tRW Journal - Foundational Ideas and Reflections

Issues in technical efficiency can be compensated with outstanding physiology, mental toughness & determination. How much better could athletes be and how much longer could they perform at world class level with all systems fully optimized? Elphinston 2008

Stability, Mobility, Posture, Body Awareness, Symmetry and Balance providing the foundation for Sporting Movement Development & Injury Resistance Building Blocks,  Elphinston, 2008 

You must have the physical (movement) competence to do the technical stuff and the technical competence to do the tactical stuff.... in that order. Giles, 2005

In order to optimize the function of the body we must recognize muscle synergies and train movements not muscles. We must realize we are training connectivity through unity in movement that is integrated not isolated. Gambetta, 2007

The quality of our movement control and attention is fundamental to the quality of our lives and the ability to experience our world as well as solve novel problems. From infancy and through childhood we learned to move and we moved to learn. It's called the perception-action cycle, i.e.) we perceive and thus we move and as we move in turn we perceive more and experience our environment more fully while increasing our awareness of ourselves within it.

Pain, injury, overuse, or merely disuse will interfere with our movement experience and reduce our freedom & variability of coordination, contracting our awareness and  interrupting our rhythm and quality of movement as well as our confidence in it. 

Immersing ourselves in a Movement Wayfinding process of motor learning we can regain movement control and efficiency, and restore and expand our bodily perception and awareness while building resilience. We can overcome performance plateaus and experience those flow & clutch moments in sport that allow us to transcend ourselves,  overcoming our personal limits to become more than the sum of the parts. 

This empowered bodily awareness and control is essential  to enable us to become one with the rest of the boys/girls in the boat.

Decide it is Priority

Commit

Manage your time to make it happen.

Assess the Status Quo

Determine the Destination

Define short and long-term goals

Design a plan to move forward

Stay motivated 

Benchmark Progress

Create Change

 Developing a positive, focused working alliance through ongoing iterative conversation, the tRW experience utilizes targeted questioning to allow for the athlete's exploration of the environment and task solutions. In collaboration with the experienced practitioner, and based on proprietary assessment tools and with recognition of the individuality of the learning process, the athlete will be guided to re-organization of action to find their way through emerging and novel performance problems. This process will allow for the development of stable and consistent technique that is resistant to performance anxiety.  

At tRW, we understand that the quality of your movement is equal to the quality of your experience of life. Our targeted motor learning process (Movement Wayfinding) is designed to develop movement adaptability, the ability to produce and coordinate an appropriate ratio of stable and unstable movement behavior to allow for skill learning and the development  of skill adaptability and injury resistance. 

The Movement Wayfinder (tMW)- One who seeks, explores and discovers variable coordination strategies that are stable, yet flexible and adaptable for life and sport.

In seeking you will: 

1. Identify the site and direction of uncontrolled motion (i.e.) weak links in the kinetic chain (before symptoms start) that might otherwise hinder skill acquisition and athletic performance.

2. Employ cognitive movement retraining to promote muscle specific recruitment efficiency and overcome faulty movements, substitution strategies, compensations, co-contraction rigidity, control impairments.

3. Acquire the stability and flexibility of coordination patterns to allow for skill learning; the development of skill adaptability.
 

4. Expand your repertoire of movement solutions to underpin the Wayfinding Coaching framework.
 

5. Increase tolerance to physical, cognitive, and attentional load specific to the demands of your sport while developing injury resistance.

6. Achieve optimal variability of movement strategies to manage a diversity of contexts and performance environments. 

7. Overcome performance plateaus resistant to coaching input.

8. Return to your performance context with improved quality & efficiency of movement following injury.

The Movement Wayfinder has a proven track record of success in helping clients achieve flexible & varied movement strategies for peak sport performance as well as life's daily challenges. Regardless of level of physical goal this approach is tailored to the client's unique situation & experience and has included prospective Olympians, collegiate and high school athletes looking to make a greater impact, as well as the plateaued master athlete and active individual invested in moving better.  

