Author: Benjamin

We're making a slight change to our publishing schedule here on TTW. Publishing on Mondays was getting in the way of us getting that necessary-for-sanity time away from work. From now on, Jerry's pieces will go up on Tuesdays.

Back in December, I got to teach a ski lesson to a 25-year-old former tennis pro. The day before, his first on skis, he'd taken a lesson with another instructor, who had gotten him out of the beginner area and up the chairlift onto the main part of the mountain, which by my measure is a successful first day.

We went up the chairlift and did our first run so I could watch him ski. He showed a body pattern typical of beginning skiers. He could ski in a wedge under control, but had all sorts of unnecessary tension in his body, particularly in his arms--beginners tend to clench their poles fiercely, causing tension to run all the way up the arm--and his torso, which he hunched over.

"Let's try this," I told him. "This is a technique called centering." And, as Jerry has described here before, I had him take a balanced, athletic stance, engage the core, raise the diaphragm without tensing the shoulders, and breathe. After a few breaths, I asked him, "Do you notice how free the breath is, how you can easily bring it up from your base all the way to your shoulders?" He did, without any difficulty. "Now that you have that feeling in your body," I said, "try to maintain a centered breath and let's ski a little."

The transformation was immediate. The hunched torso disappeared. He stood more erect, maintaining an efficient, athletic stance. The tightness in his arms dissipated. And his skiing, which had been tentative, began to flow. His balance was better, his movements were more precise and controlled, and he skied with a great deal more confidence.

He was delighted, and now that he had an entry point into feeling what his body was doing, he was excited to explore. On the next run, I gave him a fuller understanding of centering by describing the movement of Novak Djokovic on the tennis court. "Djokovic is astonishing," I told him. "The way he moves, even when he's running down shots that he shouldn't possibly be able to get: he's always in center." Unsurprisingly, to someone who'd spent God knows how many hours on a tennis court, this made perfect sense. "I don't know if you know this," he told me, "but Djokovic is a fantastic skier."

I learned more about him as we continued to ski together. He told me about his professional career. He had taken one year on the challengers' tour when he was seventeen, but had been unable to make his way far enough into the rankings to even begin to cover the considerable expenses accrued through all the travel. He had also suffered all sorts of injuries--at seventeen!--because of the constant pounding his body was taking from endless practice, high-stress match play, and travel.

Over the course of the rest of the day, I provided him with little technical tips, the kind of non-intuitive things that make learning to ski such a challenge, and he picked all of them up very quickly. He made great strides over the course of the day. Interestingly, he quit for the day not long after lunch, admitting that he had so exhausted himself the day before by holding so much unnecessary tension that he felt he needed to stop early, lest he injure himself.

In this story we can see the difference between the common athletic model of fitness and what we're doing with the principles and techniques we talk about here. The athletic model is, in many ways, built on struggle. It is built on pushing the body through the messages the body sends about exhaustion, fatigue and pain, teaching oneself to ignore them in the drive for excellence. While most of the students I introduce centering to immediately release tension, ski with more freedom, and accelerate their learning, he was an extreme case, as befits someone with unusual athleticism. And yet, as much of an outlier as he was among the people I teach--and thus among all people--even at seventeen, an age when recovery is far easier than it is even ten years later, much less twenty or more, he wasn't enough of an outlier to remain healthy in the face of the demands of a professional tennis career.

Yet so many of us labor under the misapprehension that, but for a lot of dedication and a little luck, we could have achieved similar fitness levels as pro athletes. That while maybe we lacked some of the elements of raw talent that point to a professional career--hand-eye coordination, or raw speed, or whatever--our workouts and our overall approach to exercise could match that of professional athletes. What doesn't occur to us is that the simple ability to work out at that level without injury is a rare talent as well. And yet we apply that approach--pushing our bodies against the signals it sends--to how we work out, practice sports, and even live our lives. How many people do you know who say things like, "I've learned to get by on five or six hours of sleep per night?"

