http://hbr.org/2011/05/being-more-productive/ar/1
Nice article on productivity. I like this passage on why you shouldn't treat your employees like they are expendable:
"Tony, you’ve also written about how the cultures of some organizations encourage people to work in ways that are unhealthful and ultimately limit productivity. Why do companies do that?
Schwartz: I remember giving a talk at a prestigious investment bank several years ago. At the end a partner stood up and said, “Mr. Schwartz, this is all very interesting, but we have a thousand people knocking on the door who can’t wait to come in and replace the people we’ve burned out. Why should we worry about giving people time to renew? When they burn out, we just bring in a fresh new group of people, who are thrilled to get the jobs.” I’d argue that in knowledge work, you get more out of a person in the third or fifth or seventh year than out of the replacement you brought in because the first worker collapsed in year two. This is a broader issue that deserves attention. We can’t keep pushing people to their limits and expect them to produce at a sustainably high level of excellence. The companies that build true competitive advantage in the years ahead will be those that shift from seeking to get more out of people to investing in better meeting their needs."
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Mind in the Muscle
I wrote this 4 years ago now. Seems somewhat quaint but I still believe in the importance of the mind-muscle connection, perhaps now more than ever. Enjoy:
Dragon’s Principles of Mental Training #3
by Charlie Dragon
“The body will never fully respond to your workouts until you understand how to train the mind as well. The mind is a dynamo, a source of vital energy. That energy can be negative and work against you, or you can harness it to give yourself unbelievable workouts . . .Whenever you hear about anyone performing unbelievable physical feats – Tiger Woods in golf, Michael Jordan in basketball, Michael Johnson in track, Hermann Maier in skiing, and so many more athletes – it is because of the power of their minds, not just technical, mechanical skill.”
-- Arnold Schwarzenegger, The New Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding
#3 – “Mind in the Muscle”
It’s surprising to find out that bodybuilding, of all activities, is incredibly mental. Think of how important that makes the mind in swimming! In swim-ming, this principle is often referred to as “feel for the water.” Feel is an elusive thing, hard to define, hard to understand. Feel is tied closely to technique and efficiency, but it’s more than that. Feel is also partly the tactile sensations of water on your skin – literally the feeling of swimming. But I think feel is also about your ability to feel, as deeply as possible, the movements of your muscles. Feel is an awareness in your mind of what your muscles are doing.
Your ability to feel the water against your body, feel how your muscles move in the water, and make small but essential technical adjustments all come from this awareness. Some people have a much greater degree of natural feel than others, which is why many coaches believe feel cannot be taught -- you are either born with it or not. I agree that people do have very different de-grees of mind-muscle connection naturally, but I believe that awareness can be greatly improved in everyone. To get a mental picture of feel for the water, think about a swimmer who you have seen swim fast with seemingly little effort. A smooth, flowing stroke is how we can tell visually if someone has good feel.
“The key to success in your workouts is to get the mind into the muscle, rather than thinking about the weight itself [applied to swimming, thinking about the muscles in use rather than the number of laps or time]. When you think about the weight instead of the muscle, you can’t really feel what the muscle is doing. You lose control. Instead of stretching and contracting the muscle with deep concentration, you are simply exerting brute strength.”
That quote captures the difference between just going up and down the pool and truly experiencing, feeling, what you are doing. When your mind is in your muscle the experience of training becomes completely different. You will see results much more rapidly and the training itself will become more enjoya-ble. The best time to practice feel is during slow swimming (warm-up, recovery, drills, warm-down) and when stretching. It’s been said that the great Russian swim teams of the early 1990s would be in the pool many hours each day, but much of that time was spent swimming slowly and doing drills to improve feel for the water.
Try to feel as many of the muscle fibers engaging, stretching and con-tracting as you can. As you pull against the water in a freestyle stroke, for in-stance, try to feel your forearm, shoulder, and core muscles engage, then your upper back, your triceps as you finish the stroke, and then your deltoid as you recover over the water. Feel the muscles in your legs as you kick, and feel your lungs as you breathe.
