Mental skills and personal experiment (13): greater self-awareness
The first powerlifting week was over yesterday. To be more precise, Friday.
The heavy workout days were Monday (bench press), Tuesday (squat) and Friday (deadlift). I already reported what happened at the bench press heavy day.
The squat day surprised me. Unlike the bench press, in which I believe I lost very little strength, the squat felt heavy. Besides that, I decided to train at the fancy health club that sponsors me, and not at my original team gym. I never actually learned how to properly wrap my knees. I always had someone there to do it for me – and they are the best, at Paraisopolis. At the health club, I must wrap my own knees. No one knows how to do it and the best they can do is watch.
Tuesday turned out to be a contest between knee wraps and myself, where the wraps had were far better prepared. After the second attempt at actually squatting with my own wrapping, sound common sense indicated I should give up. So, I just called it a day in terms of heavier training and made it into a “knee wrap training session”. Interesting, though, is that I was able to actually concentrate on the work, in spite of the expected frustration with the weight. I was actually pretty satisfied.
Wednesday and Thursday were much more complicated. Thursday would be the great day in which I would be teaching a course on powerlifting to Physical Educators at the Health Club. The reason for this was a project designed by the general Manager to create a “powerlifting product”. It was a lot of responsibility, the product is actually my brain-child and all the administrative procedures went wrong – it seems we have trodden a few toes. I really have a hard time understanding unspoken confrontation.
There was no workout Wednesday, and also no sleep. Thursday became quite a successful and productive professional day and a total athletic disaster. I managed to do three exercises (I had taught four classes, two of them included practical lessons in which I lifted a lot). I did accomplish the “summoning of mental achievements” into the session itself for the first and second exercises. The third was irregular and when I started the fourth I realized I was “cold” inside: there was nothing to summon. The bar never left my chest.
Friday was deadlift day. A new member of the team decided to learn the lift while I was training. That means requesting my attention to teach it. To my surprise, my lifting itself was pretty easy, needing just a few seconds to focus and execute the lift according to what had been previously rehearsed.
The level of self-awareness during the lifts is far beyond what I had experienced even on the best of my past training days. The ability to “look inside” while lifting seems to be natural.
The funny thing is that after deliberately quenching and struggling to keep quenched the tendency to become an observer during mental rehearsal, I think I learned to actually observe myself while physically performing an action. I am really not sure about this. Might be just a much more accurate self-awareness, but my impression is that I had a little movie of myself performing the lift while actually doing it…
Weird… something to be further explored.
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Marilia Coutinho, Ph.D.
Mental skills and personal experiment (12): getting physical
Today was my first physical powerlifting workout. Benching. Boy, how I missed that bar… These “neural vacations” have been a torture.
Apart from real fun, I obviously felt my elbows. Both – more the left than the right one, which makes sense: the ugliest injuries had been on the left arm.
I am being a good girls and strictly following the periodized spreadsheet. My desire was to load disk after disk on that bar, but I controlled it. Which was good, because I then concentrated on the items I had been “mentally rehearsing” the previous weeks.
Guys, it works: the workout today was precisely what I had rehearsed. Even with people talking to me the whole time about various issues (we are two days from a course I will teach the instructors about lifting kinesiology and they are quite anxious), focusing was easy. “Summoning” the imagery I had created during the mental rehearsal was the hardest part, but feasible.
Before I got inside the power rack for my scheduled workout, accident images kept popping to my mind. I was troubled by them – I thought they were maybe caused by the videos I chose for the course. But now I believe the mental rehearsal “intervening thoughts” might have been the expression of a fear. After all, I almost died in 2007 with one of these accidents. The actual physical contact with the bar dismissed them all.
Tomorrow will be squatting day. Mental rehearsal today was full of accident “intervening thoughts”. Observation: also in 2007 I broke my tibia while squatting over unstable surface.
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Marilia Coutinho, Ph.D.