This approach is a recipe for disaster.

Because please notice that that bit about how it's only those talented few who can work out at that level without injury isn't even true. Even among these preternaturally gifted individuals, seasons or more lost to injury is the norm, not the exception. Think of your favorite athletes. How many of them haven't had surgery to fix some damaged something or other? The answer is a paltry few. Now for someone making millions of dollars a year plying their craft, this kind of long-term cost might be worthwhile. But for the rest of us, shouldn't we use a different metric to measure the success of our fitness regimes? Maybe one that leaves us feeling better and having more fun?

Back in August, 2014, a few weeks after the various stressors in my life just got to be too much and everything pretty much fell apart, and a little before our first official session, Jerry came to watch me play soccer. He didn't tell me he was coming and I didn't see him. I didn't know he'd been there until he told me about it at our next poker game.

"What did you see?" I asked him.

"I saw a lot of stress," he said. "You say you love the game but you don't really act like it on the field."

He said this matter-of-factly, without any particular judgment, but I remember I had to fight to keep from bursting into tears. It was a raw time, and there's a way that certain pieces of truth can hit you and force you to confront things in your life. I say I play soccer because I love it, but on the field I experience a lot of stress and not much fun. I already knew I had to make substantial changes in my life--indeed, by the time we had this conversation, I was already doing things to drag myself up from the lows I'd fallen into--but here was a very concrete and hard-to-confront reality: even the things I love I didn't know how to enjoy right then.

We're a year-and-a-half removed from that day, and I've come a long way. It's not that I'm incapable of joylessly churning away at things that should be fun or that I don't do it anymore. But now I'm likely to notice when it happens and try to figure out if it's something that can be changed or if it's inherent in the activity. For example, the indoor soccer leagues here in Boulder have games that start as late as 11:10pm. The games themselves are usually fun, but the cost is tremendous--I won't get to sleep until 1 or 2am, and I wake around 7am, so the whole day after the match is pretty much worthless. Now, I tell my teammates that I simply won't play the 11:10p games.

Diving into stress is a pretty common way for adults to approach competition. I don't know if we learned it from our parents when we were kids or from our coaches when we played youth sports or from watching professionals (for whom winning and losing has a very different significance from that of amateurs) or from all of the above, but people put a lot of ego into winning and losing. Most of my soccer teammates treat the game like there's more at stake than just a fun day at the fields. I unconsciously used to do the same. Now I'm trying to break that habit.

It's hardly just in athletic competition that I can choose stress and struggle over pleasure and ease. I've done more grinding out writing than anyone should do in their life, despite a recognition from way back that my best writing tends to come from approaching the words and sentences with a sense of flow and play. At this point, I've built some of that play into the techniques I work with, but I still have a near-daily struggle to trust that my work can actually be fun.

If you think back to the original idea that motivated the work and writing Jerry and I are doing here, you'll notice that what we're talking about right now applies pretty directly to Tiger Woods (and many other professional athletes as well). There's no pleasure or joy for him in playing the game anymore, and the constant grinding pressure he's put himself under has led directly to the injuries and mental/emotional hole he finds himself in now. Jerry and I are both convinced that the only way he'll start winning again is if he finds renewed pleasure in playing the game. Which is another way of saying he needs to learn to play again.

Honestly, that's true for almost all of us.

Much of what I've learned about practice and learning came from my experiences learning to play music back in my younger days.

When learning an instrument, once you get past the very rudiments of technique, you'll be given scales and arpeggios to learn. Scales and arpeggios are pretty boring to practice, but any instructor worth her salt will tell you that they're the foundation of musical technique. They're a practice that never goes away. Even concertizing musicians work on scales and arpeggios.

