Whether you are a newbie or veteran gymnast, this article might be helpful when you consider how you create consistency in your training habits and why the journey is so darn hard.
Gymnasts, particularly those of us “of a certain age,” work to develop complex physical skills through the obstacles of body limitations, fear and anxiety, mental blocks, and sometimes, the weather or simple changes in our environment.
The older I get, the more I feel the challenge. I know that I feel very different on hot vs. cold days. When our gym owner moved some equipment around, all of the adults had quiet panic attacks because our understanding of our surroundings were suddenly very different.
With all of these out-of-our-control distractions, it can be hard to maintain consistency in our performance, and sometimes even small environmental changes can require more effort to accomplish the same skills successfully from one session to the next. Sometimes, the skills disappear completely if there are enough distractions or obstacles (or injuries). That said, we adults tend to take on the attitude of “more is better.” If we just drill the skill we want over and over and over again, we’ll get it. Right?
Here’s the problem with that mindset: if you keep drilling faulty mechanics, you’ll be creating habits where you will continue to fail. In gymnastics, that failure could lead to unsuccessful, or worse, disastrous outcomes. I have written plenty about injuries sustained at the gym. Those poor outcomes can take us out not only of our training, but it could seriously mess up our regular lives.
Read all about my broken foot saga. The concern is very real.
Practice makes…
The following Instagram post recently caught my eye because the message meshed with everything I’ve been working on in the gym: practice doesn’t make perfect – it makes habits. The creator is Kelvin Lam, former head cheerleading coach at San Jose State University and founder of the Moxie Method Stunting System. In many of his posts, he talks to his students about making specific changes in their training to make specific outcomes happen. Often, it’s about stepping back to a more fundamental aspect of a skill set.
Central to developing skills safely in gymnastics relates directly to how we create our habits. Regarding my many injuries and mishaps at the gym: many of them were related to that desire to keep going until I “got it.” The problem was that I was often reinforcing bad body angles and creating habits that were leading to chronic problems. When you repeat things over and over, you reinforce neurological pathways that form habitual behaviors. Sometimes in our earnestness, we practice the wrong patterns over and over again, leading to the formation of bad habits.
What is a habit?
Researcher Benjamin Gardner wrote an analysis and review of 136 different studies that looked at the usage of the word “habit” and measuring it in terms of health-related behavior. He distilled many different definitions of the word down to this:
Although used in everyday parlance to refer to frequent, persistent or customary behaviour, within health psychology ‘habit’ is defined as a phenomenon whereby behaviour is prompted automatically by situational cues, as a result of learned cue-behaviour associations (Wood & Neal, 2009). Habits form through repetition of behaviour in a specific context (Lally, van Jaarsveld, Potts, & Wardle, 2010). This reinforces a mental context-behaviour association, such that alternative options become less accessible in memory (Danner, Aarts, & de Vries, 2007, 2008), and the context acquires the potential to activate behaviour in the absence of awareness, conscious control, cognitive effort or deliberation.
In short, habits are:
- formed through repetition
- situation and context specific
- automatic
Gardner’s definition sheds some light on why it is so hard to create the habits we need to build complex skills as adults: he talks about the reinforcing of a context-behavior association in order to activate habitual behavior.
Here’s the problem: adults tend to overthink. We pay attention to the myriad distractions in our internal and external environment. Any change can alter the context for creating our habit: our body feels different physically (body pain, dehydration, menopausal issues, etc.); kids/work/responsibilities distracting us; something new in the physical space. We are learning in an ever-changing environment, which makes it hard to replicate past successes.
With all of that mental messiness resulting from environmental (internal and external) changes, it feels like it takes forever to make new skills stick.
How long does it take to make a habit?
There’s always the question of how long it will take to learn a gymnastic skill and make it a habit.
Some people come into the gym wanting to learn something very specific without having the fundamentals to get there. Sometimes, they are impatient with themselves (or the coaching) when they aren’t progressing as fast as they want to. That makes for a tricky training environment.
Adding to the struggle, another study by Benjamin Gardner, Phillippa Lally and Jane Wardle suggested that with daily repetition of a skill, a habit can take about 2-3 months to fully form. That’s with daily repetition, which means that you have exposure to the behavior or skill every single day to make it automatic. Most adults train one or two days a week, at best. Managing their expectations is an important facet in their approach to learning new gymnastic skills. The fundamentals aren’t necessarily fun, but they are still essential, and anyone starting something new must do so with great patience.
“Habitually performed behavior”
In his review, Gardner talks about habitually performed behavior, which is where we activate multiple smaller habits in order to perform complex tasks like physical activity.
This tracks with the progressive nature of gymnastics training, starting with the fundamentals: we master the simpler skills so that we can combine them into more complex ones. When doing so, our goal is to eventually turn the complex skills into habitually performed behavior so our performance of them becomes automatic. It should never be about just chucking your body and hoping for the best.
Focus on the fundamentals
Here’s a good example of how you can use habitually performed behavior from gymnastics fundamentals to create better outcomes of more complex ones.
