Research has shown that peak performers visualize more than the average person. And this is no coincidence. Dr. Richard Suinn conducted a fascinating experiment with world class downhill skiers. He first measured the electrical activity in their legs by collecting EMG (electromyography) data while they were skiing. Later he had them sit down in a quiet room and visualize the downhill run while he measured the EMG activity in their legs. Remarkably they were the same! Despite the fact that they were not moving, the EMG activity spiked every time that they imagined themselves going around a gate. At the end of the EMG recording the researchers noticed a very large signal that they couldn’t explain at first. They asked the skiers if anything had happened toward the end of their visualizing. The skiers said, “Yeah, we had to stop!”
I once worked with a 1500m runner who was having a great deal of difficulty hitting her split times during a race. A split is a smaller distance within a race, such as 200m or 400m, that is used to help keep a runner on pace so that they can run their best time for the overall distance. The woman, I will call Sue, was frustrated that she was not running up to her potential. During a race her split times were erratic and this would cause her to perform poorly. This was somewhat unusual because distance runners tend to be exceptional at their ability to feel how fast they are running but Sue was not one of them.
I started by asking her to visualize a 200m run. This meant that she would be able to see and feel every step of the 200m. There are two views you can use when visualizing. One is watching yourself as if you were outside of your body watching from the stands. The other which most people use, is seeing things from your own eyes as if you were looking out as you walked down the street. Seeing every step may not sound too hard, but give it a try. Imagine walking from where you are now to another room with your eyes closed. See every step without a break in the video. Could you do it? Probably not the first time. It takes some practice to see every movement without the momentary fade outs between movements.
Sue practiced this for about four weeks. She finally told me that she could literally see every step of her 200m run. “Great!” I said, “Now do it with a stop watch. When you see yourself begin to run, start the watch and then stop it when you cross the finish line. Then before you open your eyes say the time that you just ran.” At first she was all over the place. The actual elapsed time might have been 45 seconds and she would say 33 seconds. Amazingly over the next three to four weeks she became remarkably good at knowing the precise time she “ran” the race in her mind, even to the point that she was able to often hit the tenth of a second. The really exciting part was that her times on the track just kept getting better. She was hitting every split and was able to run the entire race on pace. Sue finished the season with a personal best in the 1500m and qualified for the National Championships.
A little exercise that may help your ability to see things more clearly entails looking at a photograph for thirty seconds and then putting it aside out of view and drawing what you saw. It’s not so important how it looks as much as did you capture all of the details. At first you will probably be surprised how little you are able to capture. The trick is in not remembering some list of objects but simply seeing the photo in your mind’s eye. If this proves too challenging try staring at the photo for a few seconds and then close your eyes for a few seconds, seeing the imprint in your mind, then open your eyes and stare at it again, repeating this for a minute or two. You will be amazed at how well you begin to see things with your eyes closed and opened!
This ability to see and focus in detail does far more than just help you master technique or improve your timing, it is a game changer. Consider that an NFL quarterback has less than four seconds to find and deliver a ball to an open receiver before being sacked. You might say, “Well, that’s not so fast.” Could you find someone in a crowded room in four seconds? Maybe. But could you locate another three people in different parts of the room before finding the one you wanted to speak with? That’s what a NFL QB does on almost every play. Even before the ball is snapped he is looking at the field and watching the movement of the defense. He typically has four or five options of whom to throw to when the ball is snapped. Amazingly as he looks through his progression, he sees instantly if the first receiver is open before he is even a quarter of the way through the pattern. It is like watching a video and pressing pause at the one second mark. What do you see? Based on that limited view will the receiver be open. It is either throw or not throw. If not, press play for one more second. What do you see? Throw or no throw? If the next receiver in the progression will not be open, press play again for one second. This continues for about four seconds until the QB is either sacked or has thrown the pass.
On the other side of the ball, the linebacker or defensive back must cover the receiver. If he only sees a blur of the player in front of him, he will be faked-out and beaten. His ability to focus on a detailed spot on the player he is covering is essential if he hopes to stay close enough to prevent a completion. His ability to then shift his laser-like focus to the ball is what makes an interception possible. The better he is at doing that the more likely he will achieve peak performance.
This is not only true for football, almost every sport requires that same kind of ability to see things in great detail. Think of the intense visual focus needed to return a 120 mph serve in tennis. It takes about 100 milliseconds to process visual cues and locate a ball in space. Once you see the ball it will take another 75 milliseconds for your brain to calculate the speed, spin, and direction of the ball. Fifty more milliseconds to choose the direction that you will move. Twenty-five milliseconds to trigger your muscles to fire and begin moving in that direction. At this point the ball is at the net. You now have less than four-tenths of a second to cover the distance in order to make contact with the ball. The difference between amateur and professional players is their ability to see subtle cues that indicate where the serve will go. With so little time to respond their ability to see what is happening with perfect clarity is essential. The pros see cues that tell them where the ball is going before it is hit. They see the smallest changes in the hip, shoulder, and racquet movements of the server, whereas the amateur only sees the ball after it comes off the racquet.