Mental skills and personal experiment (11): more details
After a few days of total “energy work” rest and some improvement of my labirynthitis, I resumed the experiment.
Today I believe I chose the best sequence: breathing exercises, seated meditation, zhan zhuang and, in the end, mental rehearsal. This sequence seems to provide the best condition for each practice, one being preparatory for the other. Meditation after mental rehearsal is hard, since it is quite an arousing and tiring exercise. Mental rehearsal before anything else is difficult, since I am not sufficiently concentrated.
Again I focused on that specific difficulty I had concerning the chest stop. A second insight emerged then: not only I was scared by the expected “energy sink” at that point, but by becoming anxious to press I was systematically losing control over the eccentric phase. It occurred to me during and after this mental rehearsal that I must introduce eccentric “physical” training in my workout routine. Not just sustaining, not just finalization, but something rarely done in bench press pre-contest meso-cycles: eccentric over-max training.
That I will do tomorrow.
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Marilia Coutinho, Ph.D.
Mental skills and personal experiment (10): sick but strong
Hot weather and my organism simply don’t match. Yet my house doesn’t have air conditioning (nor my car). Weird thing… it didn’t use to be this hot in São Paulo… I was born here and although I haven’t lived here all my life, I used to survive pretty well in the past. I think I’m headed for some changes – at least concerning air conditioning.
I’m sick again, but I feel great except for the fact that I am so dizzy that I have to hold on to things in order not to fall. We (my friend and I) considered the possibility that this was a result of a wrong turn in my Qigong workouts. We have re-examined this hypothesis in the light of my past reactions to heat: plain terrible, simple as that.
It was a nice and quite productive day. My brain works fine and my mood is ok, but the culprit seems to be the choclea: four liters of water weren’t enough to prevent a certain dehydration, it seems.
Anyway, I did all my “qigong/mental rehearsal” practice as always, only avoided heavy metal during Zhan Zhuang and added the “qigong sequence” – a very nice collection of exercises supposedly efficient to “unblock” energy flow and make you feel better. Since it really made me feel better, our first hypothesis sounded right. As soon as I moved my head again, though, I noticed there was a problem with the HEAD, not the MIND.
There might be a feedback mechanism there, anyway. This was the worst heat induced labirynthitis case I’ve ever had and although it is hot, I’ve had other hot days in my life.
Mental rehearsal is getting better and easier, especially concentrating on the “participant” role.
Also the strength workout went out fine – it might be just an impression, but the actual loads I did were slightly higher today and the whole thing felt lighter, while the rest of the gym was complaining they were unable to do anything because of the heat. The only thing that was pretty hard was to walk from one place to the other, or move up or down (sitting down, getting up, turning round were all ridiculous).
Apart from surviving the heat, the rest went fine today.
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Marilia Coutinho, Ph.D.
Mental skills and Personal Experiment (9): “Power Zhan Zhuang”
As a sequence to my last findings, I decided to keep the “industrial, gothic-like, heavy-whatever” soundtrack and extend the background experiment into Zhan Zhuang.
1. I defined the order of items that were to fit into the soundtrack. There was a sort of techno-house music from Camille Jones called “The Creeps” which I always found interesting for “warm-up” focusing. That was the first item. Then obviously Feuer Frei (Rammstein), followed by Ich Will (Rammstein), Feuer Frei again and Six Days.
2. That allowed me to explore my weak point in bench press technique (the chest stop) both raw and equipped. I gave special attention to using the Super Duper and rehearsing the pressure sensation and the resulting carry-over. Not very successful at that.
3. I also tried to create and repeat another serious pitfall in my performance: losing scapular abduction when around maximum load. I reproduced the pressure and joint “discomfort” (I must change this representation) caused by very heavy loads when you first hold the bar – a sort of “sustaining” mental workout. And concentrating in not losing scapular abduction.
4. After that I used something with a high emotional impact on me to relax and finalize the mental rehearsal with the actual “success feeling”: The Queen’s “we’re the champions”. This song was released a little before I was a very successful fencing athlete and it has always been linked to the sensation of climbing the highest podium position. Cool.
