Discussion

This study seeks to analyse control and coordination of free throw shooting in basketball by trying to demonstrate the relationship between the structural and functional composition of the individual and the movement performance. Notably, muscles and action are imperative for this type of coordination and control. How muscles relate with regards to movement outcome, enhancing /lagging joint and associated structures is essential. Notably, there is no significant difference between the success rate of the shot and the joint angle where the ball is being shot for the different age groups. However, the joint’s peak angular velocity among the different development stages is different. The ankle, knee and hip joints show higher angular velocity among people in the adolescent and adulthood stage while low in infants, early childhood and older adolescents. Additionally, the variable included in this experiment included those that affect ball trajectory, the different phases of the free throw and factors that influence free throw shooting such as stance and balance.

Motor development is regarded as the process in which individuals acquire motor skills as they grow and gain experience. It also entails a change in movement behaviour especially when shoot the free throws. Motor development is regarded as a sequential, continuous and age-determined process (Haywood & Getchell, 2018). This is the reason as to why when a person grows, he able to make free throws with ease as opposed to when he was a child. Motor development depends on physical growth, maturation and the aging process (Gagen & Getchell, 2018). Notably, the body increases in size and mass, it qualitatively advances its biological makeup and eventually growth through the aging process. The result of the estimate of uncertainties (CE/VE) shows that there was a moderate correlation between free-throw success and constraints, rate limiters and rate controllers used by children in the stages of infancy, early childhood and later childhood. Conversely, there a high correlation between free-throw success and constraints, rate limiters and rate controllers used by people in the adolescence, adulthood, and older adulthood.

Constraints affect how motor skills develop. With regards to free throws, the limit specific movement and the encouragement of certain movements are also determined.  With regards to the Newell’s model of constraints, there for categories of constraints namely individual constraints and functional constraints, environmental constraints and task constraints (Enders, 2015).  Individual constraints are based on the person’s physiological and morphological structure of the body such as weight, muscle mass, and height. This also includes the nervous and cardiovascular systems. The functional constraints are related to behavioural functions such as the level of motivation, attention, and feelings (Eberle, Peters & Gura, 2017).

Conversely, the environmental constraints are those that affect how motor skills develop and are outside of the body. This includes factors such as gravity, surfaces, cultural norms.  For example, gender typing refers to the socially determined masculine and feminine characteristics.  Similarly, the task constraints are found outside the body and are explicitly related to the goal and skills at hand (Dunne, 2016). The rules guiding the task and the available equipment plays a significant role.

A rate limiter is a constraint that suppresses the emergence of motor skills.  For example, a four-year-old who is attempting to shoot a free throw on an 8-foot goal but he lacks the muscular strength to do so. Accordingly, the muscular system would be regarded as a rate limiter. Notably, the body has dynamic systems such as skeletal, hormonal and muscular that define the person but also acts as a rate limiter (Deckers, 2018). Until the rate limiter is outgrown, it when the individual can change or emerge. It is imperative to interact with the performer’s environment and the tasks required to determine the rate limiter, for there are some dynamic systems that may develop slowly in the young or even degraded faster among adults.  Therefore, the slow development process of body systems is known as rate limiters. They are individual systems or constraints that tend to hold back the development of a motor skill especially for somebody the process of learning how to shoot free throws (Correia et al., 2019).  Examples of rate limiting constraints are systems that prevent the growth and development such as muscle, skeletal and neurological. This is more prevalent as people age, and the body starts to break down and develop arthritis. This tends to affect the rate of physical activity among older adults and leads to a loss of muscle mass. Notably, older adults tend to suffer from such health problems caused by aging and limited the ability to control their movement during free-throw shooting (Roettger et al., 2015).

Based on the Perception-Action concept, there are functions that the environment can provide that promote the development of motor behaviour. This function is termed as affordance. Affordance is also known as rate controllers as they help to create opportunities either through places or events within the environment that stimulate motor development (Renshaw et al., 2015). They allow the body to scale up. For example, if the child is practicing free throws and the rim is too high, the height can be reduced so that he can be able to shoot free throws effectively.

References

Correia, V., Carvalho, J., Araújo, D., Pereira, E., & Davids, K. (2019). Principles of nonlinear pedagogy in sports practice. Physical education and sport pedagogy, 24(2), 117-132.

Deckers, L. (2018). Motivation: Biological, psychological, and environmental. Routledge.

Dunne S. G. (2016). Neural and Hormonal Systems Underlying Human Reward-Seeking Behavior (Doctoral dissertation, California Institute of Technology).

Eberle, H., Peters, H. W., & Gura, N. (2017). U.S. Patent No. 9,742,679. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Enders, H. (2015). Corticomuscular Contributions to the Control of Rhythmic Movement in Humans (Doctoral dissertation, University of Calgary).

Gagen, L. M., & Getchell, N. (2018). Viewing Children’s Movement Through an Ecological Lens: Using the Interaction of Constraints to Design Positive Movement Experiences. In Physical Activity and Health Promotion in the Early Years (pp. 57-74). Springer, Cham.

Haywood, K. M., & Getchell, N. (2018). Life span motor development. Human Kinetics.

Nigg, J. T. (2017). Annual Research Review: On the relations among self‐regulation, self‐control, executive functioning, effortful control, cognitive control, impulsivity, risktaking, and inhibition for developmental psychopathology. Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, 58(4), 361-383.

Renshaw, I., Chow, J. Y., Davids, K., & Button, C. (2015). Nonlinear pedagogy in skill acquisition: An introduction.

Roettger, T. D., Belkhayat, M., Nordby, C. J., Maurio, J. M., & Patalon, W. (2015). U.S. Patent No. 9,026,325. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.