The Learning Schema

• Movement and technique assessment in the movement studio & the performance context.
• Motor learning & performance program design for improved quality & efficiency of movement.
• Movement Coaching- a collaborative process of motor learning & decision making to achieve the client's unique goals.
• Benchmarking progress towards robust & resilient movement proficiency & efficiency.
• Consulting & working alongside technical coaches to accelerate skill acquisition, periodize skill adaptability and manage load.  

TPM- is a multi-segmental & multi-planar assessment that informs on coordinative variability & synergistic efficiency- markers of movement quality.

Testing identifies uncontrolled movement within a chain of linked joints in functional multi-joint tasks identifying site, direction & threshold deficits. Targeted retraining restores recruitment efficiency & promotes movement variability. 

Identifying the site, direction and threshold (low or high) movement impairments and assets, this Performance assessment allows for identification of loss of movement options or low coordinative variability that has been associated with overuse injuries as the same tissues are repetitively stressed in the same way. This loss of movement variability can also negatively affect the acquisition of skill. Targeted retraining allows for regaining movement choices and an optimum window of movement variability to provide the foundation for better skill learning.

If you’ve been sidelined from your sport or favorite activity, through either repetitive or sudden excessive load, then you’ve likely had a pain experience which may have persisted beyond your expectations. 

Perhaps doing the simplest of things or when returning to higher levels of activity, you continue to experience alerts in the system (in the form of a pain experience) which seem to repeatedly set your back. 

One can draw a computer analogy to this experience, as if you had a virus in your software system (brain & neural system). The hardware system (the body) may recover its integrity but the signaling that coordinates movement may need a 're-boot', and take more time to restore full resilient control. 

Unfortunately, some experiences, beliefs, interactions with healthcare, or merely the sense we can push through pain only serve to elevate the response of the body's unconscious protective mechanisms, leaving us susceptible to further red alerts when the activity is beyond our current body tolerance. 

All the will in the world can’t get the system on-line in the way you used to experience it. This is frustrating, discouraging and emotionally challenging. Unfortunately we can’t just throw out the body (like the spent laptop) but must find a 'fix' for  the 'software' corruption in order to restore the experience of uninterrupted movement awareness, control and activity tolerance. 

We must go through a process of bodily relearning which will enable us  to modulate these heightened protective mechanisms that are hard-wired within our human movement system to protect us from harm. 

The process of motor learning, or 'recalibrating the software system', has been proven to temper these alerts and eventually quieten the system to allow us to return to our normal activity tolerance. 

As a Movement Wayfinder you will undergo this process of recalibration &  learn to self-navigate a way back to an activity filled life. 

What impresses me more!

Late in his playing career the Barilla Pasta company signed Roger Federer as an ambassador for their brand of pasta products. They cited Passion, Tenacity, Commitment, Resilience, Talent, Discipline, Sincerity and Simplicity as shared qualities between the Barilla company and Roger in his excellence and longevity as an elite athlete and role model for his sport and in life.  There can be no doubt Roger Federer exemplified these characteristics, but what struck me as I watched him on the court and followed the trajectory of his career, is how well he optimized his movement and the obvious underlying neural circuitry which allowed him to coordinate it.

Take for example, his structural integrity, the shear rotational control and stability throughout the kinetic chain. The efficiency of motion: the degrees of freedom coordinated with seemingly minimal neural effort, which manifested to us all as grace. Reflect for a moment on his timing and the underpinning gaze control (quiet eye control) and racket head speed that afforded him his accuracy of ball placement. The reflexive control at the net: his racket head clearly an extension of his upper limb within the neural networks of his finely tuned brain. The ease with which he flexibly produced and switched syntax in several different languages, and the extraordinary variability of reflexive movement solutions he displayed while achieving consistency of performance outcome to which all expert/elite athletes aspire.

As he pursued his passion into years beyond his expectations he demonstrated that age is but a number and that our movement behavior can be trained and honed and enjoyed to amazing levels of performance and longevity. However, even in the ranks of elite sportsmen and women, Roger’s excellence was unique. What singled him out and kept him going? After all- he’d won it all- why continue?

In addition to his optimized movement control, he possessed incredible intrinsic motivation, self efficacy, attention control and an ability to be both pre-reflective and reflective, allowing for continual learning & technical recalibration, and the opportunity to experience both ‘Flow’ and 'Clutch' performances that were unparalleled in his sport at the time. 

