mental skills, eastern martial arts traditions and their application to strength sports

Mental skills, Eastern martial arts traditions and their application to strength sportsTHIS SERIES HAS BEEN PUBLISHED AT “ISTADIA”, A SPORTS NETWORK THAT DOESN’T EXIST ANYMORE. IT HAS BEEN POSTED FROM DECEMBER 2008 TO MARCH 2009. I AM RE-PUBLISHING IT NOW

Marília Coutinho (http://www.bodystuff.org – [email protected])

(DECEMBER 12)

Strength sports are still a lot about pushing the athlete through the stress curve. I am a competitive powerlifter and a researcher and I have been looking at this subject from inside and out. From the inside, there are two distinct approaches to achieving the “special maximum strength” observed in certain meets: the extreme stress-driven performance, with a lot of screaming, hitting and other means of enhancing alertness and stress response, and the focused approach. The latter is less common.

With the help of a more experienced and accomplished lifter, I came to adopt the focused approach about a year and a half ago. We called it the “white chair thing”. Basically, I spent the moments preceding my turn to lift facing the back of an available white plastic chair, emptying my mind. It is hard to claim this is the one or chief reason why my performance leaped to another level, I broke a couple of national and continental records and visibly improved. There were other factors involved.

After this event, however, I started systematically searching for evidence in the literature. Besides a very old article from decades ago showing competent Olympic lifters performed mental rehearsal of their lifts in opposition to less competent ones, there was very little published material. The search brought me to martial arts techniques. That, however, is a whole different realm of encoded knowledge. I wanted to understand the concept and application of QIGONG training to strength tasks.

The only way to do it, it seemed to me, was to learn through practice. I spent one year (from November 2007 to October 2008) learning qigong in a tai-chi-chuan program. During this one year, I was frustrated. My performance was irregular, mediocre at competitions and my injuries were a real impediment.

About three weeks after I quit tai-chi-chuan, however, I started applying some qigong techniques in weight training. The results impressed me. I want to create a self-experiment on this and record my results. I haven’t been doing this the way I want.

I hope to get some feedback, encouragement and even a little scolding if needed to carry on this initiative. If I am right, this might be of great help to many athletes who still believe they need a lot of stress enhancing devices to achieve good marks.

(DECEMBER 9)

December 8 – energy and abdomen (update on mental skill experiment)

- Meditation – about 10’

- Breathing – very little

- Weight training – pecs & triceps general strength, upper back postural

- Stretching

- Flexibility

Details

1. It’s been about one week or a little more since I haven’t practiced meditation. It makes a difference. It seems there’s a breakthrough after 5-7 days continuous practice and the curve of tolerance/body need for meditation enters a plateau

2. Zhan-gong – adapted its practice to this experiment. Works better than other martial qigong exercises I tried. Consists of keeping the traditional zhan-gong position combined with breathing and visualization. Inspiration = flow up from the Earth, up legs, following front part of lower abdomen; expiration = flow down from sky, throat, spine, sacral area, turning in and forward as it reaches lower abd. Breathing this way creates a white glowing ball at lower abdomen. Haven’t done it in a while – makes a great difference.

3. Weight training: almost impossible to apply qigong to any workout exercise yesterday. The gym was full and for some reason too many people decided they wanted to assist me. IMPORTANT: must develop ways to focus and apply energy techniques while under the care of others, since this is what actually happens at competitions. Yesterday I could only practice my “thing” on triceps-pulley and parallel bar exercises. Even without a lot of focus, it was quite effective: breathed in and out zhan-gong-like, visualized the glowing ball, contracted the abdomen and pumped about 10 abdominal expirations. Tried to visualized conducting strength to triceps and pecs, eyes closed. Opening the eyes still spoils the effect – I suddenly lose strength.

Observation: yesterday was the first exceedingly hot day of the year. I have low blood pressure and felt somewhat dizzy and weak. Even in this condition, “focused” exercises were quitedifferent from “non-focused”. Was able to reach (very briefly) the state of disconnection with the environment. I suspect this is the key to it.

