaps easier said than done). If we were already perfect we wouldn't need to be out here learning! And if you're getting feedback from outside sources, find people you trust, and who you can rely on to give effective feedback that speaks to technique and not personal attributes.
Above, I wondered why it seems so obvious to me that there's transfer in throwing practice when researchers have so much trouble finding transfer in education. Perhaps feedback is one answer to that question: every time we throw a disc to someone, there's immediate feedback. Did we complete the pass, or not? If we threw it over their head, we know to aim lower next time. If it didn't go far enough, we can try to throw it further next time.
In Range, David Epstein differentiates between "kind" learning environments, where patterns are common and feedback is helpful, from "wicked" environments, that are so chaotic that feedback may be inaccurate or come to late for us to connect the effect and the cause. He uses sports as an example of a relatively "kind" environment:
Drive a golf ball, and it either goes too far or not far enough; it slices, hooks, or flies straight. The player observes what happened, attempts to correct the error, tries again, and repeats for years.
Frisbee isn't a "100% kind" environment—in a real game, there is chaos and randomness and other people who can't always be correctly accounted for. But the disc's flight follows the rules of physics, and it's kind enough that searching out feedback is an effective tool.
More experienced throwers will need to care about more than whether their practice throw was a completed pass or not if they want to continue improving. Every throw you throw in practice should be a tiny opportunity to grade yourself, and then adjust—did it have the speed, the shape, the lack of wobble that you wanted it to have? Did it hit exactly the spot on your target's body that you wanted it to hit? Feedback is an incredibly powerful tool, and we'll get much more out of our throwing practice when we're constantly using it.
One implication of the importance of feedback is that practice happens in your mind. Practicing throwing is not just something you do with your body. The things you're thinking about as you practice are an important part of the practice experience. Two people throwing with each other could be engaging in totally different levels of practice depending on the way each person is approaching it mentally.
Rest and de-stress
Until now I've focused on the, uh, practicing part of practice. But taking breaks and resting is an important part of the growth process as well. Here's Brad Stulberg in Peak Performance:
The key...is balancing the right amount of stress with the right amount of rest. Stress + rest = growth. This equation holds true regardless of what it is that you are trying to grow.
I really liked the book Good to Go by Christie Aschwanden, which goes into detail on the benefits of sleep and relaxation for recovering and growing from physical challenges. Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker focuses on the benefits of sleep on our mental performance:
Investigations in the early 2000s arrived at a similar conclusion [on the importance of sleep...]. Having learned a list of facts before bed, participants were allowed to sleep a full eight hours, recorded with electrodes placed on the head. The next morning, participants performed a memory test. When researchers correlated the intervening sleep stages with the number of facts retained the following morning, deep NREM sleep carried the vote: the more deep NREM sleep, the more information an individual remembered the next day. Indeed, if you were a participant in such a study, and the only information I had was the amount of deep NREM sleep you had obtained that night, I could predict with high accuracy how much you would remember in the upcoming memory test upon awakening, even before you took it. That’s how deterministic the link between sleep and memory consolidation can be.
Throwing skills are both mental and physical, and so I have no doubt that good sleep helps us recover physically and lets our brain consolidate the "muscle memory" that leads to our throws being better and feel more natural.
A lot of the research on taking breaks has focused on the way it helps us find solutions to problems we've been stuck on. Peak Performance discusses this study on problem solving:
In a study cleverly titled Give Your Ideas Some Legs: The Positive Effect of Walking on Creative Thinking, researchers from Stanford University examined the effects of a short walking break. They instructed subjects to take short walking breaks outdoors, indoors, or not at all. Following their walk, they assessed participants’ creativity. They asked them to generate as many nontraditional uses as possible for common items. For example, a tire could be used as a floatation device, as a basketball hoop, or as a swing. (This is called a Guilford’s Alternate Uses Test and is a commonly used method for measuring creativity.) Those who took as brief as a 6-minute walk outdoors increased creativity by more than 60 percent versus those who had remained seated at their desks.
Although throwing a disc isn't an "insight-heavy" task, I've noticed that taking breaks can definitely help me personally. Sometimes a particular throw will feel better after a couple of days of no practice than it did while practicing it every day for weeks. There are a few possible reasons for this. Perhaps a break helps clear my mind when I'm feeling frustrated with a throw that's not going well. Or perhaps it just takes some time for the muscle memory to really sink in after practicing a new skill.
And sometimes, an insight is exactly what's needed. Sometimes we explicitly realize—oh, I wasn't flicking my wrist enough, or: oh, I've accidentally changed my grip slightly from the way I used to grip the disc. Taking a break can help give us that mental space we need to figure out what could be better with our throws.
So for a number of reasons, resting and taking breaks is an important part of the process. If you're really dedicated, and don't want to completely take a break from throwing, at least work on some completely different throws for a few days, before coming back to the original throw you were struggling with.
A few odds and ends
Here's a couple other lessons from learning science that are important but maybe don't apply as clearly to disc throwing:
Spaced repetition and the forgetting curve: There's a whole science behind how quickly we forget things. If you need to learn and remember things (like foreign language vocabulary), I highly recommend spaced repetition software like Anki. It uses the science of forgetting to help us review things before we forget them, without needing to over-study.
It isn't clear to me that this really applies to throwing skills, besides in the general sense that the more experience we have with a particular throw, the longer we can forego practice without our skills declining drastically.Testing yourself is more powerful than reviewing: Studies have shown that testing yourself (i.e. trying to remember things without the aid of your notes) is a more powerful study technique than reviewing (i.e., re-reading the textbook or re-reading your notes). Here's a quote from Ultralearning:
In each group, students were asked to predict their score on the upcoming test. Those who did repeated reviewing predicted that they’d score the best, followed by the single-study and concept-mapping groups. Those who practiced free recall (trying to remember as much as they could without looking in the book) predicted the worst for their final performance.
The actual results, however, weren’t even close. Testing yourself—trying to retrieve information without looking at the text—clearly outperformed all other conditions.
It's not clear to me that there's any real way to apply this to frisbee, besides the advice I've already discussed above that putting yourself in chaotic, challenging real-game situations is more effective than an easy throwing practice.
10,000 Hours. Perhaps the first book I ever read about practicing things was Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. The book popularized the idea that people can become experts with 10,000 hours (more or less) of deliberate practice. That number isn't exactly scientific, but it's definitely influenced me over the years. If we want to get amazingly good, we'll need to practice something like three hours per day...every day for ten years!
In conclusion
Understanding what we know about the science of how people learn can help us do everything in our lives more efficiently—throwing frisbees included. When designing your own learning experience, keep these factors in mind:
Research and determine an optimal learning plan before you invest too much practice time
Find your intrinsic motivation. Learn things that you truly care about learning and have chosen for yourself.
Switch things up during practice to have "repetition without repetition".
Learning can (perhaps even should) feel like a struggle.
Skill transfer won't be perfect. Do the thing you care about as much as possible, and when you can't, make your drills as 'realistic' as possible
Always find ways to give yourself feedback.
Rest and take breaks to let your body and mind recover and consolidate your learning