Module 1 - Orientation

Best Study Practices

• SMART goals
  • My goal: Complete the Barbell Principles course in two months of study.
    • Specific
      • The course provides the specificity with its defined curriculum.
    • Measurable
      • I've set a two-month. This is ambitious, and will require daily study. I'll block time on my calendar each morning to head to the coffee shop near my house and do my studying. I'll also put some study into chemistry during these sessions.
      • I will also self-assess all of my own lifting videos in upcoming training sessions, separately from Matt's analysis. Without giving him cues, I'll be able to note difference in his expert analysis and my more amateur eye.
    • Attainable
      • Matt told me this course has been completed in as few as 40 days. I have a flexible schedule, and also have a lot of experience with learning efficiently. I believe I can do it.
    • Relevant
      • Why? I'm passionate about my own fitness, and want to attain a deep understanding of anatomy, biomechanics, and programming for both athletic achievement and life-long health.
      • In addition to achieving personal growth and edification, I'll be able to share better knowledge and advice on my YouTube channel and other content platforms. Attaining my barbell coaching certificate will help me improve my business.
    • Time-Bound
      • There is a two-month achievement goal for this challenge.

Developing Your Lifting Skill

Plan for Your Lifting, Learning, and Success

• Tacit and Explicit Knowledge
  • Explicit
    • Codified and passed down
    • Comes from reasoning and reflecting on experience
    • Can be isolated, stored, shared
  • Tacit
    • Can be expressed by not codified
    • Created unconsciously by expeirence
    • Only has meaning in a specific context
    • "We did not know that our body 'knew' the height of the toilet seat"
• Keys to tacit learning
  • Exposure - make a stimulus
    • Frequent enough
      • More sessions
      • More practice in the session (more warm-ups, drills)
    • Specific enough
      • At load - air squats alone wouldn't be enough to learn a loaded squat
      • Drills - treat like "booster rockets" - jettison them once you're high enough
        • Drills train a specific subset of the movement
    • Within normal variance
      • There is a "normal" range of human movement - asymmetries, differences within specific tolerances. These are good to experience during practice to gain tacit knowledge.
      • For this reason we discourage the use of devices that explicitly cue the exact way to perform the movement - i.e. a mat on the floor showing exactly where to place the feet.
        • Consider adding these later, when the foundation of tacit knowledge is laid and now you're refining the movement
      • Gain a strong foundation in one type - i.e. back squat - then introduce other variants, like pause squat, tempo squat, front squat, box squat - so you're experience more variance and truly learning what "squatting" is like
  • Awareness
    • Idea from The Inner Game of Tennis: When a player "talks to themselves" internally, they inhibit the ability to simply perform the movement.
      • Slow mind - e.g. System 2 - inhibits System 1
    • Verbal self-cues have a cost
      • Talking to yourself on the lift inhibits the ability to do the lift
    • Draw focus to the right spot only when needed. Don't try to consciously "step through" and control every aspect of the lift. Your body knows it better than you do.
    • How to avoid too much "inner talk" and System 2 control
      • Use non-verbal cues
        • Bands to indicate proper depth
        • Looking at a spot on the wall
      • Save hard fixes for what's hard to fix
        • Leave tiny errors alone and save conscious control capacity for the things that really matter
      • Non-judgmental awareness
        • Observations naturally are followed by judgements:
          • Perform a rep - "felt too forward on that one"
          • Hit a rally - "racket was too open"
        • Instead, be curious about the observations
          • Compare a rep that felt good to one that didn't - why where they different?
        • The key is to approach the comparison curiously and non-judgmentally. Don't beat yourself up - see each small performance or rep as an opportunity to gather more data and learn.
  • Effort
    • Not too easy, not too hard
      • Too easy - not specific enough
      • Too hard - brain is in survival mode, not learning mode
        • Can't figure out why you're mismanaging the weight
    • "Goldilocks challenge"
      • Key is to learn and grow from the session
  • Intention
    • Directing awareness over a set block of time
    • Places a concept you need to work on front-of-mind, so you can better observe (vs. just "see") when it occurs
    • Intention Window
      • Session, week, block (course length, 3 months, mesocycle)
    • Allow some things to be let go "If everything else stayed at the same level, but..."
      • I was able to improve the conciseness of my cues
      • Sense of midfoot balance
      • ...these are the most important things right now. This is where the focus goes, and some other things can be "let go" - i.e. trusted to tacit knowledge (as long as they don't get too sloppy, i.e. out of normal variance)
      • Body is tacitly learning the other things while you're not "focusing" on them!

Improving Your Skill

• "As much as possible, pair learning with action."
  • Learning without action = running very fast on a treadmill. You're not getting anywhere.
  • Action without learning = skills improve up to a point, but then you don't have context-specific knowledge in order to improve further. All you have it hope, trial, and error - a phase called the flail zone.
• Multi-modal learning
  • Learning is more effective when you can interact with the material in multiple ways - especially if those ways include active recall.
    • Anatomy - can you sketch the bones, muscles, and ligaments? Can you get access to a skeletal model, or a virtual one?
    • Textbook - can you create a quiz from the reading material, or from your notes?
    • Mnemonics, limericks, rhymes
    • Anki and flashcards
• Purposeful practice
  • Not all practice is equal
  • Pretend Practice
    • Something that "feels" like direct skill practice - but it's near-practice. It's missing the right specificity.
    • Examples:
      • Air squats, goblet squats, or just the bar to "dial in technique" instead of a usefully challenging weight.
        • Reminds me of when I'd play Pokemon as a kid and spend hours grinding on weak Pokemon in an attempt to make my first fight with Brock "easy". In reality, I spent way more time using this method than I would have by fighting challenging battles. They are more difficult, but provide far more experience points. And, to get into the "lore" of the game instead of just talking about the game systems, having my Pokemon battle challenging opponents (within the Goldilocks range) would help them build useful tacit knowledge - observation, evasion, timing, etc. Fighting Lvl 3 Pidgey after Lvl 3 Pidgey builds no additional tacit knowledge after a certain point.
      • Learning moment arm trigonometry before solving movement problems on the platform - i.e. getting too into the weeds of theory without first building a base of practical knowledge that it can connect to (and that will make you care more and connect better to the concepts)
    • Naive Practice
      • The overvaluing of mindless "practice" - rote movements. Repetitive, consistent execution, and nothing else. When you simply execute (and do not observe and consciously try to improve pinpointed areas):
        • Settling - improvement takes time, energy, attention (someone read The Productivity Project!). Without effort, the brain settles for good enough.
        • Entrenchment - once a performance baseline is reached, naive practice merely reinforces performance rather than improving it
          • Errors get baked in and they get harder to correct over time
          • Some degree of entrenchment is inevitable, but remaining purposeful in practice will minimize it
        • Creep
          • "If you're not getting better, you're getting worse."
          • Surgeons with 20+ years' experience are often outperformed by younger counterparts, due to better education (higher starting point) and deterioration of skills.
            • Performance slowly degrades over years of repeated execution
    • Purposeful Practice
      • Being mindful while you train
      • Intention set to improve specific subcomponents of performance
      • Dr. Anders Ericsson: Purposeful practice should be
    • Deliberate Practice
• Mastery isn't perfection

Setting Session Intentions

• Learning intention means setting a focus or theme for that day's practice
• Key elements:
• Other considerations
• Examples for Lifting
• Examples for coaching

The BLOC Approach