In this episode I welcome back Professor Nicola Hodges. This time Nikki is joined by Dr Keith Lohse.

Nikki is a Professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver in the School of Kinesiology. She runs the Motor Skills Laboratory at UBC where she studies the mechanisms of motor skill learning. Her research focuses on processes involved in watching, learning and predicting from others, and how practice should be best structured to bring about long-term enhancement of motor skills and high-level performance. She has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles and chapters and has consulted at a number of leading sporting organisations and governing bodies.

Keith is Associate Professor of Physical Therapy and Neurology at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis. He received his PhD in cognitive psychology from the University of Colorado, before undertaking post doctoral studies in Nikki’s lab at UBC. Keith focuses on measurement, design, and analysis as they pertain to rehabilitation science and clinical practice. With rehabilitation being a complex, dynamic process with many interacting factors at physiological, psychological, and sociological levels, Keith specialises in analytical and predictive modelling techniques to help disentangle these problems and mechanistically explore the rehabilitation process.

In this episode, we discuss a paper Nikki and Keith have co-authored titled: “An extended challenge-based framework for practice design in sports coaching” found here https://www.researchgate.net/publication/357785323_An_extended_challenge-based_framework_for_practice_design_in_sports_coaching which builds on the original challenge-point work published 20 years ago. Specifically, they emphasise the importance of the challenge-point framework as a model of motor learning, and expand this framework to apply to sports coaching (giving practical suggestions for coaches to use in their practice).