Body Mind Mastery, page 11
Applying the law of balance means you need to overcompensate — to work both sides of the movement in order to find the center. In other words, make a determined attempt to swing too low. In fact, you would deliberately try to miss the ball for the next ten swings by swinging beneath it. Since we tend to undercorrect, in trying to swing too low you’ll probably end up hitting the ball. After working both sides — too high and too low — you’ll find the correct, centered place.
FASTER LEARNING THROUGH OVERCOMPENSATION
I’m going to assume that catching an object in front of you that you’ve thrown over behind your back is a new skill for you. Take a lemon or another sturdy fruit. Toss it from behind your back, up over your shoulder, catching it in front of you in the same hand. You can throw the object over the same or the opposite shoulder of the hand in which you hold the object. The main object here is to make conscious use of overcompensation. Work on one variable at a time. If you threw too far to the left, then on your next attempt throw too far right. If you then throw too far behind you, make sure you throw way in front of you. Then you’ll find the middle.
The principle of overcompensation — working both sides — applies to elements of timing, balance, accuracy, and force in every possible sport or movement skill. It also applies to finding balance in everyday activities like walking, talking, eating, or making love.
You may be reluctant to work both sides of a skill; it may seem like a waste of time to deliberately putt too short or too long, or to shoot baskets too far right after noticing you’re usually too far left. Naturally, most of us prefer to do it right on the next try, not wrong on the other side. But those willing to work both sides equally will sharpen their skills in sport and life with more success and in less time than those unwilling to do so.
Ideomotor Action and Mental Practice
Your powers of imagination can help you enhance old skills and learn new ones. The interaction of mind and muscle makes this possible. In the negative sense, turbulent thought can impose muscular tension, as you’ve seen. But on the positive side, clear mental imagery can — even without actual movement — develop correct muscular responses. A simple experiment demonstrates this principle:
MIND MOVING BODY
Tie a small weighted object like a ring to a six-inch length of string. Let the object hang by the string, held by your thumb and first finger. Hold the string still, and then begin to imagine that the ring is swinging back and forth, back and forth. Continue to imagine this, and watch what happens.
Next, while the ring swings back and forth, imagine that it is going in a circle instead. See the results.
This test demonstrates the phenomenon of ideomotor action: that for any image of movement there is a subtle, corresponding muscular impulse. If you relax the body and imagine yourself performing a movement correctly, the muscles respond. Ideomotor action is a key principle behind mental practice.
The value of mental practice is well established in research. One study used sixty beginning basketball players split into three groups of twenty each. The first group practiced shooting baskets from the free-throw line, attempting a specified number of shots in a specified time for a period of two weeks. The second group was asked to practice mentally in exactly the same fashion — imagining themselves shooting baskets. The third group performed unrelated activities during the same time period.
Each group was tested at the beginning and end of their two-week practice. As expected, the third group didn’t improve. Those who practiced mentally, however, improved almost as much as those who trained physically.
The moral of the study is not, of course, that you should begin practicing from the living room couch but that mental practice can be very useful as a supplement to physical practice. I gained a reputation as a natural when I competed on the University of California’s gymnastics team, because I seemed to learn difficult movements “effortlessly” on the first try. What my teammates didn’t know was that I would dream about those moves the night before and perform them in my head all day before actually attempting them. When I finally executed the movement physically, it felt as if I’d already done it many times. This confidence helped me to overcome fear, too.
In some situations, especially, mental practice has distinct advantages:
• It’s absolutely safe — unless you mentally practice your golf swing while driving down the freeway.
• You can do it anywhere. (Well, almost anywhere. I once mentally rehearsed a trampoline routine while sitting in a dull political science lecture. As I closed my eyes and imagined myself going through my routine, my arms made twitching, waving gestures as I mentally twisted and somersaulted. I opened my eyes to see the professor and about a hundred other people in the lecture hall straining for a look at the poor guy in the front row having a seizure.)
• It’s free. If you take those private lessons twice instead of three times a week, or an hour each day instead of two, you can spend the rest of your time practicing in your imagination.
• Mental practice demands and develops your powers of concentration and clear imagery. It’s very easy to casually practice actual physical skills without real attention by letting your body go through the motions. But mental practice requires clear attention.
• Because mental practice can be free of error, there’s no fear of failure.
But there are exceptions to this last rule, too. One of my gymnasts at the University of California consistently fell off the balance beam. As surely as the sun rose, she’d fall off. She fell on weekdays or weekends, rain or shine, in practice or competition, without discrimination.
One day, out of sheer desperation — for her safety and my peace of mind — I suggested that she try mental practice for a while. “Go through five or ten routines perfectly, in your head,” I said, feeling that perhaps in this way she’d develop a good habit.
