The Effects of Random and Blocked Practices on Retention and Performance of Football Passing Skills

Today physical researchers and teachers consider exercise as a key element to improve motor skills; it is also evident that changeability in practice for retention and performance skills is both proper and effective. The main idea of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of random and blocked practice methods on retention and performance ability of 12-year-old learners’ passing skills in the Danesh football academy of east Azerbaijan province. For this purpose, a sample of 24 boys were randomly selected and divided into two groups through balancing the means. They were then instructed, trained and finally took tests with reasonable validity and stability (side-pass = 0.86, inside-pass = 0.81 and out-pass= 0.79). The variables were random and blocked practice methods (independent) and retention and performance abilities (dependent). Descriptive statistics were used to classify data and prescriptive statistics to analyze data (T and U-Mann Whitney tests). Findings of this study showed a significant relationship between retention and performance abilities of passing skills in random and blocked methods (P<0.05). Thus, results indicated that blocked practice improves the performance ability of learners while random practice enhances their retention ability.