Training and PPMs

A couple of points...

The first is quickly about strength, is it correct that over their careers players should regularly gain 8 or 10 points to their strength? That's what happens to me and I'd rather some of those points get spread more evenly across other physical attributes, stamina, agility, balance etc. There seems to be no way round this other than specific training which makes no real difference anyway, does everyone have that experience?

Secondly about PPMs, some of them are obvious in what they mean and how they affect a players play (places shots/shoots with power for example). But how about things like "Runs with ball often"? If I have a winger who is instructed to run with ball often and makes say 4 runs on average per game and I then get him to learn the PPM runs with ball often how much is it likely to make him run with the ball more often? I've never really noticed any difference in the amount of dribbles before and after with the players seasonal stats. Also what about something like "Moves into channels", you can already instruct a player to do that on the tactics screen so if he has that PPM does it mean he does it more often/more effectively? What if a player with that PPM has the instruction of hugging the touchline?

I don't know if anyone has the answers to these things, it's hardly critical but some kind of answers would be nice.

Nobody? Nothing?

I've always thought it makes them better at performing that action, rather than making it do them more often.

Another part of the game that is open to guessing and SI have never told us definitively that "run with ball often" actually means. It might be obvious, but it clearly isn't if no-one can tell a difference.

I've always thought it makes them better at performing that action, rather than making it do them more often.

I always thought the ppm makes them do it more often rather than it makes them better at performing that action but we wont know for sure unless SI tells us (which they wont)

PPM is prefferred Player Move. I always assumed that if a player had a PPM of say: Runs with ball often, it means that given the choice of passing to a team mate or trying to beat his marker, he'll attempt the dribble. One of the more frustrating ones is the shoots with power combined with the shoots from long range one. Too many shots get blasted over the bar when he could have run in another 5 yards and scored the goal or at least got it on target

I don't think that the PPM's make a player more or less proficient at the particular skill, just the tendancy to perform the skill itself.

It depends on the creative freedom you give the player - the more freedom he gets the more likely he is to deviate from the instructions given to him in the team tactics and use his PPMs instead.

I see this is a big grey area then that SI haven't cleared up exactly, the reason I ask is because I haven't noticed any real difference in performance from players after learning many PPMs (except for the obvious ones like places shots). In general I'll just not get players to learn them as they take up valuable training time.

Also the reason I asked about PPMs making players better at a skill was mainly because back on FM09 I had a regen who was developing nicely and seemed to have a talent for long shots, I got him to learn shoots from distance and immediately his long shots went from 16 to 18 in one big jump the day he successfully learnt the skill. I've never seen anything like that before or since, it must be related to learning the skill as theres no way a player could jump 2 points randomly like that.