To develop and stabilise abilities the volume of practice is essential.

The teacher must therefore place himself between two extremes:

• Only organise matches where the desirable situation would only rarely happen and would not enable trial and error and the adjustments necessary to learning and to automation.
• Organise themed situations, reduced and totally repetitive but so different from the game that what is learned here would not be applicable in a match.

We will therefore try and combine the two requirements of automation and versatility. Systematic situations, while offering an important volume of activity, should simulate the essential constraints of the game and preserve the meaning of the actions produced.

To create a volume of activity:

Ball throws

The thrower(s) must have or develop specific abilities to produce the requires trajectories. For the non-specialist, we use essentially two techniques:

• Throwing upwards with both hands by bending the elbows. This way we achieve rather quickly presision and trajectories without rotations.
• Hitting from the bottom with the fist, arm bent.

Ball feed

Player rotation must ensure a continuous ball feed in different manners:

• either each ball is held at the disposal of the thrower, one by one, by the player who picked up the ball.
• or there are catchers who feed a reserve by the thrower.
• in the case of a feed by services if a server misses the serve he goes and fetches the ball himself.

More generally, servers and throwers are at the service of those who work and the quality of their work depends directly on the quality of their distribution.

To imitate the game's constraints:

If constraints are not present we get a mime of the action, a formal activity that stops matching the conditions and motives of the current action and does not correspond to the expected abilities. This can be due to an error in the very organisation of the situation, or to a progressive slipping as repetition goes by. We must therefore watch out to maintain an authentic activity.

Signal

Every action must have a beginning and en ending signal (un gesture, a hit on the ball, like th whisle blow in the game) which creates the necessary awareness conditions.

Rhythm

The rhythm of distribution respects the realistic rhythm of trajectories in the game.

The target

The hitting action is always aimed at a target (court, partner etc.). Apart from a few situations of warm up and discovery of trajectory times for beginners, the ball is not the target but the means of reaching the target. This lets us appreciate the result of the action relative to the target, which the aim of the action. For instance: a spike that goes out of the court whichever way it was hit id a failed spike.

The space

In volley-ball any action always requires a movement. Action spaces will always be big anough for this demand to persist. Players have a natural tendency , to save energy, to reduce space and distance. We pick up from the ground or we place markers so that this reduction doesn't happen.

Uncertainty

Uncertainty is permanent when playing. Any ability is one of perception and decision as well as physical. Maintaining this dimension is essential. For example:

• If the work requires a certain type of trajectory we will change from time to time either in a random way or because we notice that the layer stops looking at the ball from the start and anticipates in a formal way in a certain direction out of habit.
• If we feed balls for a spike we can sometimes not give the ball if the player does not respect the engagement time He then realises that he set off too early. .