Beginning musicians work on simple pieces of music, too, to begin to put technique into practice. If you played a classical instrument as a child, or if you've ever been to a little kid's recital, you know the kind of pieces I mean, the ones written by music educators and collected into books with names like "Delightful Easy Piano Pieces Vol. 14." They're tolerably inoffensive and completely forgettable. These pieces give students with limited technique the opportunity to do something that is (more or less) making music. These pieces serve as bridges to higher-level pieces, which makes them useful, but they're not something anyone really wants to listen to--again, if you've been to a kids' recital, you know exactly what I mean. You play these pieces until they stop being useful, and then you set them aside.

For some practitioners, interleaving all of this is theory. Studying the subject for underlying patterns can, when used appropriately, facilitate understanding and learning. The risk with theory is that it can "put the cart before the horse," as my dad would have said. People sufficiently committed to theory seem to forget that theory usually arose from practice. When the opposite is true, as with 20th-century serial music, the results might sometimes be intellectually satisfying, but often lack the aesthetic and intuitive grace that drove progress in the field in the first place.

Here's why I'm saying all of this: This week, I participated in an introductory certification exam run by the national certifying association for ski instructors, and I really struggle with the association's methods. For one thing, they have built an enormous edifice of theory around skiing and insist on its importance in learning and teaching. But I do not believe that a vast intellectualized structure of words is how anyone actually learns a complicated physical task. This is not my experience. For another thing, they test us on what they call "skills," which are, I deduce, meant to be the equivalent of scales and arpeggios--exercises to build and strengthen foundation. But I am quite unconvinced that that's actually true. It seems to me--though let's grant that the association's teachers are much stronger skiers than I am, so their opinion can't be discounted--that most of the "skills" they test us on arise from proper technique rather than teach it.

And when the skills do properly apply to learning to ski, the focus can be misplaced. For example, one of the skills that they test us on is the wedge turn, which is the way that beginners learn to turn their skis. On Monday, I watched one of the examiners do a series of wedge turns, and his were the best I've ever seen. He was a paragon of balance and relaxed execution in the movement. Now, the wedge turn is a simple and effective way for beginners to learn to turn, but it's also fundamentally inefficient, which is why intermediates learn to turn parallel and quickly leave the wedge behind.

To achieve such smoothness in wedge turns, the examiner clearly had devoted many, many hours to their study and practice. Now, for this to be worthwhile, the wedge turn has to be the equivalent of scales and arpeggios, that is, something so foundational to skiing technique that it should be practiced no matter how far up the ladder we advance as skiers.

But I strongly suspect that what I witnessed was not the equivalent of a concert pianist practicing scales and arpeggios as a foundation to higher-level technique. I think I was watching a concert pianist who has, for some perverse reason, committed a vast collection of children's pieces to his performance repertoire, analyzed them endlessly, then concertizes them, and then insists that anyone who doesn't do the same isn't really a pianist.

What arose from these practices was a kind of thin-lipped, mirthless approach to skiing. By analogy, I witnessed the dissection-by-theoretical-analysis of charmless children's pieces, their joyless performance, and then a dogmatic insistence that this is the One True Path.

I understand that I'm speaking of a professional certification, and thus it probably should have a certain rigor. But, metaphorically speaking, what's the point of practicing an instrument if the end result is utterly devoid of music?

I wrote last week that my goals for the Vegas soccer tournament were, in order, to stay healthy and uninjured, to have fun, and to win the thing. I thought it would be worthwhile to examine how that all went.

Between good luck (no unlucky falls), good will (no one tried to hurt me), and staying in tune with my body, I came home pretty beat up (four matches in two days takes a lot out of a guy) but uninjured, and I've been good about rest and recovery since I've been home to try to keep it that way.

As for winning: we made it through our round-robin group but lost in the quarterfinals, 1-0, on a late-game counterattack.

Which leaves the goal of having fun. Unfortunately, I didn't have nearly as much fun as I'd hoped. It's funny that it took me until my fourth go-round at this tournament to realize this, but it's actually a pretty stressful tournament. All teams play two game on Saturday and another before Sunday lunchtime. That's a tough schedule. And though the games are only 60 minutes long rather than the normal 90, the abbreviated play doesn't help all that much. Yes, it's easier on the body, but it leads to frenetic matches.

