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