Arnold tells us that “one repetition [or one lap for us] with full con-sciousness is worth more than ten with no awareness at all.” Think about that for a moment. The better your focus, the fewer laps you need to swim to get the same results. Ask yourself, do you swim robotically, with no thought? Or are you constantly thinking about the wrong things, like how long the set is, or what the next set will be? The consequences of swimming with no awareness are hundreds of wasted laps and hours of exhaustion that don’t make you fast-er!
“It became part of my routine that year to start out every day with total concentration. The way I did it was to play out exactly what I was going to use, how I was going to pull my muscles, and how I would feel it. I programmed myself. I saw myself doing it; I imagined how I would feel it. I was thoroughly, totally into it mentally. I did not waver at all.
When I went to the gym I got rid of every alien thought in my mind. I tuned in to my body as though it were a musical instrument I was about to play. In the dressing room I would start thinking about training, about every body part, what I was going to do, how I was going to pump up. I would concentrate on procedure and results until my everyday problems went floating away. I knew that if I went in there concerned about bills or girls and let myself think about those things while doing bench presses, I’d only make marginal progress. I’d seen guys reading the newspaper between sets day after day, and they always looked bad. Some of them had been going through the motions of training for years, and you couldn’t tell that they had ever picked up a weight. It had been nothing more than heartless pantomime” – Arnold, The Education of a Bodybuilder
My high school weight room was a perfect example of athletes with no mind-muscle connection. Kids just throwing heavy weight around with bad form, not feeling their muscles at all. Unfortunately, the majority of swimmers are no better, just getting up and down the pool each day, unaware of what they should be feeling.
Achieving mind-in-the-muscle takes a great deal of focus and will initially make swimming more difficult. You will be engaging your muscles more fully, and you will not be used to that. It’s easier to swim mindlessly and just use brute force, but it’s also slower. When I first understood the mind-muscle con-nection I had to lower all my weights, but once I did I saw far better results.
I am also convinced that by focusing on your muscles you help to take pressure and stress off your joints, reducing the risk of injury. If you aren’t fo-cusing on your muscles, they will not be as engaged, and the work may move onto your tendons, ligaments, cartilage, or smaller rotator cuff muscles causing overuse and injury. By thinking about what muscles you are using, and focus-ing on how they feel, you can reduce the risk of injury.
The mind-muscle connection, and feel for the water, is probably the most difficult thing to express in writing because it is entirely sensory, and it is diffi-cult to teach because no drill or correction can give you this ability directly. Two people can be doing the exact same thing in the pool and have radically different experiences. Strive to be the aware swimmer.
Dragon’s Principles of Mental Training #3
by Charlie Dragon
“The body will never fully respond to your workouts until you understand how to train the mind as well. The mind is a dynamo, a source of vital energy. That energy can be negative and work against you, or you can harness it to give yourself unbelievable workouts . . .Whenever you hear about anyone performing unbelievable physical feats – Tiger Woods in golf, Michael Jordan in basketball, Michael Johnson in track, Hermann Maier in skiing, and so many more athletes – it is because of the power of their minds, not just technical, mechanical skill.”
-- Arnold Schwarzenegger, The New Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding
#3 – “Mind in the Muscle”
It’s surprising to find out that bodybuilding, of all activities, is incredibly mental. Think of how important that makes the mind in swimming! In swim-ming, this principle is often referred to as “feel for the water.” Feel is an elusive thing, hard to define, hard to understand. Feel is tied closely to technique and efficiency, but it’s more than that. Feel is also partly the tactile sensations of water on your skin – literally the feeling of swimming. But I think feel is also about your ability to feel, as deeply as possible, the movements of your muscles. Feel is an awareness in your mind of what your muscles are doing.
Your ability to feel the water against your body, feel how your muscles move in the water, and make small but essential technical adjustments all come from this awareness. Some people have a much greater degree of natural feel than others, which is why many coaches believe feel cannot be taught -- you are either born with it or not. I agree that people do have very different de-grees of mind-muscle connection naturally, but I believe that awareness can be greatly improved in everyone. To get a mental picture of feel for the water, think about a swimmer who you have seen swim fast with seemingly little effort. A smooth, flowing stroke is how we can tell visually if someone has good feel.