Also, many teams get put together just for this tournament, so they lack cohesiveness. Teammates who know each other well know how to rely on one another. Not being able to fully trust your teammates adds to the stress.

In the past, being stressed while playing soccer was normal enough that I didn't particularly notice it. Engaging in stressful situations and calling them fun is just something people in our culture do, and I was no exception. Now, I'm more aware of this approach, and it strikes me as a little odd. And this points to a crucial question: Is it worth it? Will I participate in this tournament again? Right now, I think the answer is no.

In our pieces from last week, Jerry and I both spoke of the need to attend to the energy of the season when setting goals.

Which points to an interesting conundrum for my winter. I'm teaching skiing this winter, and I've been surprised to discover just how physically arduous it is. I go home deeply tired every single day I work. I expected that because I'd be skiing at the levels of my students, I'd be skiing much less than I do on a typical day on the slopes. And while that's true, what I hadn't counted on is that skiing inefficiently, which I have to do to demonstrate the techniques I want my students to work on (in order to model the progression to the next level, I ski just above their current level), is vastly more exhausting than skiing efficiently. Two top-to-bottom runs in a snowplow demand as much from my body as a full day of carved turns. Throw in the energetic demand of focusing as hard as I do when I teach, and my days are really tiring.

Jerry and I both described winter as a time for rest and recuperation, but I'm certainly not tamping down my physical activity.

What has also been interesting, though, is how much energy I've had when I'm on the mountain. Even after nights when I've woken up after four or five hours of sleep and been unable to get back to sleep, my energy during my workday has always been excellent. Over the years, I've noticed how good I feel when I'm in the mountains. This winter, I have come to believe that time on snow-covered mountains offers powerful support for us energetically.

All of this is a long introduction to the framework under which I'm operating for my winter-time goals. If I weren't teaching, I'd probably be resting more, as the season dictates. But I am teaching (and enjoying it), so I'll continue to have to put out the energy the job demands.

So then my main goal, from a fitness and health perspective, is to stay healthy and uninjured. That means being very careful to get adequate sleep, moderating my alcohol intake, and trying my best to eat well. It also means paying close attention to what my body is requesting on days when I don't work. I have no choice but to meet the physical demands of my job, but when I find myself especially tired on a day off, I have to either keep my exercise, be it on the slopes or in the gym, to a light to moderate level, or else take the day off completely.

I am applying Training Tiger Woods principles to my skiing and that of my students each and every day, and of course I'll continue to do so. My goal is to ski and ride with less stress and more flow, which dictates that I continue attending to the breath and continue practicing holding a strong center. That approach, coupled with the instruction I get from the stronger skiers who surround me at work, has already help me improve my skiing markedly this winter, despite having very little time away from teaching to actually practice. I hope to see continued improvement now that the teaching schedule has lightened after the end of the holidays.

I expect to practice or play very little golf or tennis until nearly the spring equinox, at which time we'll establish new goals in line with the growing energy of spring. So beyond what I've mentioned so far, my focus will be in the gym, aiming to provide myself with a stronger base for activities of spring, be they golf, tennis or soccer.

One last thing: I'm in Las Vegas this weekend for a soccer tournament. My team's goal is to win the thing. That's my goal too, right behind staying healthy and uninjured and having a lot of fun. Wish us luck.

Neither Jerry nor I particularly believe in new year's resolutions. Resolutions rarely seem to work in practice. If a single application of willpower was all it took to make a change in our lives, we'd all do it every single time we noticed something not working as well as we'd like it to. "Goodness," we'd say. "I eat too many sugary foods. I think I'll stop." And then we would.

But life doesn't work that way, does it?

However, the idea of resolutions is wonderful. Both symbolically (a new year, a new beginning) and energetically (the winter solstice is energetically the moment of the yearly cycle's rebirth), the early days of winter are an excellent time to look ahead.

