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Protein Shake for Thought #2: Muscle Memory

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 19:31:02 +0000

It’s kind of amazing that we don’t have to relearn how to walk, speak, read, or throw a shot put every single day. Thankfully humans have been able to evolve a mind that holds facts and movements to be brought up for later use.
Usually memory is thought of within the context of knowledge. Good memory is helpful for remembering the rout to get home, to pass your biology test, or to remember you forgot to turn the stove off before you left for work (which, believe me, will lead to your eggs exploding everywhere). But beyond remembering facts or ideas the brain also stores memories about movement. This is muscle memory, and it’s absolutely essential to getting out of bed in the morning and winning the World Series.
Muscle memory is the ability for the body to perform movement almost in an unconscious automatic manner. The ability to do a perfect snatch, to throw the tightest spiral possible, to exactly kick the ball into the goal at the perfect height above the defender. All without you hardly thinking about it. Like your body is able to do it all on it’s own, all it takes from your conscious mind is the decision to do so.
A lot of y’all probably already are endowed with some muscle memory for everyday tasks. How many of us can type on the computer with our eyes closed? I’m doing it right now. Only thing I left out was a u in computer.
That’s because so many of us pretty much grew up typing on computers. It has been instilled within most citizens of the first world since the mid 1990s.
In fact, when I was in elementary school, in the early and mid 90s, we had to have typing practice once a week in my school’s computer lab. At the time I guess teachers thought that these kids would actually need to be taught how to use a keyboard. But I’m pretty sure that has about died out. Computers and typing on them are so prevalent in our lives that kids start learning on their home computer shortly after learning to walk and talk. And those of us who learned to walk and talk use computers so much in our everyday life that we rack up all that typing practice almost non stop.
Now typing is pretty much instinctive for just about everyone who can fit their hand on a keyboard.
And think about the other side of the coin. My hand writing is absolutely awful. That’s because anything I hand write is temporary, and I’m probably the only person who has to read it.
I still usually do my initial brainstorming and rough drafts for essays, papers, and this blog in a spiral notebook. If you tried to look through that you would never be able to decipher it. But I’m able to relay all my thoughts to you from this divine computer intervention.
The basis of muscle memory is the physiological connection of motor skills from nerves througout our body and the brain. Essentially a motor skill is a movement that we have to first learn, and then practice to make it automatic. It’s something you start out having to think about but eventually you can get it down without thought. This is anything from babies learning how to walk to learning how to shoot a basketball.
Another term associated with muscle memory is motor learning. Motor learning pretty much describes the internal process the brain and body take to motor skills, be they basic or more complex.
Like everything else in our body it all starts with the firing of neurons in our brain and then the path down the spinal cord and nervous system to initiate physical movement. Muscle memory really doesn’t have anything to do directly with the muscle. There are no neurons or nerves that store information in a muscle. The skills and memory used for muscle memory come from the brain.
The cerebellum is the area of the brain that stores, learns, and transmits all the information for with motor control. The memories associated with muscle memory are stored here. Over time movements that are repeated get stored here, and the more times you repeat a movement the more memory you store about that movement. Essentially you memorize the movements for downhill skiing just as you would memorize the date of the fall of Constantinople for a history class (which is of course May 29, 1453).