“The key to success in your workouts is to get the mind into the muscle, rather than thinking about the weight itself [applied to swimming, thinking about the muscles in use rather than the number of laps or time]. When you think about the weight instead of the muscle, you can’t really feel what the muscle is doing. You lose control. Instead of stretching and contracting the muscle with deep concentration, you are simply exerting brute strength.”
That quote captures the difference between just going up and down the pool and truly experiencing, feeling, what you are doing. When your mind is in your muscle the experience of training becomes completely different. You will see results much more rapidly and the training itself will become more enjoya-ble. The best time to practice feel is during slow swimming (warm-up, recovery, drills, warm-down) and when stretching. It’s been said that the great Russian swim teams of the early 1990s would be in the pool many hours each day, but much of that time was spent swimming slowly and doing drills to improve feel for the water.
Try to feel as many of the muscle fibers engaging, stretching and con-tracting as you can. As you pull against the water in a freestyle stroke, for in-stance, try to feel your forearm, shoulder, and core muscles engage, then your upper back, your triceps as you finish the stroke, and then your deltoid as you recover over the water. Feel the muscles in your legs as you kick, and feel your lungs as you breathe.
Arnold tells us that “one repetition [or one lap for us] with full con-sciousness is worth more than ten with no awareness at all.” Think about that for a moment. The better your focus, the fewer laps you need to swim to get the same results. Ask yourself, do you swim robotically, with no thought? Or are you constantly thinking about the wrong things, like how long the set is, or what the next set will be? The consequences of swimming with no awareness are hundreds of wasted laps and hours of exhaustion that don’t make you fast-er!
“It became part of my routine that year to start out every day with total concentration. The way I did it was to play out exactly what I was going to use, how I was going to pull my muscles, and how I would feel it. I programmed myself. I saw myself doing it; I imagined how I would feel it. I was thoroughly, totally into it mentally. I did not waver at all.
When I went to the gym I got rid of every alien thought in my mind. I tuned in to my body as though it were a musical instrument I was about to play. In the dressing room I would start thinking about training, about every body part, what I was going to do, how I was going to pump up. I would concentrate on procedure and results until my everyday problems went floating away. I knew that if I went in there concerned about bills or girls and let myself think about those things while doing bench presses, I’d only make marginal progress. I’d seen guys reading the newspaper between sets day after day, and they always looked bad. Some of them had been going through the motions of training for years, and you couldn’t tell that they had ever picked up a weight. It had been nothing more than heartless pantomime” – Arnold, The Education of a Bodybuilder
My high school weight room was a perfect example of athletes with no mind-muscle connection. Kids just throwing heavy weight around with bad form, not feeling their muscles at all. Unfortunately, the majority of swimmers are no better, just getting up and down the pool each day, unaware of what they should be feeling.
Achieving mind-in-the-muscle takes a great deal of focus and will initially make swimming more difficult. You will be engaging your muscles more fully, and you will not be used to that. It’s easier to swim mindlessly and just use brute force, but it’s also slower. When I first understood the mind-muscle con-nection I had to lower all my weights, but once I did I saw far better results.
I am also convinced that by focusing on your muscles you help to take pressure and stress off your joints, reducing the risk of injury. If you aren’t fo-cusing on your muscles, they will not be as engaged, and the work may move onto your tendons, ligaments, cartilage, or smaller rotator cuff muscles causing overuse and injury. By thinking about what muscles you are using, and focus-ing on how they feel, you can reduce the risk of injury.
The mind-muscle connection, and feel for the water, is probably the most difficult thing to express in writing because it is entirely sensory, and it is diffi-cult to teach because no drill or correction can give you this ability directly. Two people can be doing the exact same thing in the pool and have radically different experiences. Strive to be the aware swimmer.
Monday, April 25, 2011
The Brain and Time
Saturday, April 23, 2011
The Eight-Fold Path to Better Swimming
Below I list the Buddhist Eight-fold path as described by Bruce Lee in “Tao of Jeet Kune Do.” When I came across this I felt like it spoke directly to the process we as coaches go through with our athletes when we are trying to make a change. Without knowing it, we attempt to carry them through these eight steps, and with those athletes unable to make a change, I can usually tell which step they get hung up on.
