Why professional athletes need a prolonged period of warm-up and other peculiarities of human motor learning

Abstract

Professional athletes involved in sports that require the execution of fine motor skills must practice for a considerable length of time before competing in an event. Why is such practice necessary? Is it merely to warm-up the muscles, tendons, and ligaments, or does the athlete's sensorimotor network need to be constantly recalibrated? In this article, the authors present a point of view in which the human sensorimotor system is characterized by: (a) a high noise level and (b) a high learning rate at the synaptic level (which, because of the noise, does not equate to a high learning rate at the behavioral level). They argue that many heuristics of human skill learning, including the need for a prolonged period of warm-up in experts, follow from these assumptions.