5. Done with rehearsing, I moved to another room and did breathing exercises and seated meditation. Very easy. The meditation lasted for about 10 minutes. I might have been anxious because of the next step, already planned.
6. Which was “soundtracked” Zhan Zhuang. This time the sequence was Apocalyptica’s “One”, followed again by Feuer Frei and Six Days.
7. “One” produces results (in any respect) not far from those Classical music does. Very effective for the
Zhan Zhuang practice, helped to hold focus into “concentrating” energy and all that. Feuer Frei totally changed the atmosphere, but did not disrupt the exercise. Only I opened my stance and sat lower on the standing position, almost like a horse stance. I sweated a lot and might have unnecessarily contracted the left deltoid. The exercise lasted 12 minutes, which was pretty long considering my previous attempts.
The scientific literature seems to be out of consensus as to whether mental rehearsal leads to SKILL LEARNING or SKILL IMPROVEMENT or refinement. Some of the studies suggest that it is really effective in training what the subject already learned “physically”. That makes me think if there isn’t a gradient in this respect and mental rehearsal should become the most effective when synchronically complementing “physical” training.
I believe I am refining a framework that will become much more useful once I resume my proper powerlifting training. I am still in preparation – we must strictly follow our periodization for competition, and I have still one more week to go with preparatory movements. In ten days I shall actually start squatting, benching and deadlifting. That is when the real action begins…
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Marilia Coutinho, Ph.D.
Mental skills and Personal Experiment (8): soundtrack and the right focus
Today I decided to refine my mental rehearsal technique and focused in one specific lift and one specific challenge: the bench press and the chest stop. I believe doing this was more productive than going through all the three lifts, creating a full powerlifting meet mental scene.
Many interesting observations:
1. I think I found out why the chest stop is a problem, besides the physiological fact that it is a problem (isometric contraction with fully stretched pectoral muscles and loss of elastic strength plus other problems). I think I finally SAW that I fear the chest stop. I am not sure why – it can be a fear of being squished (I don’t think so – never happened to me) or a fear of the “strength sink”. That makes me lose control and become desperate to lift again. As it became automatic, I lost the consciousness that what lies under this urge to go into concentric phase is FEAR.
2. Therefore, I produced a visual image of strength storage during the short chest stop and repeated the mental experience until it became “nice”. One thing powerlifting is for me, is the second (often the first) greatest source of pleasure. So, there you go: associate the chest stop with pleasure.
3. Rehearsing one lift, or even one movement in the lift during the rehearsal session is easier concerning quenching the “observer” response.
4. I did all this listening to my Sharm meditation/whatever synthesized sound. Later, while browsing something on the web, I played my “platform” music – basically two Ramstein songs and DJ Shadow Six Days remix. Well… it was MUCH MUCH easier to perform basically everything, including concentrating in the “participant” role. Probably because I “mental rehearsed” lifting thousands and thousands of times listening to that. Might work with War drums or other warrior-like music or (real heavy) heavy metal powerlifters usually enjoy.
5. Still a little bit of headache in some finalization movements, but much less than two days ago.
6. Meditation was less effective, no idea why.
I did some research in recent medical literature concerning mental rehearse and gathered them here: http://www.bodystuff.org/mentalrehearsalBIB.html
There is also a bunch of books about it that I haven’t actually looked at here: http://books.google.com.br/books?uid=9582357440004992726&rview=1
This is all for today
Mental skills and Personal Experiment (7): head-ache and strength
Just a short note today (late).
1. Did my mental rehearsal early in the afternoon. I kept fighting the participant-observer shifts that seem to come natural. And when I really imposed the participant perspective and concentrated on TECHNIQUE, I ended up with an acute head-ache at the end of the lift. I noticed I was going into apnea along the lifts, exactly as real, “presencial” lifts. Maybe this is the reason, since you can repeat the lifts so many times mentally and that means going into apnea that many times as well.