1. Right views (understanding): You must clearly see what is wrong.
2. Right purpose (aspiration): Decide to be cured.
3. Right speech: Speak so as to aim at being cured.
4. Right conduct: You must act.
5. Right vocation: Your livelihood must not conflict with therapy.
6. Right effort: The therapy must go forward at the ‘staying speed,’ the critical velocity that can be sustained.
7. Right awareness (mind control): You must feel it and think about it incessantly.
8. Right concentration (meditation): Learn how to contemplate with the deep mind.
Let’s look at these first four steps and shift to the perspective of the swimmer rather than the coach. When we set a goal to achieve something new, we first have to see what we need to do differently. That may sound easy but it’s quite uncommon. We tend to be blind to our weaknesses. Are you willing to look at your shortcomings? To admit them to yourself or to others?
Perhaps you can see what you need to do differently. Getting stuck on Step 2 is when you want to make the change but you don’t. This is sometimes hard to detect because you can be going through the motions of what it takes without truly deciding to accept “the cure” because that cure has some consequences you may not like. Having that willingness to accept what needs to be done is a huge step.
Steps 3 and 4 are about starting to carryout the change. You must speak in a way that will help you to make the change and you must act on your speech.
One of the biggest impediments to following the Eight-Fold Path that I see in athletes is when they make a change and do not see an immediate effect. Or they see an immediate effect which is negative. I had been searching for a long time for an analogy to explain to my athletes the process which I want them to undertake when a change is necessary. And one night driving home from practice, I found it.
It was about 9:30pm and I hit the dreaded night roadwork on the highway. Doesn’t seeing that neon sign feel like a punch in the mouth? This particular road that I was on had terrible traffic on it all day, so the solution is to widen the road, take out a few lights, build a new bridge even. Ok, sounds good, right? But wait, to make those improvements traffic will actually get worse in the short-term (I use ‘short’ loosely here as we all know how long those projects can last). But we put up with that worsening of the problem because in the long-term it will result in an improvement. That’s often the same process we go through when trying to make a change in our technique, or our training habits. Short term you have to make it worse so long term you can make it better. A short-term regression to make a long-term progression. How many of us are prepared to do that?
That 1st step needs more attention, for what is really required is awareness. To fix any problems that are hindering your performance, to make the gains you want to, you must first have some understanding of yourself, of how you think and how you feel. Without that understanding you won’t know whether you are doing the right things or the wrong things.
Physical awareness is your ability to know where you body is in space. Sounds obvious enough, but there is a big difference between knowing you are swimming in a pool, and knowing exactly where your hand is entering in backstroke, or whether your hips have dropped an inch during the middle of a tough set, or whether your head is coming up too high for a breath in butterfly, or whether your elbows are too far back in your breaststroke pull. Or how about bad posture? Do you feel like your shoulders are forward and your back bent? Probably not, and that’s the problem. Physical awareness is essential for technique improvement, reducing drag and improving efficiency. I believe awareness seperates, more than conditioning differences, 1st place from 8th place. Physical awareness is tied to that mysterious feel for the water you hear so much about.
Improving physical awareness is a long process, one that takes concentration and constant vigilence. You have to keep thinking about your technique, you can’t simply think of it only during times when you aren’t tired and able to go slowly. Try to feel technique as much as possible, rather than only thinking about technique.
Another type of awareness is mental awareness, which is recognizing or understanding the type of thoughts you have, what causes them and the emotions that follow. For me, this is much, much harder than physical awareness. The mind can be like a black box that you can’t see into. Our thoughts often come quickly and our reactions to them play out on a near subconscious level. Often we don’t see character traits in ourselves that everyone else does. For instance, you may not think you are pessimistic even though its clear to everyone else you are. So it’s impossible to change from being a pessimist to being an optimist if you don’t recognize that you are a pessimist first!
Getting to the point of having awareness about your emotions and thought patterns is an accomplishment. Most people simply act, think, and feel on automatic. Not being on automatic during practice is the goal, doing everything with attention and awareness will bring you better results faster. This is the difference between mindlessness and mindfulness.
Mindfulness is giving complete attention to what is happening right now. The more often you can be in a mindful state physically, the better your technique will get, and the more often you can be mindful about your thoughts and emotions, the easier it will be to reach your goals, whether they be in the pool or in other parts of your life.
In ancient Greece
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