As I mentioned, last week I was at a week-long survival class at Tom Brown Jr’s survival and tracking school in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. It was an experience that I won’t soon forget and something that I would recommend to almost everyone, with few exceptions. I’ll have more to write about the experience when I have more time to process and digest, it was possibly the most intense education I’ve ever received in a short 6 days, but for now I have one story to share with you. On the Monday, Tom says that after Friday you’ll never look at the ground the same way again. To be honest with you, I thought it was bullshit, and I was wrong.

But let me tell you a little story to illustrate my point.

On the drive home my buddy Dom Matteo and I were riding with another student from the class who needed a ride back to the train station in Philly. At some point in the hour and a half ride he and Dom got to talking about climbing, something Dom is pretty passionate about.

Dom has built a bouldering cave in his basement and his young kids both climb. Having found another climb, Dom excitedly pulled out his phone to show the other guy, Rob, a video of his 3-year old daughter bouldering.

Upon watching the video, Rob exclaimed “Oh, wow!”

Now, this wasn’t just a random shining on about someone’s kid. Rob was able to see something that a regular person, a non-climber, would never see. He was able to appreciate it in a unique and special way.

This general concept is something I’ve written about before, where skills allow you to appreciate more of the world.

This little kid, barely past speaking age, had performed a complex climbing move most climbers don’t even learn right away. And Rob could spot it, and appreciate it, immediately.

I call this “having eyes.” For example I have eyes for movement. I see mistakes and inefficiencies in my clients that a layman would never see. Conversely, I can see the beauty in an athlete’s unique and highly efficient movement. I also have eyes for dozens of other things I’ve invested time into developing.

Circling back to Tom’s exaggerated promise: I now see the natural world in a way that I never could before.

I’m not joking or exaggerating when I tell you that I can find mouse tracks in the forest.

This in turn gives me greater appreciation for every moment I spend in nature. I literally get more out of it. It’s like seeing everything in color when before I only saw black and white. If I had to invest a week to experience more every time I go hiking for the rest my life it was worth many times the investment.

I don’t know about you, but I want to have eyes for as many things as I possibly can. I want to be able to appreciate as much of the world as I possibly can.

Turns out again and again skills are the key to that end.

Apparently it’s complex physiology week over here, because today instead of discussing neuroendocrinology we’re going to take a quick look at neurophysiology.

The brain is complex far beyond our understanding or comprehension, and any firm declarations about how it works should be met with a pound of skepticism. That said, it can be fun and interesting to look at associations and look at generalities that might be interesting. We do know, in broad strokes, that if you damage or stimulate specific parts of the brain there are pretty clear assocations about what happens. For example, a person with a missing pre-frontal cortex demonstrates completely disinhibited behavior. Basically, they act totally inapproiately and without context to their actions.

The frontal lobe, and specifically the prefrontal cortex, could be described as the area of the brain where we consider our actions, integrate things we’ve learned about the world around us, as well as where much of our empathy stems from. If you’re familiar with the story of Phineas Gage, who took an iron rod through the front of his head, he was not so fun to be around afterwards even though he survived.

Which is interesting, because guess which region of the brain is most active during new skill acquisiton and learning?

You probably guessed it. The prefrontal cortex.

Studies of skill learning have shown that during early stages of learning most of the activity occurs towards the front of the brain.

You can literallly stimulate and develop the empathy part of your brain by learning new skills.

What’s even more interesting is that as you approach later stages of skill learning, the activity in the brain actually moves more towards the back of the brain into the parietal lobes.

This one might be a little more difficult to guess what other functions are associated to that area of the brain so I’ll just tell you: joy and happiness.

Which makes sense. The better you are at a skill, the more joy you are able to derive from it because you don’t have to think so hard in the concscious competence stage, you can just unconciously partake in the activity and enjoy the process.

Learning new skills proves, again, to be damn good for you.

What are you working on?

Last week I discussed a simple training framework for which direction to go in when you can’t go where you want to. I suggested that there might be yet another route to take, and of course lots of people wanted to hear more about that.

The long and short of it in case you didn’t read that one, you can read it here if you like though, is that when you can’t do the actual movement you want to train, because it hurts or doesn’t test well via biofeedback, you can pursue pieces of the whole. Eventually, when the problem that is stopping you from doing the specific is resolved, having trained the pieces will benefit the whole.

Sometimes, however, you can’t train components either. Typically you’d see this when you’re paying close attention to biofeedback, you have a pain issue you’re working through, and/or you’re training heavily for a sport which leads to a tendency to over-do certain movements.

In that case, the next step is to work on opposition movements. Literally, training the opposite. To use our example from last week, if you can’t squat (hip extension, knee extension, and so on) you would look at training hip flexion, and knee flexion.

An example of this that seems to be coming up lately is that everyone suddenly realized that all the hip external rotation and abduction (legs moving away from centerline of the body) you get from squatting and deadlifting heavy might be overdone and cause some problems.

The solution? Working on hip ADDUCTION (moving the legs toward the centerline). By this logic, probably won’t hurt to do some extra internal rotation as well.

Most of the time training opposition movements aren’t as fun or sexy as doing the things you want to do to get you to your goals. But, it’s a simple, quick, and super effective framework for figuring out how to get BACK to doing those things you want to do when you can’t because you’re hurt or trying to heed your biofeedback so that you don’t get hurt.

By the way, this is the kind of training philosophy and structure that I go over in great detail in my biofeedback training workshops. I’ve got two dates coming up in October, in Toronto and Manila. I’m not ashamed or too humble to say that previous attendees have said that the workshop completely changed how they approach their training (and coaching). I’d love to see you there.