The bar slips or moves or rolls, and you adjust. You unrack the bar and discomfort creeps in, maybe the bar feels heavier than you think it should, or your grip doesn’t feel quite right-did you remember to look down? As you start the movement, your balance shifts forward to your toes, and you have to adjust. Distractions like these take your attention away from the lift, reducing the amount of mental effort you can give to fixing your form, and perhaps making the lift more difficult than it needs to be.įor newer lifters, each rep may present a cascade of reaction-based decisions. You may also carry mental baggage into a lift: squats are hard, deadlifts are intense, presses are uncomfortable, and to some, the bench press looks like just a dull guillotine. Lifting is uncomfortable, and you may interpret that discomfort of the exercise as pain or fatigue, some of which you control and some of which you do not. Instead of ambient noise and hostile motorists, however, there are many different distracting sensations during a training session, set, or rep. It’s a physical activity that requires control over your movements and in both cases, failing (or crashing) is to be avoided at all costs. Lifting is similar to parallel parking in the scenario above. Inattentional blindness opened up a lot of questions about attention and has given researchers some insight into the nature of perception, including the finding that “all variants of voluntary effort-cognitive, emotional, or physical-draw at least partly on a shared pool of mental energy.” ( Kahneman, “Thinking, Fast and Slow” (2011)) ( Simons, Chabris, “Gorillas in Our Midst: Sustained Inattentional Blindness for Dynamic Events,” Perception, vol. To their surprise, 56% of observers did not notice the gorilla. Approximately 45 seconds into the 75-second film, a person in a gorilla suit walked through the action on the screen from left to right, appearing in the film for 5 seconds. Observers were told either to count the total number of passes made by the team they were watching (the easy version) or to keep separate silent mental counts of the number of bounce passes and aerial passes made by their team (the hard version). Observers were told that they would be watching two teams of three players passing basketballs and that they should pay attention to either the team in white or the team in black. The name comes from one of the experiments in which a video is played showing people in either white or black shirts passing a ball. One of the most famous tests of perception is “The Invisible Gorilla Test.” The name comes from studies done by Daniel Simmons and Christopher Chabris that begin with an investigation into the importance of attention in visual perception. The effects of splitting your attention can be surprising. Being able to lift, to stay in balance and control a heavy barbell, without constantly adjusting our form is one of the keys to long-term success. Achieving something like a flow state is also a great goal for those of us struggling in the gym. It is the purview of experts and virtuosos, those who perform flawlessly without seeming to try. Flow state training is the attempt to bring many things into focus without having to spend conscious effort focusing on them. What do you do? Turn down your music, of course! Though ambient noise has little to do with the operation of your car, you have a limited budget for your attention, and you cannot always direct your attention where you want it to be. You think you see one, and you are about to parallel park on a busy road with people all around. For example, imagine you are driving in a new and unfamiliar city looking for a parking space. Develop Your Lifting: Flow State Trainingīy: Nick Soleyn, PBC, BLOC Editor in Chief and Staff Coach
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