Learning vs Performing

[john petersen]

I am intrigued lately how we acquire a new individual skill or movement pattern and "make the decision" to assimilate or reject it.

How we learn and how we perform are related of course, but one is done more consciously than the other. There is a theory that our conscious input is extremely minimal while skiing....and that conscious decision making happens for larger, more global moves (like changing a line or skiing around an obstacle) while all the other thousands of functions that need to happen in order to make that decision occur take place on the subconscious level.

What stands out to me is that we seem to operate subconsciously through complex "programs" or groups of movement patterns that then allow us to begin to anticipate changes in terrain or pitch or react more fluidly to our situation at any given moment.

versatility through experience, I guess. (learn by doing)

In teaching we intuitively (and through training) try to introduce one thought or movement pattern at a time then take that thought or movement to different terrain or conditions so that we can expand versatility and confidence. I like to call these things "tools" . I try to choose them wisely so that they are still useful LATER...when I am not around.

When an idea or movement or exercise is introduced we must interrupt the flow of performance with that idea. Performance goes down due to that interruption. The conscious mind "gets in the way" and slows things down....probably for our survival....I think its here that we decide through the experience and conscious thought process on just how to use the new exercise. Or find out if it does not work.

as we assimilate the idea and movements to our subconscious programming it is ultimately rejected or accepted. or, in my case put on the back burner for further reflection or rejection. (sometimes Im just not ready to use it, but dont ultimately reject the idea in case I have missed something or do not have a fully formed movement pattern that can use it yet.)

Some things, of course, take more time than others. The more skilled we are, the more adept we are, the more accomplished.....the harder it is to have breakthroughs and reach new heights.

A very intuitive or experienced instructor or friend may show you something that works well on many levels. It just seems to click. It also fits your style of skiing. BUT when this happens, it goes pretty deep. There are gaps in our movement patterns, like missing pieces of a puzzle. choose the right piece and the picture begins to suddenly emerge. Then more pieces fit and the picture gets bigger and more well defined. Or....choose the wrong piece and the picture blurrs...the piece does not fit...and we have to search for another piece. conscious to subconscious to conscious.......the loop continues. If the piece fits, we test it and revel in it and smile a lot!

the right piece will fill missing gaps in SEVERAL movement patterns in our subconscious, which is why, I think, we have breakthroughs once in a while. It may take several cycles of both successful and unsuccessful exercises to equate to an overall feeling of accomplishment, but eventually, we reach saturation and something has to give, one way or another.

This is a bit "stream of consciousness", so I apologize if its a bit dry.......(but to me its fascinating).....

I may have a question forming....but it goes beyond simply asking for a coaching cue that works for you....but more like what teaching/coaching process worked best with your learning style, preference or mindset. What approach to the lesson/clinic resonated with you and stuck with you the most?

JP

 

[GettingThere]

The link below has some thoughts that touch on what you are saying. Essentially the brain's working/real-time memory/capacity seems to be limited. Movement patterns learned over time (through reps) get moved to a different part of the brain and get recalled "subconsciously", and also get executed faster than rational thought. Thus if all the "tools/response movements" are pre-burned into the brain, it leaves the available memory/processing for higher level thoughts (such as picking a line, or "pole plant down the hill" or whatever). For me, the takeaway in my skiing is that I *try* to not clutter my brain with more than one (or at most two) conscious goals as I'm skiing down a challenging (for me) slope.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-athletes-way/201110/no-1-reason-practice-makes-perfect

 

[Pete in Idaho]

Something I always try to do when I was an instructor and now when friends and acquaintances ask me to give them some tips/help/etc. was and is not to dwell too much on mechanics. Without telling them what I often try to do is instill in their skiing/mind/performance an appreciation to ski the whole mountain.

Noticed this in ski school, had many instructors that could make perfect med. radius turns on groomers but couldn't really ski the whole mountain and looked rather fragmented when doing so.

Ski the slow line fast and the fast line slow (Bob Barnes) and doing so while flowing down the mountain has always been a desired skill AND way to the ski. Can one do this and separate the mechanics from the subconscious and just ski naturally ? Obviously experience counts, time on the snow, ski experiences etc. all contribute to ones ability to accomplish this level of skiing.

Sometimes I will pull off an area, sit down and watch. Seeing and observing a person who is one with the mountain is really something to see and very obvious when observed. Watching a skier FLOWING with and down the mountain is always a joy to watch.

Note. I realize that liberties were taken with your subject - but - it is July.

 

[razie]

use the decision training tools.

http://www.effectiveskiing.com/wiki...raining_vs_behavior_training_in_alpine_skiing

this is a very important subject for me. here are more thoughts

http://www.effectiveskiing.com/wiki...-_the_scientific_concept_in_skill_development
http://www.effectiveskiing.com/wiki/carving-blog/Improve_-_learning_zone_vs_performance_zone
http://www.effectiveskiing.com/wiki/carving-blog/Promoting_new_movement_patterns
http://www.effectiveskiing.com/wiki/carving-blog/Learning_styles_don't_work

cheers

 

[oldschoolskier]

Everything we do is about patterning, pure and simple.