I’m sure you long ago realized where all this repetition takes place, in practice. Every time you go to your football practice, tennis lessons, do sets of 5 snatches in a row, or pull out your cello, you’re practicing. You’re sending the information of movement through your body into your brain where the memory of it is stored. To develop muscle memory you have to of course, learn and practice these movements.
The book Outliers has become pretty popular in the motivational and self-help genre. Because of the success of Outliers the 10,000-hour theory has also gotten to be a very well known theory. For those who aren’t familiar the 10,000-hour theory states that no one is able to truly master anything until they have had 10,000 hours of practice at it.
Think back to when you first started learning all the skills of your prospective sport (or musical instrument, poetry writing, physics calculations, whatever it is that you do) and hopefully you can roughly estimate how many hours of pure practice have elapsed up until the present.
It’s probably not too close to 10,000 hours. If it is, congratulations, please give us all tips on how to stay the course to achieving that much practice time.
Within that 10,000 hours of practice you’re developing all kinds of motor control and muscle memory. 10,000 hours worth of repetition and performance builds up and is all stored in your brain. Yes, we all pretty much have the capacity to master almost anything simply because we have the capacity of working and storing 10,000 hours of muscle memories and motor skills in our brain.
Of course the ultimate goal of sport is not practice but competition, performing at your very best to win. Any competition or performance is essentially showing off how well you’ve retained all that information. Whoever demonstrates that they have the most information, and has perfected it best wins.
Of course there’s a downside to constant practice. If you were to go out all day and all night trying to practice you’d get monstrously tired. When you start getting tired you start getting sloppy. When you start having sloppy practice your brain may start retaining the all the inaccuracies. Then when you need the correct movement information your body will only have the wrong ones you taught yourself by over training yourself.
So now you know why we’re able to walk, or run a 400-meter race without relearning how every single time. Thank you cerebellum and nervous system for making it possible.
I encourage everyone to think about what all memory storage and memory transmission means.
Repeating knowledge or movement makes those things get stored in the brain. Every repetition adds to your memory. This means that we can essentially program our brains like a computer. We change the structure and how neurons fire by working at storing memories.
Next time you spike a volleyball or launch a javelin you’ll know that it’s not just your strong legs and shoulders that give you this ability, but your own hard work that put the memories of those movement in your brain allowing you to unleash your body on command.

This Is Why I Coach

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 05:57:53 +0000

2012 Austin Golden Gloves

Just want to congratulate Team Perazim for an amazing showing at the tournament this past week.

The ability to mentally and physical give everything you have for 3 rounds, is all you can ask for form your fighters. These 5 men and 1 woman did just that during the 2012 Austin Golden Glove Tournament. During the grueling 8 week camp leading up to the tournament everyone one of these fighters battle his/her own demons. Whether it was getting through workouts, the intense training schedule, staying focused, or letting in self doubt, the love and support of all the coaches and their teammates enabled each of them to endure and conquer the hardest weeks of training they have ever been subjected to.

During the tournament some calls did not go in our favor, but people took notice of these 6 warriors both mental and physical toughness. Our fighter’s relentless determination to finish the fight makes us more proud of them then they will realize. They kept their composure when calls didn’t fall in our favor. The support they gave each other when self doubt crept in revealed we didn’t just build a team of fighters but a family of fighters.

This tournament not only left our fighters with a huge bucket of emotions but also us coaches. We understand that many more teams will come and go, but the first is always the most memorable. We can only pray the generations of teams to come will be able to live up to the lasting impact the 2012 Austin Golden Glove team left on our hearts. As coaches we want to thank each and every one of these 6 amazing athletes for pushing themselves when they wanted to quite, encouraging others when they thought more was not possible, and most importantly believing in each other when times were tough.

As a coach you pray for individuals that exhibit champion like qualities, we at TruEffort Training and Perazim Boxing were privileged enough to have 6 fight for us in the 2012 Austin Golden Glove Tournament. This team of fighters is the essence of why we coach.

A big thanks to Coach Xavier for his belief in my coaching staff and me to get these fighters conditioned for the tournament. Our styles and love of sport complement each other in such a way that using this team as a stepping-stone will ensure those upcoming generations of fighters will be equipped for battle mind, body, and soul.

Protein Shake for Thought #1: An introduction on how to recover the mind, heart, and will.

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 21:14:47 +0000

Welcome athletes, excersise nuts, sports fans, TruEffort members, web surfers, Austinites, Texans, and maybe Nova Scotians. Welcome to the Protein Shake for Thought. This informative, and performance enhancing blog is the newest strategy in TruEffort’s mission of developing athletes in newer and smarter ways. (Don’t worry it won’t show up on drug tests.)

Protein Shake for Thought, or the Shake, is a powerful punch of nutrients, vitamins, and ideas to help build the most important muscle in your body. The brain. Regular reading of this blog will lead to increased stamina of thought, stronger awareness, and a powerful ability to understand.

You may say to yourself “That’s incredible. How and why are the good people at TruEffort providing these incredible results? How can a blog produce so much?”