Intrinsic Motivation

“The Latin root of the word ‘Motivation’ means ‘to move’: hence, in this basic sense the study of motivation is the study of action. Modern theories focus on beliefs, values and goals. An individuals efficacy expectations are the major determinant of goal setting, activity choice, willingness to expend effort, and persistence. When individuals are intrinsically motivated they engage in an activity because they are interested in and enjoy the activity. 

An intrinsic motivational orientation is clear when someone has the following:

1. preference for hard or challenging tasks
2. learning that is driven by curiosity or interest 
3. striving for competence and mastery.

Self Efficacy

“People with self efficacy believe in their ability to succeed in attaining their goals. A sense of efficacy provides staying power and resilience to endure and move beyond obstacles and setbacks, and allows for a creative response to failure and disappointments. Individuals with high self efficacy view failures and disappointments as indicators of the need to learn more or use different problem-solving strategies”. Roger’s failures were important milestones in his development as an athlete and skilled performer. His rivals pushed him to continue to learn, change and improve. His self-efficacy underlay his willingness to persist and his enjoyment in doing so. 

Attentional Control

Overcoming performance plateaus, changing rackets at the height of his career and even returning after injury, Roger exemplifies that ability of an athlete to continually improve through varying his attention control from automatic processing to conscious processing. He alternated between pre-reflective and reflective states in order to recover and improve to meet the demands of the dynamic and diverse performance environments and the grueling schedule of the year round ATP competition.

Thus, in witnessing this master athlete we witnessed the shear potential of our human movement behavior coupled with executive function characteristics that inspired him to achieve for the sheer joy of it (the process) well beyond his or anyone else's expectations. In 2006 David Foster Wallace, wrote an article in the New York Times : Roger Federer As a Religious Experience. For while Wallace knows nothing of neuroscience and the substrates of human movement, he was clearly struck by the sublime way in which Roger moved long into his career. I'm struck by the sheer complexity and adaptability that underpinned Roger's ability to move through his performance environment with such precision, control and seemingly effortless skilled ability that often surprised even him.

The Rowing Wayfinder (tRW) project began as a means to give definition to my coaching philosophy honed over decades of coaching and teaching experience. That philosophy, or coaching nature, is best aligned with what is coined as a WayFinding approach.  Wayfinding is essentially a process that avoids pre-determined outcomes, or a prescriptive approach, but instead endeavors to 'know as you go',  requiring both athlete and coach to assume a 'hunter-gatherer' mindset with respect to skill acquisition. Wayfinding holds that neither skill, nor strategy, nor movement can be imposed – they are derived and evolve as a function of experience by active participants.   It is meeting the athlete/student where they are and guiding them towards 'where to look, but not what to see.'   At its core, the Coach as Wayfinder simply describes an ideal coaching nature underpinned by extensive  experience - allowing, guiding, not directing. 

The Holy Grail in coaching/teaching occurs when the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts with respect to the experience, the process, and the performance.   I have been fortunate to have reached this summit on a number of occasions during my coaching/teaching career and the constant thread through all of those experiences was having applied a Wayfinding nature to my role.  Not directing, but rather guiding, listening, adapting, refining.   When I was more prescriptive or dogmatic - the experience was left wanting.  

I first came across the term 'Wayfinding' within a chapter of 'Invisibles, The Power of Work in an age of Relentless Self-Promotion. 2014.  In the first chapter, the work of an architect/engineer, who specializes in designing signage for navigating complex spaces is chronicled.  His craft is referred to as Wayfinding - a process, when successfully applied, guides the navigator effortlessly through the complex spaces - such as major airports.  When done well, the traveler does not recognize the skill of the Wayfinder. When done poorly, the stress of airport terminal navigation is palpable.   The passage that strongly resonated with me was the observation that a true Wayfinder 'conveys information without drawing attention to the conveyer'!   

I do not by any means consider myself an expert on the subject of Wayfinding - but rather a devoted learner and practitioner.  I welcome any feedback and opportunity to discuss the topic of Wayfinding - feel free to connect.   

Carl T. Woods, et al have provided significant exploration of the topic and are the source of some nomenclature contained within.