2. When I concentrated instead on the Qi experience, the head-ache was lighter. Also, the experience was more “unreal”, much like a “perfect lift” is in reality (the sudden loss of individuality). No, this I could not achieve yet.
3. Ended the session quite tired and decided to meditate at this time, with the head-phones and the weird sound. I went into a 20 min trance – very strange.
4. Had texts to finish and then went to the gym. Today was Pilates day – I am taking Pilates seriously – the basis of his propositions are sound and interesting. It was the first time I actually felt I could use the power-box effectively. After that, I did a short leg workout. Slow and concentrated movements. Believe it or not, the control level over the movements with a fully loaded leg press (haven’t begun the powerlifting macro-cycles yet – still into the adjustment and preparation cycle) was perfect.
Jusq´ici, tout va bien… (this is a French joke about a man thrown from a top floor on a building and reporting his fall at every floor – no, I don’t think this is dangerous… just a joke).
Mental skills personal experiment (6): “Observer X Participant” in mental rehearsal
[Reminding all that I have trouble with this editor and it usually ignores my paragraphs…]
1. UPDATES: I am beginning to time my “mental workouts”: meditation and zhan-zhuang, for now. I don’t believe it is relevant to time mental rehearsal. Zhan-zhuang is getting easier, but it is still very uncomfortable. It used to be quite easy, sometimes easier to focus than the seated meditation. I wonder if this is related to the fact that when I did that before, I was doing other qigong exercises regularly. Mental rehearsal today was much easier to observe:
a. “Observer X Participant”: most passionate lifters intuitively rehearse. They rehearse while driving, showering and even pretending to talk to someone else (boring). I had never realized that these “intuitive rehearsals” are a hybrid practice between acting out the situation mentally, bringing feelings and sensations as if it were actually occurring, and observing oneself doing it (as if in a movie). Now that I am conscious of this difference, I can’t say whether it is mostly as observer or mostly as participant that I have intuitively rehearsed before. One important empirical observation is that whatever it is, part of the time the experience elicits motor response. I remember once running at the treadmill and noticing a group of friends laughing at me. They said I was deadlifting “intensely” while running. I also remember squatting at the shower. Friends reported benching at the shower. A good mental rehearsal, however, has to be mostly PARTICIPANT. You can observe yourself in training or competition videos – I feel the effective way of rehearsing is concentrating on your self-perception. I tried this today and it was hard.
b. Mind tricks: I still can’t figure why my mind keeps playing these stupid tricks, like making me lift the bar from the rack unbalanced (I never did that) or, worse, this ridiculous leaning of the torso (a mistake which I really never do). I have tried instead to concentrate on what I KNOW are my usual mistakes (like “dancing” with the bar while walking back instead of a straight step) or insufficient stabilization of the bar on the chest in the bench-press. It seemed to work.
c. Integrating the qigong perception: hardest, but the most intense part of the “workout”. I believe this is probably the most subjective part of this practice. I guess each person must find a set of visual and sensory clues to something that is invisible and hardly sensory. For me, it is a white-hot ball under my navel that spreads light towards different parts or the body as they are recruited for the lift. This process results in a completely bright body (I see my hands and the parts of my body visible to me during the lift, which are few, very bright as if they were magma) and a weird feeling of cold heat. I think I have to elaborate on that because it is not making much sense.
2. A friend reminded my yesterday that tai-chi itself is somewhat a hybrid of “mental rehearsal” and practice itself all the time, in opposition to kung-fu, where the two dimensions are separated. During a tai-chi practice, you must be fully conscious of the qigong work going on in your body, whether in motion or still (zhan zhuang). He also reminded me you probably must go on practicing qigong exercise proper in order to be able to “summon” them during mental rehearsal AND during the actual “application”. Standing positions are thought to provide Qi accumulation, whereas other exercises provide flow and skill on the manipulation of the Qi. I am aware that those that are reading my account as if zhan zhuang and qigong were not more than meditation exercises will be quite skeptic. As I said before, this experiment is extremely hard for someone (like me) with traditional western scientific training, since I don’t have where to start for a methodological design, to start with. I consider this closer to a “case study”, whatever the result may be, than and experiment proper, since besides a few quantitative measurements, all I am doing is recording the experience.
