Feedback and Motor Learning in Sports: The Pele Example

Introduction: Pelé and the Study of Motor Learning

When Rio de Janeiro won its bid to host the 2016 Olympic Games, the city had one world-famous representative on its Olympic committee who may have been more recognizable globally than President Barack Obama. This individual may not be a household name in America, but he is most famous for scoring two goals in the 1958 World Cup championship when he was only 17 years old. That achievement made him the youngest player ever to compete in those renowned championships. Over the course of his distinguished career, the majority of the football world would consider him to be the greatest soccer player of all time. Brazil actually declared this individual a national treasure in order to prevent other countries from luring him away. His name is Edson Arantes do Nascimento — though you may know him simply as Pelé.

So why would this individual be relevant in a paper dedicated to the application of feedback in motor learning as it applies to sports? The answer is that over the course of his career, Pelé successfully applied and translated the concepts of augmented extrinsic feedback and intrinsic sensory information feedback to his goal of playing soccer better than anyone else ever had. This made him, in effect, the Michael Jordan of soccer.

Motor Learning: Movement as a Foundation for Skill

Humans use movement to learn about the world. Movement allows us to function, grow, mature, and maintain healthy bodies. Most people take this ability to move for granted, and in most cases they are right to do so. However, to increase specific skills, individuals such as world-class athletes must learn to move in far more precise ways than the average person, which means they move to learn and then learn new applications of those original movements.

The reason Pelé's two goals in 1958 were so spectacular was that he was still a child competing against grown men. Children are more likely to explore their immediate world through movement and then form mental and physical links between an action and the reality they just experienced through that movement. There are well-established scientific studies and distinct principles that govern motor learning. For sports, several areas are particularly relevant:

Pelé was somehow able to incorporate these principles into his own ability to play what he called "the beautiful game." In other words, Pelé and other athletes who understand and apply the underlying philosophies of a child's motor skill acquisition — such as building with blocks, developing skills for sports or leisure, writing, drawing, or simply moving through their world — will be better equipped to play soccer, basketball, or any other sport. Pelé played his game on a rectangular field with goals at either end, interacting with two teams of eleven players all trying to kick a single ball into an opposing goal.

The skills required to succeed at soccer involve exceptional precision in movement: running, kicking, heading the ball, and thinking clearly at the exact right moment of a game. For instance, while any body part except the arms and hands may be used to play soccer, children who play for the first time often instinctively reach out to grab the ball with their hands — a natural motor reflex — even though only the goalkeeper may legally handle the ball.

Feedback: Regulating Athletic Performance

Feedback is a major component of the motor learning process. Feedback is the mechanism by which humans regulate themselves by monitoring their own output — the body feeds back a portion of its output data to itself. A familiar example of this process is the autopilot system used in commercial aircraft. With the exception of the well-publicized incident in which two pilots overshot their destination in Minnesota, autopilot systems provide a computer that flies a plane through constant feedback about speed, altitude, direction, and other critical variables.

Every time the plane veers slightly off course, the computer receives that information and makes minor directional adjustments to keep the aircraft on the most efficient path to its destination. Feedback similarly controls machines such as heaters, air conditioners, and microwave ovens. For a highly tuned athlete like Pelé, feedback was used by the brain to control muscles and joints, regulate blood flow and oxygen intake, and manage all other voluntary and involuntary bodily functions, allowing him to move more efficiently than any other soccer player. Externally, Pelé also absorbed and applied millions of bits of feedback data from coaches, fans, and his own natural instincts, producing the results the game demanded. His movements were modulated, controlled, and refined through the continuous process of feedback.

Conclusion

This paper discussed the application of feedback and the acquisition of new athletic skills through motor learning as it applies to sports. There is no better example of motor skill mastery in the world of soccer than Pelé. In 1977, Pelé played his final professional game — an exhibition match between the New York Cosmos of the United States and the world-champion Brazilian Santos. Having played for both clubs during his career, he played the first half with the Cosmos and the second half with Santos. That match marked the end of a great soccer career. It was also a final opportunity to witness how this extraordinary athlete applied and translated the concepts of augmented extrinsic feedback and intrinsic sensory information feedback to the objective of playing soccer better than anyone else in the world.

References

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