Inter-Trial Rest Interval Affects Learning Throwing Skills among Adolescents

Abstract

Newly acquired motor skills can be critically driven by different rest periods during practice. Specifically, in the initial stages of motor skill acquisition, the interval between individual trials plays a pivotal role in facilitating effective motor performance, such as in the case of throwing. The objective of this research was to determine the optimal inter-trial rest period promoting efficient motor performance, focusing on two specific motor task actions. In a randomized counterbalanced cross-over research design 169 high-school students aged 14 were studied (M = 150; F = 19). In one block, participants performed 10 basketball free throws with a short rest interval (< 5 s) and 10 other throws with a long rest interval (∼50–60 s). In a second block, they threw a regular size tennis ball into a 1-m diameter circle on the floor at 6.75 m, again throwing 10 times with a short inter-trial rest interval and 10 times with a long inter-trial rest interval. The order of the rest intervals within each block was randomized and counterbalanced. With a repeated measures two-way analysis of variance, greater accuracy seemed to be associated with short intra-set rest intervals as there were significant main effects of both conditions (F1,167 = 368.0, p < 0.001, η2 p = 0.271) and resting time (F1,167 = 18.6, p < 0.001, η2 p = 0.192) and no significant interaction “condition by time”. Fast practice was efficient independently of the complexity of the throwing task, suggesting robust support for schema theory.