Are the gifted athletes simply gifted planners?

I was doing a little research on the brain, and I ran across a really interesting section from "Principles of Neural Science" by Kandel et al. In chapter 33, the authors state:

The nervous system deconstructs complex actions into elemental movements that have highly stereotyped spatial and temporal characteristics. For example, a seeming continous motion of drawing a figure eight actually consists of discrete movement segments that are constant in duration, regardless of their size. These simple spatiotemoporal elements of movement are called MOVEMENT PRIMITIVES or MOVEMENT SCHEMAS. 

Well, that is interesting to me. Basically, they are saying that complex movements are just combinations of simple and basic movements that are constructed for function in the brain and expressed in the body. Okay, well, that wasn't enough so I went on to do a little more research and found interesting information at the University of Southern California's Computational Learning and Motor Control lab. They state that:

Movement coordination requires some form of planning: every degree-of-freedom (DOF) needs to be supplied with appropriate motor commands at every moment in time. The commands must be chosen such that they accomplish the desired task, but also such that they do not violate the abilities of the movement system. Due to the numerous DOFs in complex movement systems and the almost infinite number of possibilities to use the DOFs over time, there exist actually an infinite number of possible movement plans for any given task.This redundancy is advantageous as it allows a movement system to avoid situations where, for instance, the range of motion of DOFs is saturated, or where obstacles need to be circumvented to reach a goal. But, from a learning point of view, it also makes it quite complicated to find good movement plans since the state spaces spanned by all possible plans it extremely large. What is needed to make learning tractable in such high dimensional systems is some form of additional constraints, constraints that reduce the state spaces in a reasonable way without eliminating good solutions.

I posted this on my Facebook page and my good friend and colleague, Andrea W, wrote: So maybe what makes the gifted athletes so gifted is less the ability to move well and more the ability to plan well?

Brilliant, Andrea!

I replied: Andrea, I like that idea!! I think that one leads to another though. Like you said, the ability to plan well may be Step 1 in that process that leads to the "gifted mover". For the gifted athlete, I think by "luck" or something they were able to find the exact combinations of primitive movements that caused a systemic change in their body (neurological, muscular, skeletal, endocrine, etc) that pushed them into that other level. We've said multiple times that form follows function and this would be in that same thought process. We know that the mylineation process is extremely important in building any skill because it creates a "faster more efficient" neural pathways in sensory and motor nerves. I believe because these athletes had the right combination of primitive directives initially, they were able through time and practice reinforce the myelin as well as the supplementary and presupplementary motor areas in the brain to a point where they are perceived, justifiably, as "great athletes". The crazy thing is that working with an inefficient combination of movement primitives leads straight to repetitive strain/stress injuries. 

Great athletes, musicians, dancers, etc may have had the good fortune to fall into those combinations of movement primitives that paved the way to their greatness. This doesn't mean that they didn't hone their skills but it seems that the environment where the "abilities" flourished was there all along.

This leaves hope to many of us who are not "gifted" athletes. I believe that through careful work we can find those combinations of movements that enable us to be an effectively efficient athlete When we find that combination, it's up to us to refine it to the point we are "gifted athletes." 

It can be done.

Thoughts?

-Will