How we learn a pattern is the trick.

Good instructors make a link that sticks, it can be anything, joke, movement, description, smell, sound and so on.

Great instructors individualize that for each student.

The Greatest instructors are not always certified or trained, they just are.

It comes down to my personal favorite concept said by a fictional character "Master Yoda....Don't try, do". Simple words, simple concept, very accurate.

 

[Pete in Idaho]

KISS ! Sometimes it just comes down to: JUST DO IT !

 

[MikeS]

I took a computer science class way back in college, and one of the things the professor taught us was the code to make a 'half adder'. If you put two of them together, you had a line of code that would do addition. What he told us about this really stuck. He said once the code is written, you don't have to rewrite the code every time. You just save the code for the half adder, and throw it in a box. Then when you need something that calls for a half adder, you just pull it out of the box and put it where it needs to be. And he then went on to talk about how you use those elements to build even bigger, more complex pieces of code, which then go into the box as well, to be pulled out to build ever bigger and more complex code.

I look at that as a good analogy for learning and performance. Learning is writing the code from scratch. Making sure everything is in place, all the carrots and slashes and dots... that requires a great deal of thinking and frontal lobe power. But once its learned/written, you just pull out the completed product when it's needed. As you get better, you go from a simple single line of code that you write manually, to building whole programs with thousands of lines of code that are just pieces of code you've already written pieced together the way you want them.

Caveat, I am not an IT specialist, I don't actually write code in real life. So I may be inaccurate in details. The concept is what I was going after.

 

[PTskier]

To greatly oversimplify how the brain learns think of the brain as having three sections. The lower section is the autonomous section that does things like respiration rate, heart rate, digestion, etc. Put that aside. The top section is the thinking section. Anything we have to think about is slow and tiring. We can only think of one thing at a time. There is no such thing as multi-tasking. We do give slices of concentration to one thing after another, but just one thing at a time. The middle section, the sub-conscious, is where the neural connections exist of things we've "learned."

When we try something new we have to think it through. Think of each concept or each movement. This is slow and tiring. After we've repeated the movement several hundred times the new neural connections are formed. We've "learned" it. We can now recall the instructions to do this very quickly and nearly effortlessly and "automatically." The thinking portion of the brain is now available to think through and begin learning something else. But...replacing something we've already learned may take several thousand repetitions to get the old movement out and the new movement cemented in. Old habits are indeed hard to break.

A properly taught skiing drill repeats the same movements many times until we're doing them without thinking of them. Repeat the drill (correctly) until your mind wanders and you're still doing it right. That's a sign it might be actually "learned." The drill Thousand Steps is named that for a reason...and not named Hundred Steps or Ten steps.

 

[T-Square]

Don't do something until you get it right, do it until you till you can't get it wrong. At that point learning has transitioned to performing.

 

[razie]

I think it's called a thousand steps to make the student actually try to make as many steps as possible... but it might as well mean the other thing as well

good point about old habits being hard to break... the trick is re-sequencing. we can't actually "change" something we learned, but we can build new neural pathways.

so - break down the larger movement sequence into small sections, change one section with an alternate pattern and then re-compose back the main pattern - the point being that we learn the new sequence in parallel with the old one and then just swap it.

To achieve this effectively, it's important to have a clear and detailed picture of cause-effect and what to change, how the movements influence each-other, how to decompose.

It's good often to find new cues, to help the brain kick in the new patterns.

 

[Fuller]

Here's a few random July thoughts...

I'm the prototypical terminal intermediate - I am slowly getting better but my existing patterns are quite entrenched. It's kind of a bummer because I love skiing and would like to ski the whole mountain but I know my limits. About this time of year I start reviewing all there is to read about the subject; countless videos, endless ski threads etc. I think I'm pretty knowledgeable about the subject from a general theory standpoint and interestingly enough I can imagine / visualize / how it feels executing a proper series of turns in challenging terrain. My head and my body both know what to do but still...

Remember the movie Apollo 13? Gary Sinese (Ken Mattingly) back on Earth, spends hours in the simulator trying to get the right sequence to reboot the on board computer with only a limited battery supply. All the steps were necessary and had to be accomplished but it would only work in the correct order. It comes down to sequencing.

Does Gary Sinese ski? Does he teach skiing? If not I'll settle for Ken Mattingly.

 

[Uke]

'My hands were moving faster than the moving of my mind' Jorma K.

