Mirror Neurons II, Putting it into practice, and some examples

So we're back to talking about Mirror Neurons and their applicability to more effective athletic training. In my last entry on this subject, we looked at the concept and the science behind it, albeit in layman's terms. If you buy into the science and the experiences of those who've benefitted from it, then it's pretty hard to deny the value of learning to utilize techniques to leverage this innate skill.

So now it's time to talk about how the rubber meets the road. How to put these principles into practice, both as a coach and as an athlete? For me, long before I was ever formally introduced to the science behind the process, I would dub my favorite music onto VHS tapes of world cup racing. At the time, back in the mid to late eighties, finding world cup footage was pretty difficult. Outside of the Olympics, skiing wasn't often broadcast in the US, and recording shows in Europe still presented the problem of getting their PAL format translated to something our US VCR's could understand. Can't tell you exactly how I got a ton of world cup skiing footage back then, but let's just say that I did, and that where there's a will, there's a way.

So I would dub the music onto the tapes. At first, this was inspired by a deep desire to shut out Beattie's color commentary, but I had apparently tapped into yet another powerful organic learning technique. As I have mentioned in previous blogs, I spent hours and hours watching the best in the world, to my favorite music, again and again, in the comfort of my own home. Then I started taking the music with me on the hill. Remember when dinosaurs roamed and they first invented the Sony Walkman for cassette tapes? Yeah, that's me in that picture... I skied a lot in the spring at A-Basin in those days.. the ski season high in the mountains of Colorado often stretched well into June. When the music played, all of the repetition of correct ski racing movement patterns that I had "experienced" courtesy of my mirror neurons would come to the surface and onto the hill. My learning ceased being incremental at that point and started to consistently take quantum leaps and bounds. To be sure I worked very hard at everything I was supposed to... but then again so do a lot of people. I'm telling you I would not have gotten to the level I got to, not even close, without the video repetition.

Of course, learning this way isn't the ONLY way to learn. I share it with you here simply because the nature of our sport in particular (e.g. limited time spent actually doing the movement to be learned itself) demands that we utilize these built in learning mechanisms. Ironically, very ironically, the hardest part to grasp, ESPECIALLY for those coaching types whose teaching styles have perhaps unwittingly over the years fallen into patterns supporting their job security, ---is how easy and natural the process is.

Like anything else that utilizes the innate plasticity of our brains, developing the ability to learn by seeing... can itself be learned, developed, honed, perfected. It is much like, nay, EXACTLY like, the acquisition of language. Proper movement is like proper grammar. Eventually you get to a point where, if it sounds right, it IS right. Same with athletics, body movement, skiing, and ski racing in particular. As with language, over time the practitioner gets to the point where if the body's "grammar" feels right, it IS right.

And it is so much easier to employ these techniques these days, people. We live in a high bandwidth, zero transaction cost, information rich society. For our purposes (addressing coaches here), that means there are no excuses for not delivering these learning tools directly to wherever our student's laptops reside. In my world, Universal Sports is the biggest thing since sliced bread. On demand, any time, all the time. Wow! I simply turn their sound on zero, plug my laptop into my big screen, and jam out to whatever my current taste in music happens to be.

Its important to remember the "you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink" concept. You can't set athletes in front of a video screen and order them to utilize their mirror neurons "or else.." If the viewer isn't interested or motivated, the action is pointless. Mirror neurons require that the viewer have "interest" in what they are seeing. And as you may have guessed the intensity of one's interest can run the full spectrum from ice cold, to tepid, to hot, etc. That's why I strongly recommend taking that extra step and personalizing the individual student's videos with music of their choice. Even better, far better, if the students take it upon themselves to do it themselves. From ownership comes empowerment, from empowerment, motivation, and from motivation... interest. Follows is a video I made that I linked on the Loon Race Team website. NEXT ENTRY: "Balance is not a body position."

