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Mental skills personal experiment (5): first session of mental rehearsal (ridiculous)

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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.

Tags: eastern techniques, energy, focus, martial arts, meditation, mental rehearsal, mental skill, mental skills, performance, powerlifting, qigong, sports psycholgy, sports psychology, strength sports, stress, tai-chi-chuan, weight lifting, weight training, zhan gong, zhang zhuang

Posted January 4, 2009 at 4:50 AM by marilia05 | Permalink | Comments(3)

Comments

Two very good learning points there, both around timing and planning of mental rehearsal. What was the aim of the mental rehearsal? Was it to practice the skill in itself, or to gain some additional benefit from doing it?

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Rob Robson
Co-founder, iStadia.com

Posted by robrobson | January 4, 2009 at 5:02 AM

1. Skill and performance at the actual competition setting. There is only one published paper on strength sports and mental rehearsal at the competitive level, which was done in 1974 (I gotta find it here...). Something that makes strength sports different (but not so much) from others is that neural response to actual maximum effort is intense and slow to recover. Lifters will never attempt or accomplish their real max out of the meet platform. Rehearsal becomes fundamental and has been shown to be the chief statistically relevant variable to explain high performance among competitive lifters. 2. One of the most important workouts at the high competitive level is "sustaining work": you just hold the loaded bar beyond your supposed 100% max effort. You never actually lift - just hold. This way, you are trying to provoke neural adaptation to the situation itself and to the relation with maximum loads. As I see it, mental rehearsal is complementary to this workout (at one level). 3. In mental rehearsal you can review your "checklist" a number of times which would be absurdly impossible in any training situation. You can never do more than just a couple of heavy lifts in a week, and just a couple of such weeks in a year. When you do that, it is pretty hard to remember the checklist, since you never get to practice it. Failure usually comes from getting confused with technical items of the checklist. 4. The third item is more interesting , but I need some time to reply. It concerns the actual Qigong application to real life experience and how you may rehearse it in order to be able to "summon" these "unusual powers" when they are needed. More later!

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Marilia Coutinho, Ph.D.

Posted by marilia05 | January 4, 2009 at 12:31 PM

I AM HAVING TROUBLE WITH THIS EDITOR, WHICH BUNDLES MY TEXT AND SORT OF IGNORES MY PARAGRAPHS... 1. Skill and performance at the actual competition setting. There is only one published paper on strength sports and mental rehearsal at the competitive level, which was done in 1974 (I gotta find it here...). Something that makes strength sports different (but not so much) from others is that neural response to actual maximum effort is intense and slow to recover. Lifters will never attempt or accomplish their real max out of the meet platform. Rehearsal becomes fundamental and has been shown to be the chief statistically relevant variable to explain high performance among competitive lifters. [paragraph] 2. One of the most important workouts at the high competitive level is "sustaining work": you just hold the loaded bar beyond your supposed 100% max effort. You never actually lift - just hold. This way, you are trying to provoke neural adaptation to the situation itself and to the relation with maximum loads. As I see it, mental rehearsal is complementary to this workout (at one level). [paragraph] 3. In mental rehearsal you can review your "checklist" a number of times which would be absurdly impossible in any training situation. You can never do more than just a couple of heavy lifts in a week, and just a couple of such weeks in a year. When you do that, it is pretty hard to remember the checklist, since you never get to practice it. Failure usually comes from getting confused with technical items of the checklist. [paragraph] 4. The third item is more interesting , but I need some time to reply. It concerns the actual Qigong application to real life experience and how you may rehearse it in order to be able to "summon" these "unusual powers" when they are needed. [paragraph] More later!

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Marilia Coutinho, Ph.D.

Posted by marilia05 | January 4, 2009 at 12:32 PM