So in that spirit, we decided to write about goals to start the new year. Unlike a resolution, a goal, properly stated, offers us both a destination and a direction. It essentially creates a path, and then offers us a means to walk that path.

It's important that goals reflect the energy of the season. As Jerry noted, the winter solstice and the early days of winter, the short days and long nights, energetically harbinger a time of rest and reflection.

Of course, most of us do not live this way at all. In our culture, we generally treat every day as equivalent to every other day. We put out as much energy in the dead of winter as we do in high summer. Ever wonder why people tend to get sick in the winter? Getting out of sync with the energy of the season is a major factor.

So within this framework we can begin to talk about our goals for the winter. We'll speak specifically about our goals next week.

For a while there, despite what we were hearing about El Niño, it was looking like Jerry and I were going to be able to practice golf all winter long, like we'd have no hiatus at all. But now it's finally gotten cold and the snow has arrived and winter has come.

Assuming the White Walkers don't make it all the way to Boulder, what are we intending to do with Training Tiger Woods during what will be the golf off-season?

Well, first of all, every year that I've lived in Boulder, there has been a mid-winter warming in which the snow melts, things dry out, and it's possible to go out and hit balls, perhaps even play. I'd be surprised if that's not the case this year as well. When it rolls around, doubtless we'll take advantage of it and get outside to practice.

But our focus will mostly be elsewhere. As Jerry said on Monday, in the gym we're going to focus on foundational conditioning, as well as applied meditation and visualization. And I'm hoping to take a little time to let/help my body return to full health. I've had pain in my elbow from overextension during tennis serves since back in the summer, and I still have a lot of tightness in my body from when I separated my shoulder, because the muscles tightened to protect the injured area. I'm hoping some regular yoga practice and body work will help open up the stuck energy in and around each of those parts of my body.

Also, I'll be on the slopes a lot this winter. I'm working as a ski instructor this year, and while I'm in the high country I intend to work on TTW-related skills quite a bit.

With respect to my own skiing and riding, I've already been practicing and playing with the sorts of techniques we've talked about here on TTW, and I've seen them apply successfully to skiing and snowboarding. Back in 2013, poor early season snow had me spending most of January and February skiing cruisers and working on my technique. I subsequently had the best late-season of skiing I'd ever experienced. Though the snow is much better this season, I've taken that same focus and coupled it with centering, breathing, and the kind of practice techniques we've talked about here. So far the results have been quite positive.

I'll also be exploring teaching TTW techniques to my students. Instructors are given a pretty thorough training by the resort before we first work with students--the ski school's trainers have been doing this a long time, and they have the teaching of skiing progression pretty substantially down at this point. But I've already found that there's a gap in the training. Already I've seen the necessity of teaching core activation and breath focus. I've also seen that those areas are really unfamiliar terrain for most people, far more unfamiliar than skiing itself.

Getting to work directly with students throughout the winter will doubtless teach me a huge amount about how to teach and apply these techniques effectively. When golf season rolls around again, I expect to have a lot more in my bag, as it were, and I'll be very excited to get to apply it.

Over the past couple of months, we've given a pretty good background about what we're trying to do here, what the goals might look like, and how we aim to achieve them. I've written about practice, about my baseline abilities (both physical and mental), and about my relationship to centering. But I notice there's something missing that needs to be addressed.

Ultimately, my goal with golf isn't really to lower my score, not really. What I really want to do is to be able to go play 18 with a friend and have a lot of fun. That's what I'm really aiming for.

Now, that doesn't mean I could just go to the course and whale away. That's not how I derive my fun. I don't enjoy performing poorly at things. Not being able to hit anything besides the shortest irons isn't fun. Not being able to encounter common situations on the course with a sense that I have the ability to meet those situations isn't fun. Flubbing shots completely isn't fun. My goal isn't really to shoot a lower score, it's to be able to grab any club from my bag and feel like I've got a pretty good chance of doing what I envision with that club--because that's fun. I want to feel like I have an amateur's full repertoire of shots--because that's fun.

