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RAW REACTION TIMES (The Reality)
While lesser mortals grind out victories with their patient shots, eliminating
risks and playing the percentages, the truly gifted seem to conjure with
time. They bring an unhurried genius to their game that allows them to play
shots with an audacity that sometimes surprises even them.
One surprise has been that raw reaction times do not appear to be the answer.
When top athletes take standard reaction time tests - such as hitting a switch as
soon as it lights up they are no faster than average.
“There is surprisingly little difference between top-class athletes and good,
fit ordinary people” says Peter McLeod of the University of Oxford's
Department of Experimental Psychology. “In laboratory tests of reactions
using unskilled tasks, most people show much the same reaction time of about a
fifth of a second. So top-class athletes don't appear to be tapping into some
generalized superiority” says McLeod.
Even more surprising for those expecting an explanation in terms of a
speedier nervous system, other research has shown that it takes nearly
half a second for our minds to become properly conscious of fast-moving
events. Measurements of the brain's electrical activity indicate it takes only about
20 milliseconds for nerve impulses to travel the distance between the sense
organs and the brain. However, reaction-time tests show that it takes a minimum
of 100 milliseconds before the brain can produce even the simplest action and
nearer 200 milliseconds to make the more complex judgment involved in hitting a
light switch. But research by Benjamin Libet, a physiologist at the University of
California at Berkeley, suggests that becoming conscious of an event takes
even longer.
His experiments show that it takes between 400 and 500 milliseconds for the
brain to complete all the filtering and recognition processes needed to produce a
subjective experience. This suggests that consciousness lags behind reality
by up to half a second. So any rapid reactions shown by athletes must be
achieved by subconscious processing without conscious thought and
prediction. Meaning “If You Have to THINK About it, It’s Too Late”
Training Consciously for an Unconscious Event
(The Facts)
It seems that while information may not enter the brain of top performers
significantly faster, where the novice experiences only a blur of details, the
expert sees a well-ordered set of possibilities. Such an ability to read the
game allows the expert to anticipate and so bridge the split-second gap
that exists between reality and the brain's perceptual processes. Abernethy
says studies have shown that top performers are skilled at anticipating
what their opponents are about to do… (WHY?)
The interesting thing about such anticipation, says Abernethy, is that players
seem to go by a gut feeling - a subconscious recognition - and the only way to
discover the cues they are actually using is to film the athletes action and then
see what is happening in the frame where the expert guess is made. “You can't
teach people anticipation by saying look at point A or point B. It just has to
come with practice and players may never really know what they are
reacting to.” says Abernethy.
Anticipating the unexpected
Top athletes become so good at anticipation that their responses can seem
almost instantaneous, as if no reaction gap existed. Anecdotal evidence
suggests that in learning a skill, whether it is playing tennis, driving a car or
unscrewing a bottle cap, there is a progression from crude, conscious control of
the action to smooth, automatic performance. Medical scanners that can track
brain blood flows are providing neurological evidence of this progression.
In the early stages of learning a skill, the higher conscious parts of the brain - the
cortex and basal ganglia - are most active. But as the skill is mastered, these
areas drop out of the picture and control is taken over by the cerebellum,
the brain's specialized movement center, says John Stein, a physiologist at the
University of Oxford.
Stein says support for this view comes from the discovery that there are two
routes by which sensations reach the cerebellum. There is a cortical route
where sensations are mapped first on the cortex (forming a conscious
picture) and then passed down to the cerebellum. But there is also a direct
route from the eyes to the cerebellum, bypassing the cortex. This route
quickly delivers the information needed to control subconscious skills. This
promotes the aspect of CHOICE in how you can approach training and your
efforts to optimize your reaction speed.
The present proposals encompass not only the traditional view that the
cerebellum is involved in skilled motor performance, but also the broader view
that it is involved in skilled mental performance. It is also involved in various
sensory functions including sensory acquisition, discrimination, tracking and
prediction. A recent theory that is broad enough to encompass all of these
motor, mental, and sensory functions has proposed that the cerebellum does the
following basic processing: It makes predictions (based on prior experience
or learning) about the internal conditions that are needed to perform a
sequence of tasks in other regions of the brain, and it sets up such internal
conditions in those regions automatically, thus preparing those regions for
the optimal performance of the tasks. Again, promoting the aspect of
CHOICE in the set up.