Zen and the art of ski racing

Recently I've been helping a friend of mine with organizing her yoga retreats, and in doing so, did some focused research (I google'd it..) on yoga travel and the marketing mix of retreats in general. My friend is looking to go international, and having run a few summer race camps overseas and out of country over the years, I thought there would be some knowledge to share. Sure enough, my Macbook Pro yielded its usual window to the world of internet knowledge, and first up was an interesting article published fairly recently in the New York Times about the proliferation of yoga studios beyond spas and retreat centers to mainstream hotels and more traditional resort venues.

This article was helpful in several ways to both my friend and I. As for my yoga friend, it was something of an affirmation to see an article from THE Newspaper of Record pointing out the expansion of an industry niche that precisely fits the business plan upon which she is about to embark. The fact that increasing numbers of mainstream destination hotels are now calibrating their resources to sync up with traveling yoga practitioners can only mean that my friend will have lots more venues at which to plan the perfect yoga experience 'neath skies untouched by city lights, or looking out over the azure waters of Bora Bora... and so on. I'll be the first to sign up, and in fact we are in the beginning stages of creating another something of a first: Skiing and Yoga retreats. Stay tuned.

One thing in the article that caught the attention of yours truly was the mention of a former contemporary of mine: Kristen Ulmer. Ulmer was what I can safely say was an early adopting big mountain skier who in her day could pretty much outski all but a handful of skiers on the planet, men included. To me, the stuff she did still seems incredible, nay, impossible. But, there she is, alive and well, to tell us all about it. Anyway, it seems Kristin has been pursuing a little niche of her own with her company "Ski to Live," which bills itself as "Powerful mindset training for sports and business..." This is the PERFECT transition for someone who made a big name for themselves in the sport, and believe me, she did. What caught my attention was her website's claim that her clinics utilize "world famous Zen Master Genpo Roshi's Big Mind process.. "

As a former world cupper myself who, believe me, read every book under the sun about far eastern philosophy and Zen in particular, this intrigued me greatly. In looking back, my whole competitive ski career organized itself around bringing far eastern ways of knowing into my own practice of the sport that I hold so dear, and, now that I'm fortunate enough to work with young people who are taking on the sport for themselves, I'm able to attempt bringing what I learned into their lives.

So I take such claims with great skepticism. Zen is a buzzword like "fine Corinthian leather..." Show me the money, the beef, the proof in the pudding, etc. I couldn't find anything that Kristin actually wrote or recorded that would betray her deep understanding of satori, other than her beautiful skiing itself, which to be fair is as Zen as it gets, so I guess I will have to sign up for one of her clinics at Alta or Snowbird. She also offers one hour phone counseling.

Neither am I prepared (yet) to fork out $$ for Genpo Roshi's DVD's...

I must tell you that I, a teacher of skiing, do not teach skiing. To clarify.. it does not come from me, not directly anyway. It just doesn't work that way. Rather, I prefer to imagine my role more as facilitator, one who has traveled the path extensively who is able to show the way to those just starting out upon it. I am not the power out there on the mountain. To be sure, the ideas I share about the process may have tremendous power, but those come through me (not from me), and that's another story. No, the real power out there is the mountain, the environment, the large forces that those who are out there in the environment are not only experiencing, but creating, in real time. Further, skiing is all about becoming always aligned with those forces. Hence, skiing has always been one of the great vehicles to understand life: develop an awareness of that which is your world, your reality, then learn your place.. the space you occupy within it, and finally, come into power with it and learn to be wholly creative in, about, and for your own universe. Phew! Or something like that.

When I'm training ski coaches and athletes alike, I find the teacher student relationship remains cleanly defined by this, one of my oft quoted mantras: "The teacher's job is to shine a clarifying light on the path, but the student's job is to actually walk it.." In this regard, everyone has a light to shine.. because everyone has their own unique path to share...

Back from Hood. Lots of data to process. Some notes.

I'll finish up on mirror neurons from the last post, but before I do, some words about the past two weeks. I've been up at Mt. Hood for the past ten days or so, and it's been a long while since I've skied there. For some reason, after I graduated past the development team, we were always going off to New Zealand or S. America. Certainly cost is an issue, but gosh, you can get an awful lot done at Hood with the proper chemical broadcasting apparatus....