Of course, a pleasant side effect of developing that repertoire and having more fun is that my scores will fall. All the things that make me say, "Hey, that was a pretty good shot," are things that would make me a "better" golfer than I am right now.

In last week's piece I wrote about noticing negative emotional patterns held over from when I was a kid. I've used these patterns to hold myself back throughout my life. Holding back served me in some fashion. It no longer does.

So when I talk about having fun at golf (or any of the myriad activities I participate in), I'm really using it as a shorthand to describe something deeper still. What I'm really talking about is developing and deepening an approach to life that sustains me in a way that my earlier habits did not. Seeing better scores on the golf course will be lovely. I'll enjoy it. But the real goal is living a better life.

In my piece from November 13th, I wrote about my baseline golfing abilities from a physical perspective, but that's only part of the picture. At least as important is what's generally referred to as the mental game. Perhaps you noticed in that piece that there's a fair amount of language about inability, frustration and not having fun.

Because Jerry and I practiced a lot but didn't play much--only that one nine-hole round--there was only so deep into the mental game that I could explore, at least as it pertained to golf. During practice, I noticed lapses in concentration, frustration, and times of not enjoying myself. But practice and performance are two very different things.

However, over the course of the summer and fall, I played a lot of tennis, and what I kept discovering within myself were mental/emotional reactions accompanied by body sensations that I recognized, via the discernment that comes with centering, as the same sensations I felt and the same behavioral patterns I engaged in as when I played tennis thirty years ago.

For example, I choked a lot when I played tennis as a kid. If I was beating someone, and he began to show frustration and anger, I would tend to ease off and, to my own perplexed frustration and dismay, eventually lose. Earlier this year I faced a similar situation. I was winning a match handily, and my opponent started getting really angry. I found myself falling into the pattern from my youth--easing off, dropping games, and so on. As I noticed what was happening, I also noticed that it was accompanied by some complicated physical sensations. When I dove deeply into those sensations, I suddenly realized that the pattern from my youth stemmed partly from empathy--I felt bad along with my opponent--and partly from a fear that winning would make the other person not like me. So I would choke, and the other person would feel better. Of course, then I would feel very bad indeed.

That pattern may have "worked," after a fashion, for a shy, sensitive kid who really wanted to be liked, but I'm older now, and I'm not interested in making others feel better by making myself feel bad. In this specific case, once I noticed what was happening, I recentered via the breath and closed out the match.

Now, what I'm describing may look like something I should be discussing with a therapist--"I was a choker as a kid, and I'd like to tease out the reason why"--and there is an element of therapy when these sorts of things come up in the body, but Training Tiger Woods is all about meeting and overcoming our limitations, and what I've been continually noticing since we began this project is how many of my negative patterns I recognize from years and years ago. They are still concentrated in the body. What's been critical is recognizing, as I did in the tennis match I just described, that those patterns served me in some way at some point in my life.

It is very uncommon that we make bad choices in order to hurt ourselves. It is very common that we make unskillful choices, thinking we are helping ourselves or others or both. In many ways, the techniques we're describing in Training Tiger Woods are about finally learning to bring skill to the mental/emotional/energetic patterns that underlie our athletic endeavors.

Let's come back to golf and what I said in the earlier piece about my baseline abilities. What I wrote there is descriptively true: I'm not a very good golfer and it frustrates me. But that day on the range, I also began to recognize within my body the same feelings I felt back when I was young and used to go golfing with my dad on Saturday mornings. I was a poor golfer and it made me angry and eventually I quit. I see now that my relationship to not being very good at golf is substantially a pattern still carried forward from my younger self. On some level, that pattern served me at the time. It no longer does. Changing it will not be easy--I've carried it within myself for most of my life--but I believe that the tools Jerry and I are developing will finally allow me to do so.