The cerebellum has to have experience, though. This experience comes from
knowledge and stimulus. When learning to walk or ride a bicycle, for example,
we're pretty unsure of ourselves at first and with good reason. Not only do we
begin the learning of things from the very basic beginnings, we have to use our
cerebrum (our consciousness) to concentrate on what we are doing. After a
while the action becomes automated and is taken over by the cerebellum,
freeing us to have our minds on other things.
Well-learned complex physical movements are better handled by the
cerebellum. It functions outside of conscious awareness and manages very
complicated movements with greater speed and efficacy than the cerebrum. This
happens during the Training Process of knowing HOW to do the movement,
having the physical strength and repeating it over and over till it becomes
automated or passed off to the cerebellum.
However, when either the conscious cerebrum can have control or
"unconscious" mental processes can have control, the consciousness
assumes control whenever attending to a movement or action. Optimal
performance of well-learned or "wired in" actions (like walking or breathing)
happens when your consciousness is on other things and not trying to have
control. What you are thinking of and the position of your head is critical for
training the cerebellum to take over assumptive actions.
Performance Anxiety
The most common barrier to optimum performance is when circumstances
invoke a busy internal dialogue or negative predictive failure that cause us to
attempt to consciously control the various actions or movements involved in
making the save. (i.e. someone says Shutout going into the third period) Even
though we may have automated our performance it is still subjected to our
thoughts. Self-consciousness, careful thinking, fear, self-criticism and
especially anxiety get in the way of optimal performance. Practicing under
the conditions technically, physically and mentally that are as close as
possible to the conditions you'll be in when performing will optimize performance.
This means that even though training and game time are different environments,
we must perform them through some constant to bring congruency and
consistency into our play. The connection is made in the Mental Process.
The Mental Game
Everything you learn and gain the ability to do starts as 100% mental. You must
understand mentally How to do it first. But it must be translated in the body and
expressed 100% physically in order to execute a save or response. To do this
Optimally, with Consistency, the body uses past experience or muscle memory
(synaptic connections) and stored visual information in the brain/cerebellum. Head
Trajectory is the constant contact point or mechanism the mind and body rely on to
translate the information from seeing the puck to movement with the greatest
Efficiency (Speed). You can think about Head Trajectory for set up but it doesn’t
involve itself in the conscious reactive process. It hands off the physical execution
directly from what you see to the unconscious. This allows you the ability to train,
develop and play on one a constant mental and physical platform.
Efficiency vs. Speed
The expectation that you need to be and will become faster and faster by
reducing the amount of time from when the puck is released until we react or move (or
increase our reaction speed by closing the gap of time from stimulus to response) is a
FALSE one.
There is a point early in the Training Process at each level of your growth
where you DON’T physically get Any Faster, develop faster raw reaction times. You
become Faster through Efficiency - “SET UP”. Set Up on the puck using Head Trajectory puts the body in a position where you are ABLE to move (Reactive State) as the
puck moves, before the shot or pass is released with no Gap of Time. Maintaining
Head Trajectory through the initial save allows you to absorb or clear rebounds and to
enter into your Post Save Responses Sooner... more Efficiently!
Because most goals are scored on rebounds, second chances or lateral
passes & that the puck in those situations typically travels faster from the point of
release to where we need to get to, we must read, react and move “With” the puck
through to release… Anticipate.
Combined with the ability to Anticipate we must
direct our Technical game to achieving and maintaining position on the puck through
Efficiency at Set Up with Head Trajectory in these 3 key areas:
1.
Prevent and Control Rebounds
2.
Get to our post save response sooner, more Efficiently
3.
Establish early set up of new position on the puck, including proper Angle,
Squareness, and Depth
So the KEY to Optimum Reactions and Performance is not to just train technically on HOW to play goal but to know WHY the body is capable of such performance
and the understanding WHAT it requires in order to train for it ON PURPOSE by
CHOICE to achieve a more efficient and consistent level of play.