Changing Your Perception
Are you trying to fix your swimming stroke mechanics to swim faster? Are you avoiding a certain stroke because of pain in your shoulder? You might be surprised to learn that swimming faster than the person next to you could be as simple as changing your perception. It can fix your swimming and make you faster!
A swimmer presented to me with right shoulder pain as he returned to training after several weeks off for semester break, then a 14-day quarantine on return to school. (Time out of the water both last year and this year has been a HUGE problem for swimmers!) He had previously been experiencing left shoulder pain, but that one was feeling great as he returned to training.
Fortunately, he had the forethought to get some video of his swimming before he came in the see me. He reported that two coaches from his team had looked at the video and given him two completely different reasons why his right shoulder was painful.
He asked me to look at the video to see what I thought. (As an aside, he did NOT tell me what either of the coaches had said before I examined his swim stroke via video). We looked at freestyle only, which showed a long glide phase on the left arm with a relatively straight-arm pull. His right arm showed an early catch with early bending of the elbow. He kept his elbow high toward the surface of the water, and high above his own shoulder level (meaning, above his ear). This resulted in a mid-pull phase on the right shoulder that resembled a breaststroke finish…bringing the entire arm into the side, rather than pushing water toward his feet.
Both arms were doing completely different motions!
But it didn’t feel that way to the swimmer.
What Your Body Tells You about the World
Have you ever looked at a video of your own swimming and seen something similar? It’s especially noticeable on backstroke for most swimmers. You will swear that you roll your body and that you enter with the hand above the shoulder. Then you see your video that shows you flat in the water and over-reaching with your hand way over the head…sometimes above the opposite ear!
How can you get it so wrong?
Everything you know about the world and how you interact with it, you learn through your senses. Your sensory receptors are constantly collecting information and sending it to your brain. And you tend to think that these messages give you an accurate view of the world and what you are doing in it. But nothing could be further from the truth.
Just because you feel like you are swimming well, does not mean the you actually are swimming well.
This is because your perception of what you are doing compared with what you are actually doing are often two different things…as evidenced on that video that demonstrated your stroke fault.
Perception vs. Reality
In the above example, the video shows reality…you are actually swimming with a stroke fault. But your brain cannot decipher the difference between what is the correct swimming stroke and what you are doing.
How is that possible?
First, your brain receives so much information all the time that it has the job of sorting that information into “baskets.” Your brain basically is always categorizing incoming information as important (life threatening), or not-so-important (non-life-threatening).
Sifting Sand Analogy
I like to use the analogy of sifting sand at the beach to illustrate this…
Imagine that you are at the beach using one of those plastic sand sifting pans. You shake and shake to get the sand to fall through, and you’re left with the big rocks and shells left in the pan. You pay attention to the big stuff that gets caught by the pan, but might forget about the fine sand that you have underneath.
Your brain is always doing the same sifting of information. It often will pay attention to big pieces of information, like fatigue in your muscles or pain in your shoulder. But if might filter out and ignore the fine pieces of information, like the position of the shoulder and hand when it enters the water, or how bent the elbow is when pulling the water.
So your perception of what you do is the product of the information your senses send to your brain, and also to what your brain learns to pay attention.
The trouble is that the brain fills in missing information (that was sifted out) with assumptions based on its previous perceptions…even if that doesn’t match reality!
Illusions of Movement
You can have illusions in any of your senses. We often refer to these as hallucinations, but that seems much too serious a term for what is going on when you are swimming.
You can imagine that you are moving in one way and actually be moving in a completely different way.
In the 1800’s, Hermann von Helmholtz did experiments that showed this illusion of perception and its effects on movement. He had people wear prism glasses that shifted a person’s visual field several inches to the right or the left. He then asked them to reach for a cup of coffee on the table.
Each person would reach to where they “saw” the cup of coffee, although the glasses actually shifted/distorted the sensory input from the eyes. Of course, they missed the cup! Remember, their vision was off by several inches compared with the reality of where the coffee cup sat.
Amazingly, the people became accurate to reaching tasks within an hour even while wearing the prism glasses!
