Reawakening Old Skills - How To Do It And What Is Most Important?
At Ideanthro Movement it often looks like we spend our days teaching people movement skills like throwing, climbing, running, jump etc. And while this is true much of the time, there are many instances where what we are doing would be more accurately described as reawakening old skills.
See, because so much of what we teach 'natural movements' (i.e. the things we are biologically programmed to do), most of our clients have at some point in their lives done a lot of the skills that we teach. Let's use climbing as an example.
It may have been a long time since the client last climbed over something. They may not consciously remember how to do it. But almost everyone of our clients has successfully climbed over something at some point in their life. Therefore, in 'teaching' them to climb over something, we are initially more akin to a guide helping them to rediscover a lost skill. Eventually we may end up teaching totally new additions to the skill, but in the first instance we are much more the guide.
Now, what I just wrote applies primarily to adults. It's a little different with children, because children tend to still play with most natural movements to some degree, so in their case we are mostly helping them to refine existing skills and to add new ones to their repertoires. In this article however we are focusing in on the adult situation as described.
Having established that learning to move well with us an adult is initially often about reawakening old skills, the next logical is "what's the best way to do it."
It goes without saying that a coach to show you the technique helps, but it's not what we see holding most people back. The most common thing that stops people from rediscovering these skills is a lack of self belief. This then translates into not trying for long enough. And we totally understand that.
When you first try and rediscover a new skill, it almost always feels terribly uncoordinated. What's worse, you often have some vague memory of it feeling really easy in the past, and as a result, success feels a long long way away.
What that initial experience doesn't tell you though is how quickly you can make progress if you stick with it. To prove this to you, I'm going to tell you a story and show you a video that's well outside my comfort zone.
Growing up I was never any good at music. I'm incredibly surprised that I passed high school music. To be honest I probably didn't help matters by trying to play a percussion piece for any assignment on a metal pencil case instead of a drum, but it was mainly my lack of skill that caused the problems. Anyhow, when I was approximately 19 years old I decided to learn to play music. Specifically, I decided to learn to play the banjo. This was in 2005 or thereabouts.
What transpired over the next few years was that I became an ok banjo player. Not amazing by any means, but competent with my little repertoire. Somewhere around 2008 (give or take a year) I stopped playing much at all. In the 12 years since (it's 2020 as I write this) I have only played a handful of times, and as far as I can tell I haven't played seriously before today for at least 2 years.
And today I decided to play again. Not for the long term. I just decided that I wanted to play my banjo today. Oh, and my daughter loves the song "Old MacDonald" so I figured that it would be fun to learn to play it for her (at least the melody).
So what transpired?
Initially I picked up the banjo and I was not good at all. I couldn't hit the right frets with my left hand. My right hand felt slow and totally out of time. It sounded terrible. But that was to be expected.
You see, because I watch clients hit that barrier (and then break through it) every day when reawakening old movement skills, I knew that this was going to happen to me with the banjo. And that made it much easier to stick with it through the first 30 minutes of utterly rubbish playing.
And this is what the most important part of reawakening old skills is; you need to understand that although you will almost certainly feel uncoordinated at first, and possibly even fail, you will break through and things will rapidly improve.
How long does it take? That depends, but we're talking minutes to hours (not days) to get some confidence, coordination and flow back. It takes much longer to be 100% as good at it as you once were, but you can become pretty decent at it again pretty quickly, so long as you break through the initial barrier.
And here's where I do something vulnerable.
I didn't wake up today expecting to write this blog post. I woke up today expecting to do some work. I randomly decided to play the banjo, and in the process of breaking through the barrier I realised that this would be a good story for a blog post. So I decided to record myself playing after about 1.5hrs of reawakening practice. To be honest, this would be a lot more powerful if I had recorded myself when I first picked the thing up as well, but as I said, I wasn't expecting to be writing this.
So here is a video of me playing banjo after about 1.5hrs of practice following a 2 year layoff as part of a longer 12 year hiatus.
Am I a great player? No. I never was.
Did I get all my repertoire back in 1.5hrs? No, just a couple of old favourites.
But did I improve a lot in 1.5hrs, to the point where I had fun and got inspired? Yes, absolutely.
So next time you want to re-learn an old skill, the most important thing to do is to remember that your initial attempt will feel terrible, but that it will improve a lot very fast if you stick with it.
Enjoy this little rendition of Cripple Creek (Scruggs style and melodic style) on the 5-string bank)
Cheers
Coach Jack
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