I busied myself with the other gymnasts until later, when I glanced over and saw her sitting there, brows knitted in concentration, eyes shut tight, whispering to herself, “Damn. Oops … oh, damn.” Even in her mind she kept falling off.
You can practice mentally if you’re ill or injured, or at odd moments during the day when there’s nothing much to do. It beats thinking about your problems and can provide a winning edge.
Visualizing yourself performing well in competition will also serve to program yourself for success, since your subconscious mind doesn’t differentiate between what you see with your mind’s eye and your physical eye. Imagery is a way of creating a new reality.
Mental practice also explains the common phenomenon of athletes returning to a sport after time off only to find that their technique had actually improved. It also explains a great improvement in a skill on a Monday after an athlete had trouble with it on a Friday and took the weekend off. In just thinking about the movements, it’s possible to improve, because you don’t practice any errors. Mental practice is more efficient than physical practice.
The main requirement of mental practice is to stay relaxed so that no other muscle tensions interfere with your proper response. While practicing mentally you can lie down, or you can sit quietly. Of course, you have to have some kind of feel for the movement before practicing it in your imagination. Once you know how it should feel, practice it repeatedly in your mind.
Using mental practice — visualization, imagery, mental rehearsal — is another essential tool for success in sport and life.
Slow-Motion Practice
Slow-motion practice provides another key to body mind mastery by giving you the time to become acutely aware of every part of a movement, whether it’s swinging a golf club or washing dishes, performing martial arts or a piano concerto. When you perform an activity in slow motion you amplify awareness of tension and relaxation and feel subtleties of coordinating body parts, weight shifts, and breathing that you miss when moving quickly. Slow motion enhances both the ease and speed of learning, because formerly hidden mistakes become inescapably obvious.
SLOW-MOTION EXPERIENCE
Test 1. Hold your right hand in front of your face, so that you are looking into your palm. Quickly move your right arm out to the side, turning your palm outward, and stop. Notice that you were aware of only the beginning and end of the movement.
Test 2. Now repeat the same sequence, but this time move your arm and hand in slow motion — as slowly as you possibly can. Let it take a full minute. Be aware of the relaxation of the arm and hand muscles. Notice how each finger turns; clearly see the different angles of your hand, as if for the first time.
In this test, you were clearly aware of the movement of your arm and hand in its entirety, from beginning to end. After a period of slow-motion practice you can actually move faster than before because in moving slowly you are able to notice and release tension that slowed your reflexes. And less tension means faster movement.
Slow-motion practice provides similar benefits to studying slow-motion instant replay films of training, except that you’re not just seeing but sensing.
You can apply slow motion to virtually every sport or movement art, as well as to the movements of daily life. Try taking a bite of food or washing a dish or brushing your teeth in slow motion, even for ten seconds, and notice the quality of attention and release of extra tension.
In learning any new skill, remember the formula PSP: First precision, then speed, then power. Each flows from the next in their proper order. If you want power and speed, then practice precisely in slow motion. Slow down to speed up.
Not only does slow motion work, it’s fun. And, like practitioners of T’ai Chi, you discover that in slowing down, you turn sport into a form of moving meditation.
The Beginning-and-End Method
Sometimes it isn’t practical to work in slow motion — for example, in learning a cartwheel or a somersault. In cases like this, it’s useful to pay special attention to a perfect beginning and ending position. You may not know where you are in the middle of a movement, but if the beginning and ending postures are correct, the middle will take care of itself. That’s why so many coaches in tennis or golf, for example, emphasize the correct beginning and follow-through.
When you swing a tennis racquet or golf club, hold the ending for a moment. Check your balance, the position of your arms, head, and body. Beginning and ending positions form the basis of a consistent swing.
If you complete a movement and find that you’re in the wrong ending position, move quickly to the correct ending position and feel it. The next time, you won’t be quite as far off; again, move to the correct ending posture. Before long, you’ll find yourself ending the proper position, and the middle will flow smoothly as well.
Part-Whole Practice
Any skill, like the functioning of your flashlight, is made up of component parts. If you want to find out why a flashlight isn’t working well, you take it apart and find the trouble spot. It works the same for a movement skill. When I coached and taught beginning gymnastics at Stanford University, my students learned a surprising number of skills by breaking each skill into relatively simple parts — first the beginning, then the middle, then the end. Then they put the parts together. In learning forward rolls, they first learned to squat and reach forward, then shift weight to the hands, and push their rear ends rapidly up and forward. Then they learned the end part, rolling from their backs up to their feet. Mastering each part made the whole far easier to learn, and learn correctly.
Not only do students learn better by focusing on the components of a skill, they have more fun because they experience small successes every day, rather than struggling toward the entire movement. When climbing a mountain, define each step in the right direction as success. We learn the alphabet before we write words; it works the same in sport and life. Many small successes add up.
