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Dustin comments on Akrasia, hyperbolic discounting, and picoeconomics - Less Wrong
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But first explaining how to catch a ball won't keep the person from then learning how to catch it.
If you say you're teaching someone how to catch balls, and then provide them with sequences of equations, there's a dangerous meta-message involved. You're conveying the (unspoken, implicit) idea that the equations are what's needed to make the student good at catching.
If the student then believes that because they've mastered the equations they've learned how to catch, they'll go out into the world - and fail and fail and fail.
One real-life example of this may be people who attain high status in martial arts training schools and then get themselves slaughtered in actual fights, where the only rules are those of physics and people have chosen optimized strategies for reality.
In fact, such an explanation can help to assure them that catching a ball is possible before they commit to practicing.
I would expect their real-life experience to be sufficient to convince them that it's possible to catch a ball.
More importantly, if they're not sure that's possible, they shouldn't be looking for someone to teach them how to do it. They should be trying to determine if it's possible before they do anything else.