Since breaking my foot last August, I have been very reticent to throw a standing back tuck on the TumblTrak.
I landed poorly on a roundoff back tuck there and I have been so spooked by even the mere thought of going backwards on that piece of equipment. I know full well I have the strength and skill to do it; I can throw dozens of them on the trampoline. Unfortunately, on the TumblTrak, my Lizard brain has been shutting me down.
The good news is that I have been diligently practicing my fundamentals, trying to make them more habitual, knowing that at some point, my brain would let me try the TumblTrak again. This first post below goes through all the drill prep work I’ve worked on. This is what it took to convince my Lizard brain that I have the skill sets to land safely and not break myself again. I’ve been drilling these skills for months after my recovery.
The second video is the moment of truth: finally conquering Lizard brain. As I get ready, I am mindfully tapping into all of the skill cues from all of the drills. Without those well-established habits, I’d never be able to throw the skill with any feeling of safety on the TumblTrak. The manual belt, held by my trusted and beautiful gym rat buddies was also paramount to me feeling comfortable attempting this. While technically I did all the work, I knew they were there to support me mentally and physically.
My goal here, over LOTS of time, is to make this a habitually performed behavior as well. We’ll see how that works out.
Offering fundamentals to adults
Achieving our goals of performing more complex skills is harder said than done when the body and brain either don’t connect well or struggle through physical limitations. That’s exactly why I started a Fundamentals and Mobility class for adults at our gym. Together, we check in to where our bodies and brains are and work on the absolute basic requirements before applying them on different apparatus. By doing that, we (re)discover how a skill is supposed to feel before you advance it.
My mission during my own personal training and my coaching of other adults is this all about how to solidify the fundamentals so we can progress them into more complex skills. Every time I do a single skill, I try to think how I will connect it to another one or do it on a more challenging surface. When you can easily make those connections, you come that much closer to performing the harder stuff because you have developed consistency and accuracy with the basics. As Kelvin Lam teaches, when your fundamental skills are solid, it’s much easier to build the more difficult ones.
What does a fundamentals class look like?
My article Commit to the Fundamentals details many of the baseline skills we work on in class. I’ve included photos and videos with all the descriptions.
These are some of the approaches I take in class to help adults connect their bodies and brains to safe fundamental technique development:
- Taking our time: Fundamentals are done slowly and deliberately, with attention to the small details. This give our brains time to connect what is happening in our bodies with what we will need later on.
- Limiting excessive repetition: While repetition is very important, I put a limit on the amount of times we attempt a skill in the moment, especially a new one. When a mistake is made, I immediately suggest a fix for them to try. If they exhaust their attempts, it’s time to sit and absorb the information. The last thing they need is to create habits that do not support their goals, current or future.
- Recalling prior knowledge: When we move to an apparatus, I always refer back to the fundamental that should be applied. “Remember when we worked on keeping our arms by our ears? Do that when you open up at the end of your front tuck.”
- Applying reason: It is important to explain why a fundamental is important to employ at any given time. Adults especially need to have cognitive awareness in order to take a step forward. “In order to eventually connect a front tuck to something else on the trampoline, you must land it in a full vertical position before you can throw the next move or you’ll launch yourself on an angle.”
- Using slow, steady progression: When we achieve three successful attempts, we can try progressing forward slightly. If it works, we continue with small progressions. This gives people a chance to gradually form a habit with slightly changing environmental factors. (i.e. Handstand rolls on a big cheese mat, a small cheese mat, a low squish mat, and finally to the floor.)
- Asking questions: I will often ask questions of my students, to see where their minds are. If they don’t know the answer to a basic question, how can they form a proper fundamental habit? I also encourage them to ask me questions when they are confused.
Some final thoughts for adult gymnasts old and new
When new adults come into the gym, especially if it has been over a decade or two since they’ve stepped foot in a gym, they are at first reticent, nervous, and cautious. I support both their hesitance and their desire to dig into their training, because once they start tasting success, their expectations sometimes outweigh their current level of ability. These are some of the (sometimes obvious) messages I find myself repeating in my class to help them manage expectations and train safely:
- You and your body are more capable than you think.
- Your brain and body are very different than when you were a kid.
- Your brain and body will often will get in each other’s way.
- You must fully absorb and develop the fundamentals so that your progressions are safe.
- You must develop the mobility (strength through the greatest possible range of motion) to support new gymnastics skills.
- You may not get it today or tomorrow, but working on the fundamentals will get you a lot closer to the goal.
- Do not beat yourself up for making mistakes; embrace them. We learn from our mistakes and they are an opportunity to do something different to change the outcome.
- Progress is never linear.
I hope some of the thoughts here were helpful, whether you are a newbie or a veteran. Don’t dismiss the fundamentals; they will be your best friend when you are trying to create new habits!
SOURCES:
Making health habitual: the psychology of ‘habit-formation’ and general practice (2012)
A review and analysis of the use of ‘habit’ in understanding, predicting and influencing health-related behaviour (2014)
Stacey's Headspace 
Very interesting.
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