Here's a mindblowing video of Ronaldo making a goal in complete darkness after only seeing the first few milliseconds of the ball path: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t03LHpeWnpA&t=330s
In the nanosecond at which the lights go out, Ronaldo's brain has finished (the equivalent of) considering the concept of "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" and engaged the autopilot for reifying that into keystrokes while at the same point the amateur soccer player is still doing (the equivalent of) a hunt-and-peck for the "T" key.
I’m a little league coach, currently with 9-10 year olds. Once the kids get comfortable with basic mechanics, the real challenge of the game is not thinking about mechanics, while thinking about the tactical picture.
It’s difficult - in our case right now, working with a talented pitcher who starts to panic and throws wild when she gets rattled in the game (by a walk, hit, etc).
The joyous part as a coach is that with repetition and support, the kids figure it out! That cycle continues.
It was really off-putting how outcome focused some of our other coaches were. I am a player development nerd (Driveline youth certified now - highly recommended - and love their philosophy shaped to rec players) and hated playing teams with coaches that tried to manipulate our player draft process to vacuum up all the better athletes. Those were the teams that would max out their two pitchers' pitch counts every game and cycle all the non-starters on their team through right field.
I moved onto softball coaching at our local middle school and enjoy player development and coaching at that level too. We lost this year to pandemic closures but I am looking forward to going full-on gamified tech next year (Blast sensors, pocket radar, lots of quick fun drills to keep things moving).
This analogy doesn't go particular far, but it works to explain the difference between conscious and subconscious mechanical focus.
Like, do you even know your ATM PIN? Could you think of it consciously without pressing in the air? How about your computer password? Has it become "muscle-memory," learned subconsciously as motions while semantic symbols are discarded?
I realized this after thinking about skills like dribbling in basketball where first you get plain dribbling into your subconscious, then more complex dribbling, then entire moves.
Athletes always talk about when “the game started slowing down” and I always wondered if this was pushing a lot of faculties into their subconscious so they could operate at that speed.