Gone are the glacially slow double chairs that begin to turn at 6:30 or so every morning for coaches and staff, 7:00 for everyone else. Detachable quads have taken their place (yes, this is NEW to me...) Also gone are any traces that skiers are the only snowsports participants who want to partake of Oregon's delicious summer snow. Truth... there's a lot of snowboarders up there... lots of camps with buses emblazoned with Nike, Rebok, etc... big names, for a big sport with big money; a great sport to "be seen" in. Very exciting times continue for boarders and their ilk, but the whole counter-culture appeal thing seems long gone. To me, the leading edge of fashion is something that hits you and gets your attention, without giving rise to nausea. There are so many baggy snowpants, dreads, and Dirk Diggler sunglasses now that, gasp, I really don't even see them any more... they're not on my radar. They've also installed several hand tows in and around the parks, so really, the boarding culture is seen but not felt in the lift lines. I like having them there... Their focus on creativity is actually something I think that's undervalued in the sport of alpine ski racing. No doubt this opinion of mine will come out as my posting continues. Hopefully you'll agree in time.

Regardless of how you feel about those who don't slide around on skis, the things that those in x-sports do remain quite spectacular, at least to me. The sport appears to have matured to the point where those who are in it to make a fashion statement only will soon be looking for the next thing that grabs people's attention with clothing, as opposed to miraculous body control and such. When that happens (e.g. form following function rather than the other way around) I'll be even more of a fan.

One thing that hasn't changed at Hood is the snow. Although I haven't been there in over two decades, there seemed to be no sign of global warming. Granted, the end of June is a fabulous time to partake of Hood, but, generally the snowpack this summer season seemed deep enough to last for a good long while.

Salted snow. As I mentioned in a previous post, Hood has a rather unique snow composition, at least to the uninitiated. On a typical 60+ degree day with the sun high in the sky, you can expect a couple of runs in the morning that will either be frozen or will have a nice thin layer of melt on top of mature corn. It's very fun and easy to ski. The thickness of that layer rapidly deepens however, especially towards the bottom of the mountain, and soon it's pretty apparent that the best natural conditions are retreating "up" the mountain as the morning wears on. Most decent ski racers can, will, and should, tune into the conditions in which they find themselves training. Hood is no different... generally salted summer snow firms up OK, but will consistently peel away even with higher edge angles as the athletes challenge the lateral adhesion capacity of this type of snow. The result is a generally later and lower exit beneath the gate that can be pretty frustrating to the uninitiated, especially on the pitch of the upper half of the Palmer lift where most of the training lanes are. As the speeds increase, and exits get lower, most athletes will simply increase their edge angle for better grip (as would usually be effective with mid-winter ice conditions). This doesn't really work as well on summer salted snow. Apparently this hasn't changed.

So what, exactly, can one do? I mean, someone has to figure this snow out and win the race, as it were, and I would in any event assert that the whole point of our sport is to meet the variables present in the sport as they are, as opposed to how we wish they were. Indeed, this ideal is true for most sports.

I often analogize the Formula One race car approach for this type of situation. When Michael Schumacher has a hot surface, he's going to get more drift, all things being equal, out of the same amount of wheel turn. Professional that he is, no doubt he adjusts not only his line but his timing to accomodate this situation. Racers need to nurture this instinct, and trust it, before they tip out of the starting gate when the clock is on and it really matters.

Mirror Neurons: Part I. Powerful training tool for sports in general and ski racing in particular

I happened upon the phenomenon of mirror neurons several years ago. These specialized circuits in the brain were coming very much into vogue in relation to everything from language acquisition to explaining the mechanics of autism. I think I was making a connection in Chicago's O'Hare, browsing the magazines, and here, fighting its way to the forefront between Maxim and Men's Health, was this copy of "Scientific American" with a big color neuron right on the front page. Something about the headline intrigued me, and I picked it up. The article I first read is here.