3. My annual periodization: http://www.bodystuff.org/2009geral.xls
Mental skills personal experiment (5): first session of mental rehearsal (ridiculous)
Yesterday was not a heavy workout day and I did a number of other things related to training, mostly physiotherapy and pre-hab stuff.I followed the whole breathing-meditation-zhan-zhuang sequence and it was pretty ok: lasted a bit longer and less distracted/irritated at zhan-zhuang. Maybe it’s time to start timing my practice. I had decided that it was also the day to start mental rehearsal. It was really stupid and there is no excuse for what I did: unlike the “Eastern-approach-mental-skill-translation” issue, where there is virtually no research and published material on, mental rehearsal has been studied and discussed. So… it was not so much an “intuitive” approach I adopted, it was a plainly stupid and careless one.First, I decided to do it at night, before bedtime (!!). I neglected the “small detail” concerning physical arousal that results from visualization. I must have made intense scapular abduction movements, triceps contraction, glutes contraction and isometric contraction of the quadriceps and hamstrings about a hundred times and ended up alert and sleepless. Ridiculous. Second, I did not script the rehearsal conveniently. It went on more like obsessive thought, re-starting sequences without much planning. As a result, intervening images started to spoil the rehearsal: as I was visualizing a squat, for example, I would lose balance and lean forward, losing the lift. At the bench press, I guess I lost the elbow extension movement twice, with a sudden back-kick movement just like the one that resulted in my accident in 2007 (the bar, loaded with 110kg, was thrown at my face – a couple of friends unacquainted with powerlifting were spotting and didn’t catch the bar – I almost died). Only by the end of the rehearsal session did I realize I had to take the mental-“energy”-skill into the visualization scene. I needed to create a visual description of the Qi experience. Once I did that, deadlifts were the best part of my “mental” workout.So that’s it for today.Mental skills personal experiment (4): Back on track
Having survived the Holidays, I’m back to my personal experiment.
This is the third day I follow the whole plan, including breathing exercises, meditation, zhan zhuan and the scheduled workout. The first day is always a bit hard after I stop for more than a week, but I believe it is pretty much like training in general: people who have practiced before have some sort of “practical memory” and they recover their ability fast. In strength training, people have different (yet not sanctioned by the scientific community) names for this: muscle memory, neural memory and others.
The only empirical claim that can be made is that previous experience facilitates recovery of skill performance – whether motor skills, strength or mental (meditation-like).
As much as I have prepared my yearly periodization with 4 competitive macro-cycles, I have included the experiment in the daily routine.
Yesterday was an easier-to-focus workout than all the previous weeks workouts.
Another interesting observation is that meditating AFTER a workout produced much more intense reactions. I had taken a carbo supplement by Labrada that contains a lot of caffeine and some taurine – that must be taken into account. This supplement usually helps a lot in inter-set recovery during heavy workouts, but I notice it also makes me more alert, without getting agitated or jittery as with other bio-active substances (such as anfetamines or, for other people, ephedrine – ephedrine has no effect on me, I wonder why).
Might it be that it also facilitates focus?
Visualization became vivid, colors intense, body sensations precise.
Has anyone heard of a synthesizer software called Sharm? You can produce sounds that are supposed to be focus-enhancers, or sleep-enhancers or whatever. I tried a couple of months ago and I entered a sort of trace. I was wondering if it could be useful once I start the lift rehearsals. I plan to make them daily routine as well.
Enough for today.
Tomorrow I’ll most my competition calendar and “regular” workout periodization on my web-site and a link here.
Marilia Coutinho, Ph.D.