Questions:

- How important it is to contract abdomen- Timing- Team-work (in meets and training, how to deal with team-mates and helpers)

(DECEMBER 11)

Mental skills personal experiment (3): Interruption – sick days (other comments)

December 9th has been the first hot day in São Paulo. Quite a few people are sensitive to this sudden transition and I am one of them. Blurred vision, no appetite, extreme fatigue and mental confusion are only some of the symptoms. I only know I am hungry when my head feels heavy and I can’t move – some weird hypoglycemic reaction to heat. Have no idea why.

For this reason, except for meditating, nothing could be done – especially because I passed out trying to work out.

So let’s talk a little about general principles in this experiment.

1. The relevance of the qigong standing position.

Also called “zhang gong” (or zhan zhuang), it is one of qigong’s standing positions. Here is an illustration of one form of going it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhan_zhuang

It seems to me to have evident relations with the Horse Stance in Kung fu (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse_stance ). The Wikipedia text above mentions this relationship.

As a former fencing athlete, I learned that standing positions have more to it than just practicing stability and balance.

First of all, it is a meditation practice. Personally, I feel it is the most effective one. I usually use visualization with breathing during its practice.

I may be wrong, but when I succeeded in practicing zhan zhuang for more than seven or eight days, I noticed that my body adjusted to more sitted positions, approaching more and more the Horse Stance (unintentionally).

In the beginning, it is hard to stand for more than five or eight minutes. Physical discomfort starts interfering with the ability to concentrate and we just lose focus. I decided to time the extent to which my body remained standing each day, and it naturally increases.

The relevance of doing this alone, in undisturbed environments is, as Rob pointed out earlier, to be able to reproduce it in “real performance” environments. Another explanation, rendering on Eastern knowledge systems, is that this practice is designed to built the strength and stamina that will be used, or employed, in other situations. Just like the charging of a battery, that will later be used to perform work.

2. The relevance of sitted meditation

Whole different ball game, but equally necessary. Makes a difference when focus has to be maintained under extreme stressful situations (when everybody else is stressed or trying to get even more stressed). It also seems to make the process of producing the “energy effect” (whatever that is) during strength tasks easier.

Tomorrow I must remember to speak about space – for example, the power cage or the platform as “consecrated ground” where rituals may legitimately be performed. Good occasion to discuss the ritual aspect of these practices.

OBS – Not only these have been exceedingly hot days, but I accidentally ingested a toxic plant. Not fun.

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

(JANUARY 3)

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 post my competition calendar and “regular” workout periodization on my web-site and a link here.

(JANUARY 4)

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.


(JANUARY 6)

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).


(JANUARY 9)

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.

4. Still a little bit of headache in some finalization movements, but much less than two days ago.

5. 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

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

(JANUARY 11)

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…

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

(JANUARY 12)

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.


(JANUARY 18)

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.


(JANUARY 19)

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.


(JANUARY 25)

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.


(FEBRUARY 2)

Mental skills and personal experiment (14): reporting again

I have been silent for a while but not inactive.

To be honest, I have been doing very little “homework” (mental rehearsal, meditation and zhan-zhuang ). The workouts, however, have kept a steady improvement. It is increasingly easier to focus and “summon” the necessary visual clues to perform the lifts.

Maybe this is a period I needed to focus on technique itself. I would much rather attribute this to lack of personal organization, though. Many things happened at the personal, professional and athletic levels. That includes illness in my family and the dissolution of the national sports federation I supported and competed at.

The impact of such an event on any training protocol, including the “mental” one, cannot be underestimated. It means the virtual disintegration of any long term planning. It sort of leaves you in a state of suspended animation.

Following that, the organization of another organization, political issues involved there and other practical matters took priority over all else, since without them, there is no sport, so to speak.

I hope these next two weeks will bring some stability to everything.

Sincronicities considered, it is amusing that I was procrastinating writing the chapter on periodization on my book. Recent events have just shown me how flexible a coach must be and how much she must understand principles of non-linear periodization…


(MARCH 31)

Mental skills and personal experiment (15): end of first meso-cycle

The first properly powerlifting meso-cycle ended four weeks ago. I decided to adopt a different strategy and divided a 12 week meso-cycle into three blocks. The first block ended last week, with the very-low volume X high-intensity workout, practically a load test. The result was way beyond our expectations.

We needed to interrupt out squat test because the gym was closing, and we were at an easy 170kg, which was the objective. We outdid in 7kg the deadlift objective. Unfortunately we didn`t reach the goal with the bench press due to injury.

