What are specific sports skills?

Simply put, it is a set of abilities that are deeply bound to a specific sport and can be used stably or even flexibly in the corresponding sports scene. It is not a scattered individual action, nor is it a general physical fitness. It is an "exclusive ability package" specially adapted to a certain sport.

I have been training youth football for almost 6 years. I often encounter parents asking, "If my child can tip 100 balls, does that mean he has mastered football-specific skills?" ”, to be honest, it really doesn’t count. No matter how familiar you are with a single action, it’s all useless if you can’t use it in a confrontation scene. The real special skills are that when someone comes up to press you closely during the game, you can still stop the ball firmly within your comfortable control range, you can find the space of your teammates by scanning the field and send the ball accurately, you can stay in position when defending and not be easily passed by the opponent, and you can even maintain your mentality and not kick blindly when you are two goals behind. All these together are called qualified football special skills.

Speaking of which, the definition of this concept is really different between the academic world and us front-line practitioners. Scholars who do sports research are more inclined to break it down into several dimensions: special skills, special tactics, special psychological quality, and special physical fitness. Each of them has clear quantitative assessment standards. For example, the special physical fitness of basketball needs to measure vertical jump height and restricted return running speed, and special skills need to test the fixed-point shooting percentage under confrontation.； But our first-line training is actually more pragmatic. No matter how good your individual test data is, if you can't perform well in a real game, it means that your specific skills are not fully developed.

I worked as an assistant coach at a friend's badminton training camp before. There was a kid who could hit the ball at a fixed speed of 180 kilometers per hour. As soon as he played a game, he was mobilized by the small ball in front of the net and ran all over the court. He couldn't find any chance to kill the ball. It was a typical single action to pass the test but the special skills were not developed. To put it bluntly, the core of special skills is "adaptation to event scenarios". If you are training for marathon, even if you memorize the essentials of swinging arms and raising legs by heart, if you lose speed in the second half of the marathon and even walk and run, you can't talk about passing the special skills. ； For those who practice open water swimming, if their movements become deformed when encountering waves, and they become so panicked that they cannot find their direction, then they can at best be considered swimming pool masters, but not mastered special skills in open water.

Nowadays, many schools promote "let students master 1-2 specialized sports skills". In fact, the standards are not that high. They do not want all children to take a professional route, but they must be proficient in using this program for daily exercise, participate in small competitions among peers, and really find fun in this sport. In fact, it is considered to have met the standard.