It can be seen as a responsibility of sport science to warn the sports community against applying concepts that lack any scientific basis. It is precisely in this spirit that we have critically examined the Differencial Learning (DL) approach proposed by Wolfgang Schöllhorn (1999), according to which motor learning should be structured in an extremely variable manner—ideally without any repetitions—and without technique-related feedback (see photo and video). In concept-related articles (Künzell & Hossner, 2012, 2013), we demonstrate that the claimed practical implications are not substantiated either theoretically or empirically, that the distinction from competing learning theories is incomplete and flawed, and that the approach is not viable from a practical standpoint either. Furthermore, we provided experimental evidence that interventions in which—in direct contradiction to the basic assumptions of the DL approach—task variants are presented in a structured manner and movements are frequently corrected turned out to be superior to corresponding DL interventions (Hossner et al., 2016a,b; for an independent meta-analytic confirmation, see Tassignon et al., 2021). We therefore recommend designing motor learning in sports in a way that aligns with the current theoretical discourse in movement science (see, e.g., Hossner et al., 2020; with a focus on variable practice: Hossner & Zahno, 2022).