You can learn anything in simple and progressive increments — like walking across steppingstones rather than trying to jump over a wide stream. Master each part before attempting the whole.
Imitation: The Ultimate Technique
Children are masters of imitation, the most powerful and natural way to learn. It’s how we learned walking, speaking, and other practical life skills. Everything and everybody has a mixture of virtues and weaknesses. I’ve never met a single person who didn’t have at least one quality I admired. I’ve applied the saying, “Don’t envy — emulate.”
If you look for the good in everyone you meet, that person becomes your teacher.
We have no friends; we have no enemies; we only have teachers.
— Anonymous
To learn a skill, find those who are accomplished at the skill and watch them carefully. Study their movements, habits, facial expressions. As you watch them perform, imagine yourself moving in the same manner.
Your ability will improve with practice. Even the most creative painters began by copying. If you wish to copy a drawing of a master artist, you won’t be able to reproduce it precisely at first, but with practice, your copying will improve. You can practice imitation anywhere or anytime.
To copy athletic skills, you have to prepare first; you can’t imitate a power-lifter unless you’ve developed some strength; you can only imitate a ballet dancer’s movements after developing the same suppleness and control.
I’m convinced that imitation is the master technique of learning because it works at the subconscious level. One body learns directly from another, without intervention of the intellect.
To make best use of your innate powers of imitation:
• Prepare yourself physically by returning to talent basics.
• Appreciate that it’s okay to copy. Inspiration begins with imitation.
• Make sure you have good role models.
IMITATION PRACTICE
Have a partner face you. Have your partner hold his or her arm in an unusual position. Copy your partner’s arm position, as if looking in a mirror. Then have your partner take another position, perhaps with both arms askew. Imitate that. Then mirror his or her posture. Do the same thing as he or she moves very slowly.
In this mime and acting exercise, you’ll find that with a little practice you can mirror your partner precisely, and you can apply this ability to observe and imitate in your sport and life.
In this chapter I’ve outlined practical ways to learn more efficiently. Only you have the power to make the words come alive. If you use even a single one of these techniques to its fullest extent, it will enhance your game and enrich your life.
Children have never been very good at listening to what their parents tell them — but they never fail to imitate them.
— James Baldwin
Competition and Cooperation
It may be that the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that’s the way to bet.
— Damon Runyan
Competition can bring out your best and your worst, develop your strengths and reveal your weaknesses. Competition provides opportunities to face our own moments of truth. Drawing the best from a man or woman, competition can be a model for positive, assertive, and realistic efforts in daily life. Athletes tend to be successful outside sports because they learn that life doesn’t just hand us everything, that some people excel more than others, and that such excellence comes from preparation and work. Sports, as successful athletes know, can be a source of practical life lessons about action and reaction, effort and results.
The competitive experience can, at its best, become a form of moving meditation in which all your attention, free of random daydreaming, is focused in the present moment. It’s also an enjoyable form of entertainment for millions of people, and a source of inspiration to many boys and girls.
But competition also has a shadow side: It compares unique human beings in extremely specialized arenas, quantifying the whole of their efforts with scores, times, and measurements. Competition divides the world into the dualities of winner and loser. Children who play highly competitive games emerge as losers more often than winners, despite our well-intentioned words of “it’s how you play the game…”
Sometimes we lose in our quest to win.
Competition tends to breed camaraderie among teammates but animosity between opponents. (Football has been called a game in which you feel really good about half the players on the field.) Before collegiate games, I used to see pictures of the opposing team posted outside training-room doors, with the words, “The Enemy” written below. At some events I’ve even seen athletes laugh or cheer when a member of the opposing team falls. Such practices encourage hostility in daily life, as evidenced by the way drivers treat one another and pedestrians.
When I played pro football, I never set out to hurt anyone deliberately — unless it was, you know, important, like a league game or something.
— Dick Butkus
Competition can reinforce a simplistic, black-and-white view of the world, with winning as the only valued goal. We constantly compare ourselves to others to determine our own relative worth. As Jerry Seinfeld once said, “Second place is the top of the loser’s category.”
Day-to-day improvement seems a more meaningful measure of achievement than who beats whom, but “most improved” players rarely receive recognition unless their improvement translates into winning the game.
The Way of the sage is to act but not to compete.
— Lao Tzu
The game of musical chairs is a good example of the way competition is instilled by our culture during childhood. In his book No Contest: The Case Against Competition, psychologist Alfie Kohn demonstrates that every round of musical chairs eliminates a child until at the end “only one child is left triumphantly seated while everyone else is standing on the sidelines, excluded from play. This is one way we learn to have a good time in America.”