When my colleague and I discussed the goals for this three-week block, we were a bit insecure as to the loads: we noticed my strength had increased significantly. Therefore, we had no parameters for establishing load percentages (performance levels). We were left with the fact that bellow a certain point was too light, but we doubted the Max (100%) could be high enough for those values to be 80%.

That night I decided to use the mental rehearsal techniques I had developed to “turn” our goals into a 70-75% performance level. That was the boldest thing my colleague had ever heard of. It meant rehearsing for a 100% performance of 210kg squat, 155kg bench press and 190kg deadlift.

After our tests, we realized the actual 100% for the squat is 225kg, if calculated by my present performance. I am not so certain as to the other two lifts, where injury intervenes.

Our conclusion is that it has worked: mental rehearsal is efficient in producing substantial increases in performance which is directly related to neural activation.

For the moment, it is hard to advance any other possible implication.


(APRIL 19)

Mental skills and personal experiment (17): negative feedback

I have stopped mental rehearsal for 10 or 15 days. On March 29th I developed a strange illness. According to my physician, it was a flu-like virosis, pretty strong. This Summer has been particularly difficult for many of us in Brazil. We had the hottest temperatures in more than six decades and I learned the hard way that I suffer from “idiopathic heat intolerance”. By the endof the period when I struggled against heat intolerance, I had interesting results from my mental training.

On March 26th and 27th, we tested the protocol through a maximum effort test, which I reported earlier. This test is quite taxing on the athlete’s immune system, and I might have failed to take the necessary precautions, such as extra supplementation, feeding and hydration. Yes: I am sure I failed. It had been my birthday and all was a bit out of control. On the 28th there was a family party – those long ones – where I definitely failed to feed and supplement properly, plus had some alcohol (ok, in general, not good after maxing out and not recovering well). On the 29th I had a very stressful business meeting. By the end of the day I was already feeling the virosis symptoms: sinus pain, nasal congestion, a little head-ache.

What followed then was unusual: joint pain, sickness and fatigue. I had no strength to make myself even sit down and meditate. Work was demanding and by the end of the day I felt miserable.

I lost 8lbs of lean mass, measured by bio-conductivity tests. And I lost about 25% of my maximum strength. I’ve been able to recover some of it on the squat, but not on the bench press yet. My injury is especially annoying now, as well.

Lessons to take home: it seems once you start on this mental training journey, there is no looking back. The loss was worse than when I had not engaged in any special protocol. It seems the price to pay for the gains in control acquired from mental practice is that the losses are equally dramatic.


(APRIL 20)

Mental skills and personal experiment (17): another athlete’s experience

Today I discussed the effect of having stopped my mental training with my workout buddy/coach/partner. He is also experimenting with mental rehearsal and meditation. He told me he had interrupted his mental training for about a month and resuming it was very hard. I asked him to describe what he meant by “hard”. He said he was only able to do it twice a week now.

I have resumed my mental practice for about 5 days already. It is still “hard”, but in my case this means: 1. I can endure only short sessions (about 4 minutes for each lift, 12-15 minutes total); 2. I frequently have headaches; 3. I get those stupid mind-tricks every time again.

In my review of the literature I found evidence that mental rehearsal may be useful for learning new skills (Allami et al 2008) and also that observing others performing or imagining oneself performing, as an observatory, produces positive effects (Cisek & Kalaska 2004). This latter evidence came from animal models (monkeys). I am not sure I agree with the methodological approach: first, in the case where researchers concluded that mental rehearsal is useful for LEARNING a skill, as opposed to IMPROVING or TRAINING it, there was no situation comparing a group where 100% of the training sessions were on imaginary settings (mental). The smallest amount of overt execution was 25%, which is not negligible. I would conclude all these people improved an overtly learned skill.

Allami N, Paulignan Y, Brovelli A, Boussaoud D. 2008. Visuo-motor learning with combination of different rates of motor imagery and physical practice. Exp Brain Res. 2008 Jan;184(1):105-13. Epub 2007 Sep 12.

Cisek P, Kalaska JF. 2004. Neural correlates of mental rehearsal in dorsal premotor cortex. Nature. 2004 Oct 21;431(7011):993-6


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