![]() ![]() Daniel Day-Lewis had stage fright so bad he quit the stage decades ago - an affliction he shared with Laurence Olivier, Barbra Streisand, and Mikhail Baryshnikov. This phenomenon goes by many names - performance anxiety, stage fright, choking, the yips, cueitis (in snooker), and target panic (for archers) - and the world-class are not immune. ![]() I used to write a lot about this kind of thing in this loosely connected series of posts on relaxed concentration. You're getting lost in the air, second guessing your instincts, overthinking every movement.Īnd when you're driving a car or performing a high-intensity sport like gymnastics, second guessing and overthinking can cause serious injury. You're working so hard to get it right that you stop trusting your muscle memory. The twisties are like this, and often happen under pressure. You're moving way too fast, you're totally lost, you're trying to THINK but you know you don't usually have to think to do these maneuvers, you just feel them and do them. You have to focus on making you foot press the pedal at the right angle, turn the steering wheel just so, shift gears. Suddenly, in the middle of driving on the freeway, right as you need to complete a tricky merge, you have totally lost your muscle memory of how to drive a car. Then sometimes, in stressful situations, you start thinking too much about how to do the familiar thing and you lose it completely: At first everything you do is unnatural and requires deep concentration to learn but once you've got it down, you can do it instinctively, without thinking or even paying that much attention. Your brain remembers how your body feels doing the trick and you gain air awareness. Once you've practiced a trick enough, you develop the neural pathways that create kinesthesia which leads to muscle memory. (In diving, a coach yells "OUT" and you kick your body straight and pray). When training new flips and twists, you need external cues to learn how it feels to complete the trick correctly. ![]() When you're flipping or twisting (or both!) it is very disorienting to the human brain. On Twitter, former gymnast and diver Catherine Burns explained that Biles was likely experiencing a case of "the dreaded twisties". I didn't want to risk the team a medal for, kind of, my screw ups, because they've worked way too hard for that. I just felt like it would be a little bit better to take a back seat, work on my mindfulness. Yesterday, world champion gymnast Simone Biles removed herself from the women's team final at the Olympics after not doing one of the planned two-and-a-half twists on her vault and stumbling on the landing. ![]()
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