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Video Modeling

The human brain is truly fascinating! I am blown away by the results that I have obtained with my athlete’s this week as I have implemented the video modeling procedure recommended by Boyer et. al (2009). This article found that there were mean increases from the baseline of gymnast’s skills of 53% after the video modeling procedure.

They used the following method:

1 – Video the skill

2 – The athlete views the expert and is asked to “match their performance with the expert” (on the left of the screen)

3 – The athlete views their own performance (on the right screen)

4 – The gymnast news the clips side by side with freeze-framed clips at five different spots.

5 – The athlete views the expert again at normal speed.

6 – The athlete watches themselves again at normal speed.

7 – The athlete attempts the skill two more times.

I used this with my athlete’s and the results were generally remarkable. What I discovered was that you have to make sure that you have the expert performing in the same direction as your video of the athlete. In horses this is called left rein (anti-clockwise) and right rein (clockwise). 

Another interesting observation was that if you do the video modeling in canter left – the athlete can easily copy the expert,  however, they do not seem to be able to transfer it to the right.

Eventually I would like to have a catalogue of different body types of expert riders. Often I noticed that the average rider does not relate to the footage of a rider with a very different body type to them.

This activity really highlighted to me the power of the visual image and how sometimes the fewer words the better! 

One thing I will explore is the results obtained from having the expert footage on the left, rather than the right (as I have done).

Reference

Boyer E, Miltenberger, R, Batsche C, Fogel V (2009) Video Modeling by Experts with Video Feedback to Enhance Gymnastics Skills Journal of Applied Behaviour Analysis p855-60.