Just substitute feet for hands and we're there.

uke

 

[François Pugh]

I karatedo we have basic techniques (strikes, blocks, throws, holds, chokes etc.), stances, steps, guard positions. It doesn't take long to learn the basics, but you can never do them too well, so you keep practising. We also have kata. A kata is a pre-arranged series of moves. In my style we have a series of kata that we teach in order: Generally Naihanchin is taught to beginners (white belts), Nijushiho is taught next (to yellow belts), Sankakutobi is taught to green belts, Happiken is taught to brown belts,Seisan and Bassai are taught to black belts. There are more, but that's enough to make the point. The interesting thing is that each kata builds upon the one that came before it, and things learned doing a more advanced kata can be applied in the lower kata, things like how one movement flows into another, things like focus and power, things like combinations, and more things.

To summarize, begin with simple movements, build upon them to learn more advanced movement, and learn from the more advanced movements to to improve the simple beginning movements.

 

[Brian Finch]

To greatly oversimplify how the brain learns think of the brain as having three sections. The lower section is the autonomous section that does things like respiration rate, heart rate, digestion, etc. Put that aside. The top section is the thinking section. Anything we have to think about is slow and tiring. We can only think of one thing at a time. There is no such thing as multi-tasking. We do give slices of concentration to one thing after another, but just one thing at a time. The middle section, the sub-conscious, is where the neural connections exist of things we've "learned."

When we try something new we have to think it through. Think of each concept or each movement. This is slow and tiring. After we've repeated the movement several hundred times the new neural connections are formed. We've "learned" it. We can now recall the instructions to do this very quickly and nearly effortlessly and "automatically." The thinking portion of the brain is now available to think through and begin learning something else. But...replacing something we've already learned may take several thousand repetitions to get the old movement out and the new movement cemented in. Old habits are indeed hard to break.

A properly taught skiing drill repeats the same movements many times until we're doing them without thinking of them. Repeat the drill (correctly) until your mind wanders and you're still doing it right. That's a sign it might be actually "learned." The drill Thousand Steps is named that for a reason...and not named Hundred Steps or Ten steps.

Sounds like a PT?

 

[Jim McDonald]

Same principle as mass production, Henry Ford probably would've made a helluva skier

 

[john petersen]

some great clarifying thought, gang, thanks for posting.

Im still searching minutia to find the big picture...but its happening a little less.....thats either because Ive reached saturation, or the big picture is right around the corner....true enlightenment!.....


Fuller's comments on small advances or what feels like no advances rings true to me..........a good point was made by Francois regarding the ladder of techniques.......Im pretty sure my breakthrough last year was the putting together of a few key pieces to the puzzle, in the right order, at the right time, on the right snow, from the right sources, ect, ect. BUT that breakthrough came at the expense of many a failed attempt!......But even in those attempts and setbacks (or not moving forward) I could feel something else beginning to take shape, so I kept at it. Then, in mini successes, the breakthrough came.

I was also ready again to make things happen. I think this was on ALL levels.

I really like Razie's analogy of alternate pathways.....perhaps this is why we "fall back" on ingrained patterns sometimes. (my stubborn side does not like to throw anything out, just update it so it works....perhaps this could help explain some of that!).....

Pete in Idaho suggests not cluttering up our brains (at least on the slopes) with much technical jargon or thoughts....I agree quite a bit. I am learning that keeping the tech talk and theory down to a trickle is key when trying to perform.........

The conscious mind gets in the way and interrupts the flow.......

Funny how we relate much of this stuff to computer code.......

JP

 

[Stikki]

One of the world's best track coaches, Dan Pfaff, talks about the process of stimulate-adapt-stabilize-actualize which is borrowed from motor learning research. This quote gives a summary of the S-A-S-A process:

Dan Pfaff: I think the major problem is that a lot of people are into a stimulus/adaptation motif when it comes to training and instead I feel there are four steps to improving performance. Once you have stimulated and the athlete adapts to that stimulus, then you have to spend a certain amount of time allowing that new performance level to stabilize. Then in the fourth step the athlete must learn to actualize it in any kind of environment and under any kind of stress, at any point in time. I think a lot of coaches fall into the trap of stimulating and adapting and as soon as the athlete looks like they have got things under control they then change something and push forwards for greater gains and in doing so compromise the adaptation process.. http://speedendurance.com/2012/08/14/dan-pfaff-on-the-importance-of-rest-and-recovery/

 

[CharlieP]

Aug 3, 2017

Hi Pugskiers:

I agree that the first two steps, are essential to implement and widely accepted and undertaken by students of skiing. To me the crucial phase is the "stabilization" step, where consistent practice over time mostly on terrain which is not intimidating/challenging to ingrain desired movement patterns into muscle memory. What is the magic number? 10,000 repetitions more or less? Only when a skier can forget about techniques and concentrate on tactics in more challenging scenarios such as a deep mogul field or steep pitches or both, can one even think about and achieve actualization.

Well, my 2 cents worth and another addition to my post count.

Think snow,

CP

 

[BGreen]

@john petersen if this genuinely interests you, read "The Talent Code" by Daniel Coyle. I think that stabilization step is something we don't give enough time for.

 

[john petersen]

thanks, BGreen

Ill definitely look into that

JP