Although I am neither a scientist nor a regular reader of Scientific American, one of the tag lines relating to the cover story resonated with my experience in how I learned my own ski racing. Something about how we can learn simply by watching. This was not new to me.. and it's probably not new to most modern coaches. I had been watching video to learn since, well, about the time I started to get really really good. As I read the article, first in the airport and then again on my connecting flight, the dots began to connect in a way that helped make a lot of sense about some of the more unexplainable late bloomer aspects (I'm told..) of my ski career. I took notes. I bought the electronic version of the article and sent it along to the coaching staff at Loon Mtn.

Background on mirror neurons: Although they've obviously been "in" the modern brain for a while, they were "discovered" in the 80's and 90's by three Italian neurophysiologists who were studying neurological activity in relation to specific movement. Without going into all of the details, they discovered along the way that about 10% of the motor cortex portions of the monkey's brains they were studying showed nearly identical activity while both performing a movement and watching a movement, hence the "mirroring" terminology used to describe their function.

Most athletes have used, or at least heard of, relaxation and visualization techniques that both refine and improve performance in sport. Using these techniques one can essentially rehearse the correct activity over and over in the mind's eye. It is hugely beneficial and I was fortunate enough to learn this stuff pretty early on during a summer camp with Pepi Stiegler and Otto Tschudi when I was about fourteen years old. One of the limitations with this method however is that the visualization you're replaying may or may not be the correct one. It's almost impossible to conjure up a clear moving image that resonates in your mind's eye, with all of the timing and movement and all of the other orchestrative stuff that inures to ski racing at a high level. So although practicing this way may help.. it doesn't really always work that way. Why? As my mentor used to say... often, when I assured him that "practice makes perfect," he would say: "Does practice make perfect? No! Practice makes permanent. Only perfect practice makes perfect." So, repeatedly visualizing a less than optimal movement pattern only deepens the pattern. And few can visualize something perfectly when they haven't yet done it or even seen it before. If you have a faulty template to begin with, garbage in will equal garbage out.

Well how about watching good skiers ski? Is this an effective way to learn? I contend that it is, and, for the reasons I outline in this post, learning by watching is by necessity in our sport one of the most essential training components of any racer intending to get better quicker.

The function of our brain's mirror neurons takes the technique of learning through visualization one giant step further.

Before we go any further, here is a bit more background courtesy of Jonah Lehrer at Scienceblogs.com.

A quick primer: In 1996, three Italian neuroscientists, Giacomo Rizzolatti, Leonardo Fogassi, and Vittorio Gallese put an electric probe into the premotor cortex of monkeys. They discovered that inside these primate brains there were networks of cells that "store vocabularies of motor actions." Just as there are grammars of language, rules for forming a sentence, there are grammars of movement. These populations of cells are the bodily "sentences" we use every day, the ones our brain has chosen to retain and refine.

But these cells aren't just essential for performing complex actions. As Rizzolatti, Fogassi, and Gallese wrote: "The main functional characteristic of mirror neurons is that they become active both when the monkey makes a particular action (for example, when grasping an object or holding it) and when it observes another individual making a similar action." In other words, these peculiar cells mirror, on our inside, the outside world; they enable us to internalize the actions of another. They collapse the distinction between seeing and doing.

If you pull nothing else from the above, remember that YOU have the ability, already within you, evolved over many thousands of genetic iterations before you, to observe something, and then to collapse the distinction between seeing and doing, without analysis of any kind.

It's kind of a hard wired thing.

If you aren't yet convinced how powerful this is, consider our sport of ski racing. Although our training sessions may range from two to eight hours per day, the actual amount of time spent performing the act itself is ridiculously small by comparison. Most of our training time is spent in that "between time," e.g. riding the lift, talking, waiting, etc. Even six full length runs in the morning and four in the afternoon, considered by many to be as high a volume as is tolerable, you have spent a total of ten minutes out of your entire day performing the act that you're trying to get better at. At 36 direction changes per run, you have exactly 360 turns, 180 on each leg, and the bottom third of each of those runs may be compromised because of the difficulties of executing fine motor control movements while fatigued by the anaerobic nature of our sport. This is hardly the kind of repetition that is going to allow you to learn a complex movement pattern in a variable environment.

