Weightlifting and Music
My workouts for the past year have heavily focused on the Olympic lifts. For those that might not know, the Olympic lifts consist of the snatch and the clean and jerk. These movements are some of the most effective ways to improve power output [1][2]. They’re also incredibly fun to perform – I always look forward to my pure Olympic lifting days.
As beneficial and fun as they are, they are highly technical and difficult to learn. Here’s a video of me when I first started snatching:
Now, here’s a video of me snatching about a month ago.
Notice any differences? I do. Here are a few items:
- Minimal forward jump
- Shoulders stay over the bar a little better
- More consistent back angle throughout the lift
- Better bar path
So, how did I improve? Repetition. Tons of it. On a typical week, warm ups and variations included, I snatch approximately 60 times. Do that for 52 weeks and you’ve got over 3,000 reps a year. And it’s not just mindless repetition, it’s thoughtful repetition. You have to think about how you pull the bar from the ground, where the bar is going to make contact, when you should extend, etc.
It needs to be thoughtful until it doesn’t have to be. Sounds redundant, but what I’m driving towards is competence and the stages of learning:
Four Stages of Competence
- Unconscious incompetence - You are so unknowledgeable about something that you have no idea how bad you are it.
- Conscious incompetence - You know enough about something to know you’re not good it.
- Conscious competence - You finally understand how to do something but every action requires concentration and effort.
- Unconscious competence - You’ve had so much practice with the subject that the action is now second nature.
In weightlifting, the fastest way to progress towards unconscious competence is by sheer repetition. That got me thinking. If it’s so easy (the way to train is easy, not the training itself) to progress with sports, is it as simple in other practices?
I thought back to my piano and cello playing days. My piano teacher was this rather tall and intimidating woman with a German last name. She made it very obvious that I would have to practice if I wanted to get along with her. Part of her teaching methodology was focusing on technique and finger dexterity. So, every single week she’d assign me a new Hanon variation.
These things were as repetitive as it gets. All you’d is learn a pattern, move that pattern up a few octaves, then move that pattern back down, repeat four times. Then, when you got better at it, you’d increase the tempo. It was extremely boring but extremely effective. I found that when I stopped doing Hanon for a period of time, my technique in actual pieces struggled. It was amazing. My piano teacher knew that if you wanted to develop advanced skills and work on intangibles, you needed to master fundamentals.
My cello teacher had similar methodologies (though she had an advantage because by the time I started playing cello, I’d already played piano for seven years). Here’s how my lessons would go. I’d play something for her and she’d ask me how I thought it went. As an insecure teenager, I usually answered “It could probably use more work.” She’d be honest with me and say, “Yes,” but offer constructive feedback which usually consisted of a verbal cue. Then she’d make me play it again.
These cues were surprisingly effective in that it gave me one idea to focus on instead of worrying about multiple aspects of my performance. For example, she might prime me with, “Use the weight of the bow,” if there was a passage that needed to be loud but required a gentle tone. She might say, “Elbow up,” when working on shifting and thumb position. The most memorably cue she gave me was one for the Prelude of the first Bach cello suite. She said “Imagine a leaf floating down a creek. That should be the pace.” It was abstract but it gave me the right mindset before performing. Basically, repetition, in regards to the cue, is about ingraining technique by recognizing mistakes. Thoughtful repetition, right?
When it comes down to the grind of training and practicing, cello, piano, and weightlifting look have similar progressions. What’s even more interesting are some of the details they share. For example, cues are commonplace in weightlifting. Walk into any weightlifting gym and you’ll hear phrases like, fast hands, fast elbows, big drive, or big chest. These phrases all prime the lifter to focus on one component of the lift, similar to how a my cello cues allowed me to focus on a single idea. It really is quite interesting how these practices are shared and it makes me wonder if training methods developed in one place and diverged or if each practice developed methods independently.
As I’ve been writing this all out, I thought, isn’t this all obvious? If I want to get better at something, all I need to do is practice it and learn from my mistakes. Why does it need so much thought? But then, I look at what happened my first semester in college: I didn’t do problem sets, I didn’t do “optional” homework, I didn’t study like I needed to. In a sentence, I struggled. Knowing is one thing but practicing is another. Though the lapse in college was unfortunate, I like to look at it as something to learn from. Given a new situation, there’s always the chance to apply what you’ve learned and avoid the same mistakes. Knowing exactly what to do can be fairly complicated, but, sometimes all you need is a cue (just read my Ruts post). The important things to remember are to continue practicing and to learn from mistakes / surprises. And yeah, don’t get discouraged. Practicing isn’t easy.
- Walter
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