Consider a simple task like standing twenty feet away from someone who is holding a hula-hoop three or four feet above the ground like a basket. You are given three golf balls and asked to toss them one at a time through the hoop. You might be fairly confident that you will throw all three of them through it, but sometimes you can get that funny feeling, especially when something seems really easy to do, where you think, “I hope they all go in.” You could even have a close call on one of them or it might be possible that you actually hit the rim or miss one completely. With just a small change in focus and perception the result could be very different. If instead of tossing the golf ball through a hula-hoop, you were asked to toss it into an egg cup suspended in the middle of the hula-hoop, what do you think the result would be? You might be thinking, “That would be a lot harder to do.” Surely it would be more challenging but is there any doubt in your mind that all of the balls would easily go through the hula-hoop?
Seeing clearly what is happening in the here and now is essential to peak performance. But life is made up of a lot of here-and-nows. If you live eighty years, you will have 2,522,880,000 seconds of life, or 2.5 billion present moments. If you are forty years old, you only have about 1.25 billion remaining. That may seem like a lot of time but think of how quickly the first half has flown by! Moving from present moment to present moment is not only part of life but it is an essential element of reproducing peak performances. If in this present moment you are visualizing, then focus on visualizing. If you do it for five minutes, then that is 300 present moments spent focused on visualizing. If in the next present moment you are swinging a club, then focus on feeling your swing. If in another present moment you are reflecting on what actually happened, then focus on recalling
and feeling what you did. In yet another present moment you could be planning what to do to improve your training, then focus on planning. The key is to focus exclusively on the intent of each particular present moment. Adding anything else is a waste of your time and talent.
MASTERING TECHNIQUE: KINESTHETIC AWARENESS AND MOTOR LEARNING & CONTROL
Performing at your best in the present moment is also affected by your ability to feel the sensation of movement. This is sometimes referred to as kinesthetic awareness or your ability to know where your body is in space. At this moment you are holding this book, or possibly an electronic reader. Freeze! Don’t move. Don’t Look. Where is your right middle finger? You might tell me, “It is touching the back of the book.” Okay, where is the pressure on that finger? Is it toward the left, right, or middle of your finger? You say, “It is on the left side of my middle finger.” Is it more toward the tip, middle, or lower part of your finger? “The middle,” you say. How were you able to know it? Because you could feel it! This may seem simplistic, but it is the essence of mastering movement and technique in any sport, fine art or craft.
Here’s a simple drill to improve your kinesthetic awareness. Put a pen on the table in front of you, maybe about 18 or 20 inches away with the point facing towards you. Then bring your hands back to the edge of the table and stare at the tip of the pen. After you’ve stared at it for a few seconds, close your eyes, and with your right index finger reach out and touch the tip of the pen. Now, when you reach out, don’t feel around for the pen, just put your finger down firmly wherever you think the pen tip is located. Don’t open your eyes yet! If you did not touch it, ask yourself, “Where am I? Is my finger short or long, right or left, in relation to the tip of the pen?” Then open your eyes and look at where your finger is on the table compared to where you said it was on the table. Resist the self-criticism negative commentary, and just observe the difference. At first you might not be able to know where your finger landed on the table, but after five or six tries, you’ll find that your sense of movement and position begins to improve.
If you find that you are having difficulty feeling where you are on the table after several tries, pause when you open your eyes and feel where your finger is on the table. Feel the angles of your arm, elbow and shoulder. Then move your finger to the pen tip and feel the difference. Go back and forth several times, pausing at each point to really feel the difference between them. It won’t take many more tries to touch the pen tip with your eyes closed. You will probably smile when you finally touch the pen tip but what was the goal of this drill? Many athletes will say, “To touch the pen tip.” No. The goal was to know where your finger was on the table! Think of it this way, if you know where your finger is every time, can’t you eventually put it where you want it to go? By improving this ability to know where your body is in space, you will dramatically improve the way you perform at almost anything that you do.
Often a coach will immediately tell a player what he or she did “wrong” and then what they should do the next time. This approach, however, slows down the learning process and almost ensures future errors. The reason the error occurred in the first place is because the athlete doesn’t know what happened. How can an athlete improve some aspect of his technique when he doesn’t know what he did in the first place? Often coaches and athletes will guess at what happened rather than knowing what happened. They become like Sherlock Homes and try to use their deductive reasoning. Well, if the ball went…, I must have done… “ They don’t know the answer and therefore they don’t have a clue about how to change from what they did to what they wanted to do.