Of special note, on removing the glasses, the people were once again inaccurate at reaching for the coffee cup! Their brains had already “learned” to filter and adjust the prism-glasses-information to make the reaching motions more accurate. But the brain re-adapted quickly!
This early study showed several things:
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The brain can adapt to new sensations, like a change in vision.
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Vision helps with the accuracy of a movement. There is an interdependence between the senses.
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The adaptation does not simply depend on the time of wearing the glasses, but rather is dependent on the number of interactions between the visual and movement systems. In other words, the practice of moving forced the brain to perceive things differently and, therefore, “learn” to be accurate with movement, again.
“Things that have been learned and practiced many times produce greater movement pattern strength, so it’s easier to return to them.” – Daniel J. Levitin, in Successful Aging, p.96
Perception is a Function of Practice
As Helmholtz’s study showed, the re-adaptation back to normal movement after removing the prism glasses took only a few minutes.
This is because the brain was able to reset itself to its understanding/perception of the world that was well-known before the test.
Things that have been learned and practiced many times produce greater movement pattern strength, so it’s easier to return to them. Practice is what creates the perception of the world that enables the brain to get back to that pattern with amazing quickness.
When you learn something new (like correcting your swim stroke), it requires a lot of time, energy, and practice to ingrain the new pattern. It is only with focused practice of doing the motion correctly over-and-over that you can change your perception of the movement (your swim stroke).
But here is the rub…
That old pattern of movement still has a well-established pathway in your brain. Those connections and patterns have been ingrained over a long time of practice, as well. As evidenced by the prism-glasses study, going back to the old pattern simply requires re-activating those well-established brain pathways. This makes it easier for you to fall back into the old pattern of movement. The pain that made you want to change the swim stroke in the first place might return.
Interestingly, this is actually a form of what we refer to as neuroplasticity, the ability for the brain to change itself. Your neural connections, which dictate your movement patterns, are shapeable and flexible, like soft plastic.
But that plastic needs to be gradually molded and remolded until it is the exact shape you want. That’s why you practice! Mold and remold that stroke pattern until it is the exact swimming stroke that is fastest and most efficient for you. Then practice it perfectly to ingrain that corrected perception of movement.
Practice Does Not Make Perfect
To get back to the beginning, in our example of the swimmer with different stroke patterns on each arm, hopefully you can now see that he doesn’t need to get stronger, have things “fixed” at therapy, or swim less. In fact, the only way that he is going to correct is stroke is to swim some more. He has to have interaction with the world, inundate his brain with the correct sensations, and ingrain those new neural patterns to be able to swim without trouble.
You see, your perceptions drive your interaction with the world around you. This is true in pretty much all areas of life. I have simply applied this to fixing the swimming stroke.
Please realize that your movement is more than just a physical phenomenon. It is a complex interaction of sensory information, brain interpretation of that information, and then brain output to execute a movement pattern that is accurate and appropriate for the situation. I won’t touch on the fact that some of this is not based on feedback from the senses, but rather feed-forward from the top-down (brain first). That’s a topic for another blog.
In summary, and contrary to popular belief, practice does not make perfect. Practice makes permanent and automatic. The more you practice doing something well, the more likely that you make the corrected patterns and correct your perceptions. Then you will default to always doing it well, without even thinking about it…that is, automatically!
Something to Try on Your Own
Here is a simple task that you can try on your own to work on getting your brain to start paying attention to information that is already coming into your brain.
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Start by getting into “table-top” position on your hands and knees.
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Maintain your position and balance as you try to raise one arm ahead of you and the opposite leg behind you.
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Try to hold this position for up to a minute.
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When you can do that for a minute, the tough part comes. Try doing the same, but with your eyes closed. This forces your brain to pay attention to the information that your muscular and vestibular (inner ear) systems tell you about where you are in space. This is the information that your brain has likely been “sifting out.” You are now raising your perception of what you are doing by developing the ability to use this information in your balance and control.
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Report back to me what you found more difficult, eyes open or eyes closed. I’d love to hear what your experience was.
Cheers!
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