Question: How do we learn skills?

Stuart Mourton answered on 13 Jun 2011:

We go through a number of processes and stages. We’ll take a tennis serve as an example.
Firstly you have to start by making a go at performing the movement. You will probably be pretty bad to start with and the result won’t be very accurate. You may swing and miss the ball completely, or make contact but hit it miles wide of the target. What you are doing is writing a programme for your brain to run each time you want to perform this skill. You will then start to make adjustments to this programme. You will change how high you need to throw the ball, the speed your racquet comes through the ball, and the position of your body. All these things will be altered, sometimes to a big degree, sometimes only a small amount. The more and more you practice the better your serve becomes and the stronger and stronger your programme in your brain becomes. After lots and lots of practice, you can run this programme without having to even think about it.
This is the same process for every single skill we learn, from walking as babies, to riding a bike as kids, to learning to drive as adults. All these movement patterns started off very awkward and slowly improved as our programmes became better developed. You can now walk around without even thinking about it, but as babies we had to keep our balance by holding on to things and constantly adjust our programme till we got it right!
Hope that answers your question ok?!