While giving a presentation to the United States Intercollegiate Lacrosse Association, I asked the coaches in attendance, “How many basketballs can fit, side by side, through a basketball hoop?” Quickly one of the coaches shot back with the correct answer, “Two!” I then asked them, “How many lacrosse balls can fit, side by side, through a lacrosse goal?” The room went silent, filled with blank stares. This was the U.S. Intercollegiate Lacrosse Association, shouldn’t they know that? The answer is 784! They all looked at me skeptically. But it’s true. The goal opening is 6’ x 6’ or 72” x 72”. Each lacrosse ball is 2.5” across. That means 28 balls fit across the width of the goal and 28 balls fit from top to bottom. 28 x 28 = 784! Even with a monster sized goalie in front of the goal, he would only block out 434 balls. That means there are still 350 potential scoring opportunities!
The coaches were just beginning to comprehend the full magnitude of this fact and how much it would help their players perfect the skill required to shoot a ball through any one of those openings. I told them to imagine 784 balls across the front of a lacrosse goal numbered one through seven-hundred and eighty four. Then I asked them to imagine one of their players being able to hit any one of them, such as number 56, on command. Let’s say he takes the shot but instead of hitting number 56 he hits number 60. You might think, “That’s not too bad.” However, consider that missing the target by four balls means that he was off by 10 inches. Ten inches can easily be the difference between a shot bouncing off the goal frame or being blocked by the goalie’s stick. Developing the skill to hit number 56 begins with knowing that the target is precisely number 56 and not number 57 or 55.
There is a world of difference between this precision targeting and shooting toward a general space like the upper or lower corner of the goal. With the intent and focus to hit a specific two and a half inch hole, an athlete will quickly improve his or her ability to feel the difference between any number on the goal. This ability to feel the subtlest changes in force and direction is the key to accuracy and consistency. If you worked on this kind of awareness in whatever activity you are doing, you would become like a human highlight film.
You might say, “That sounds great but how do you actually do it? How do you learn to feel the subtle difference between the movements that result in hitting number 56 and not 55 or 57?” Good question. Let’s say a basketball player has been inconsistent with his free throw shooting. The problem is that his elbow keeps flying out to the side each time he shoots the ball. Most coaches would tell him, “Okay look, you’ve got to keep your elbow in line with the shot” and the player would say something like, “Gotcha coach.” He takes another shot and, again, the elbow flies out to the side. The coach says, “Now what did I tell you?” “Keep your elbow in line with the shot,” the player responds. Coach says, “Right! Now keep the elbow in.” He takes a few more shots, and each time the same thing happens: his elbow flies out to the side. The same thing keeps happening, again, and again, and again. The coach gets a little annoyed or frustrated at this point, but it’s not as if the player is purposefully throwing his elbow out to the side. But it keeps happening.
There needs to be a different approach. So let’s think about this logically. If his elbow keeps going out to the side even though he wants to keep it in line with the ball, it means that he can’t feel what his elbow is doing when he is shooting. Here’s what the coach could do to help him. Have the player stand on the foul line in his shooting stance with the ball over his head as it would be during a free throw. Next, raise his shooting elbow as far away from his body as possible while he holds the shooting position and tell him, “That elbow position is a one.” Lower his elbow two or three more inches and tell him, “That is a two.” Move it down a few more inches and call that a three, two more inches lower would be a four, and, finally, you would move the elbow directly in line with the ball and say, “That’s a five.”
The coach moves him through all five positions several times, stopping at each one, to emphasize the feeling of his elbow and shoulder with each number. Coach never says, “Try to get a five.” His goal is not to get a five. His goal is to feel how his elbow and shoulder move during the shot. Then, the coach says, “Take a shot and give me a number.” After he takes his shot you say, “Give me a number.” The first time he’s asked, the player might shoot, and then hesitantly respond, “Uhh,
a three?” The question mark says, “I don’t really know or I am not sure.” While he is responding he is watching the coach and trying to read his reaction. He probably expects to be in trouble since he didn’t know the correct answer. But if the coach thought it was closer to a two, he would calmly reply, “I thought it was closer to a two.” Seeing that there is no adverse consequence he tries again and responds with a more confident, “Three.” As the drill progresses he becomes more confident with each answer because he realizes that there is no penalty for a wrong answer. If the coach agreed with the player’s answer he says, “I agree.” If he thought the movement didn’t match the number, coach tells him, “I thought it was…” What happens very quickly, sometimes within ten shots or less, is that the player will begin moving toward the five position without the coach ever asking him to do so. He knew long ago that a five was the most efficient position but without consciously thinking about it he began shooting fours and fives consistently. Remember the goal was not for him to shoot a five but to know where his elbow was on each shot.
Sometimes movements can happen so quickly or be so complex that it is difficult to feel exactly what you did. If you are not able to feel what you have done, try listening to it! While coaching at Boston University and attending graduate school, I worked with an athlete named Declan Haggarty who was born and raised in Ireland but had found his way to Boston on an athletic scholarship. Declan was one of the best collegiate hammer throwers in the country. Both of us were enrolled in a course taught by one of the leading Motor Control & Learning experts in the country, Dr. Len Zaichkowsky. One of the topics we discussed at length was biofeedback. Declan and I started thinking about ways that we could apply what we were learning in class to improve athletic performance.
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