TruEffort prides itself on a holistic approach to building athletes. We want to continue to educate beyond exercise and to foster an environment of thoughtfulness. The coaches here feel that it is important for athletes to never leave their game at the gym door.

Ok, that was the sales pitch. As corny as that was this is something TruEffort is serious about. So now that I’ve reigned your attention in I will actually explain what in holy heck we mean by putting a blog up for a gym.

The choice to work out and compete extends into everything else we do in life, and our life has to flow into our training and competing.TrueEffort wants to provide the highest level of athletic preparation possible, Protein Shake for Thought aims at building the knowledgeable athlete. The Shake literally wants to turn knowledge into power.

We hope that this will be a good chance to show that the coaches of TruEffort try to achieve such an ideal. This is an opportunity for us as staff of the gym and the coach of every individual to voice what may be on our minds concerning sports, training, health, sports science, and our own stories of how we got where we are and how far we plan to go.

At the same time we hope that members of our gym have the opportunity to do the same. Anyone interested in what we have to say has the place to investigate the inner-workings of our minds here. But we also want feedback of what’s on your mind about training, or anything else.

In short, a dialogue between the coaches and all those who we train to further each other’s interest in knowledge about exercise, athletics, and anything those relate to.

As I said earlier this blog is the opportunity to impart a little more knowledge to our athletes than what they may have picked up at the gym. I think a hearty dose of science, history, and philosophy will have an enormous impact on someone’s ability to train and compete.

I am a big believer in the words that Socrates spoke “The unexamined life is not worth living.” I think the unexamined sport is not worth competing in. The unexamined athlete is not worth the preparation. The unexamined win is not worth the success.

This blog is meant to be a study of ourselves as athletes. A tool used to develop an understanding that reaches beyond the traditional areas of training and translates into a knowledgeable competitor.

You think about what you do right or wrong during any practice or workout, but you need to maintain that sort of thought after you leave. There is always more to contemplate on whether it be about specifics to get right in the future, or why you’re willing to go through sets of 10 rep squats, and ice baths.

One thing I want to bring to this is a furthering of education about one’s own sport. To get you thinking beyond simply sinking three point shots, striking out batters, leading a 400-meter hurdle race. There is always something a little more to know.

The Shake will try to delve into the history and rules of different sports. Get you thinking about what makes your sport great, understand why you love your sport, and unlock more information then any of your competitors would know.

Does it not blow your mind that basketball started as a bunch of guys throwing balls at peach baskets? Think about how far it has come since then. Do those peach baskets have any direct connection with various free throw techniques, or does it say something about the recent NBA lockout controversies?
See got you thinking hard about basketball. Hopefully we can plunge into even more facts and thought puzzles about any sport you can think of.

Going along with knowing more about your own sport leads me to sport science. When it comes down to it exercise and sport is nothing more than physics and chemistry.

Sometimes we may explain how to do certain exercises, why it helps training, how it factors into your specific needs. But everything we are able to tell you at the gym face to face has a huge base of work and reasoning behind it. There is never going to be enough time to dive into the full force of that information in the middle of your workout. The shake wants to get you learning about kinesiology, the study of movement, helping you to know exactly what your body needs to excel.

Why do we make you squat almost all the way to the ground? Why do wrestlers have to do distance running in training if they never travel outside of a mat in competition? What do Russian twists have to do with your ability to hit a home run? All question that can be answered by an in depth look into the mechanics of movement

Lastly, I cannot stress the importance of self-examination. Everyone’s life and training are different. If you don’t ask deep questions about why you’re here, why you put yourself through all this, why winning tastes so beautiful, why just being a part of the wider body of athletics feels so good, you’ll hit a wall. Your performance will mean nothing more than an ego boost.

Our culture in general is lacking the ability to reflect and think through all the various aspect of what they do. I can’t build a more reflective society on my own, but my goal here is to build a knowledgeable athlete. And I will for sure do all I can to achieve that.

I can’t make you major in philosophy in college like I did, but I’m sure gonna try to help you understand science, and history, and make you critically study your self within the context of sport and training. I hope that Protein Shake for Thought will be a delicious, nutritious, and ambitious aid along your path to victory and enlightenment.