If it is true however that observing a thing can be perceived as doing a thing, and that our sport is very largely a mental endeavor in the first instance, you could at the end of that "ten minute" training day go home and watch world class skiers do exactly what you're doing, more "perfectly" than you do it, thousands upon thousands of times. Your mirror neurons are incapable of knowing, or caring, that what you are watching is not you actually doing it. Their job is to learn.

Next post: Putting it into practice, and some examples.

Four Days 'til Mt. Hood skiing. There's bound to be new equipment for sale out there!

It's been almost twenty-two years since I've been to Hood. I think the last time I was there it was a USST fundamentals camp, one of the first that I'd ever been to of that kind. I think it was July of 1988, give or take. We did a lot of interesting stuff there and, lo and behold, I still have some video on VHS. Anyway, I dusted it off.. (the tape AND the memories) here's what I saw:

First, what's with the uniforms? Turquoise & orange?! I guess we were sponsored by Howard Johnson's that year. It looks like I was on green Rossignol 3S's 205's. Big legs, lots of pink day-glow, no pole plant. I recall that I had switched to new boots that spring; Trappeur's (sp?) masquerading as the newly minted Rossignol boot brand. I had been on Raichle for my entire national development and world cup career up until that point, and was only one of two in the world doing tech events on them at that time. Much later, after I had broken my body a bit in those new boots, I remembered my grandfather's quote... "you should boogie with the one that you brought you to the dance..." or something like that. I've used it often since when asked by athletes whether they should switch their gear.

While I am not opposed to switching equipment per se.. indeed, early summer at Hood is precisely the time to do it for most athletes looking for positive change, you should be aware of the following: There has, is, and probably always will be at Hood, courtesy of a lot of manufacturers, reason and opportunity to switch from one's current "dancing partner" as it were, to one with snazzy new sexy graphics and a very smooth sales pitch to boot. My advice: Make equipment changes with great skepticism. At Hood you are likely to find skis that are not only perfectly tuned, but perfectly tuned for summer salted snow. Unfortunately, you likely won't see that type of snow again when you are racing the next season. Ever. At least not until the following spring when the sun gets higher in the sky and temps are consistently above freezing both during the day and the night.

Similarly, a lot of skis that sell well at Hood or during demo days do so because they feel good. Like marketing fine wine (e.g. advertise "dry" and sell "sweet"), many skis, particularly junior ones, are designed with an unrealistically short sidecut radius for a given speed. Why? Substituting sidecut for not being able to generate early edge angle is the easiest way to get the ski to come back into the fall line after transition. Not only will your skis feel like they're stable and underneath you at the top of the turn, most racers interpret that hook at the bottom of the turn as an assurance that they're completing their turns and in control. Don't be fooled. You've traded speed for control. Bear in mind that a well matched GS race ski should always relase down the fall line as much as the racer can tolerate for their age and ability, and will require establishing some higher edge angles above the gate. My experience with junior racers is that they often outgrow their sidecuts long before they outgrow the length of their skis. If you've ever tried to run a GS at speed on slalom skis, you know exactly what I'm talking about. When in doubt, verify your good feelings with an objective measurement.

Which means you must time it and video it. Chronos is the final arbiter of whether our kinesthetic sense of speed out there on the hill is valid, and while I have a few times in my career overridden the clock's sage advice (at my peril.. but that'll be the subject of another post), the data you receive from video and timing tends to be irrefutable. By all means, enjoy the sensations from a new pair of skis much the way you enjoy the sensations of a first date, but do not believe how "good" it feels until you have a fair head to head comparison against your equipment that brought you to where you are now. I just read that... it is not intended to be dating advice.